Queued Emails

[Dan Cole]

Thought I'd provide a bit of an update on these modules.

I set both my cart reminder and no checkout modules to 1 hour and I'll see how that goes. I haven't yet explored using a cron job to send the queued emails yet but I probably will as I get most of modules up and running. At the moment I'm manually sending them but as soon as I can remove myself from the equation I will.

I've had both of these modules (cart reminder and no checkout) set to an hour and I'm noticing that I often see both emails scheduled to be sent to the same customer. I assume that the customer is both creating an account and abandoning their carts triggering both of those emails. For the time being, since I'm sending items in the queue manually, I've just been deleting the no checkout emails and sending the cart reminder one. I can't see the point of sending both of those emails and I'm thinking that the no checkout emails should be deleted when a cart reminder email is added to queue. When I move to sending the queue using a cron job I'll need think about that a bit more. Anyone else seeing the same thing?

I'm now going to move along and get my new product scheduler module sorted out. I looked back on the list of modules you are using and didn't see that one. Any particular reason? I set up new products daily and a number of my customers are interested in keeping up-to-date on what's new. I plan to send out a brief email every time I add a certain number of new items. I'm thinking six new items at a time so maybe a scheduled email once a week.

This module is now in place and with some help from the beer guy it displays a list of the new products since I last triggered the module. In my case I have the interval set to send the emails after adding 6 additional new products. It is working well but the email template could use some further work. At them moment it looks like this but I'll be tweaking it on a going forward basis.

new product template.jpg

Next up, modules to handle our review requests.

Dan

[burt]

I can't see the point of sending both of those emails and I'm thinking that the no checkout emails should be deleted when a cart reminder email is added to queue. When I move to sending the queue using a cron job I'll need think about that a bit more. Anyone else seeing the same thing?

No Checkout, I think (I haven't looked) just puts email into the Queue regardless of whether the user added items to cart. Whereas Cart Reminder, puts email into the Queue only if the user adds to cart.

They are slightly different...

Perhaps the answer here is to set the cart reminder to (eg) 1 hour
And the no checkout to (eg) 12 hrs

Then you have a funnel of two emails going out to the customer.

As you suggest, the Cart Reminder is probably more interesting than No Checkout, so perhaps you could remove the queued no_checkout of the customer when the customer invokes the cart_reminder. Then you have just the cart_reminder in the Queue.

[Dan Cole]

As you suggest, the Cart Reminder is probably more interesting than No Checkout, so perhaps you could remove the queued no_checkout of the customer when the customer invokes the cart_reminder. Then you have just the cart_reminder in the Queue.

To my way of thinking this sounds like the best approach.

Dan

[burt]

Scenario

Customer signs up
=> no_checkout added to Queue

Customer adds to Cart
=> no_checkout removed from Queue (assuming you make this change)
=> cart_reminder added to Queue

Customer deletes all products from Cart
=> no_checkout is not in queue (as it was deleted earlier)
=> cart_reminder is not in queue (as there is no cart for this customer aka empty cart)

[14Steve14]

As you suggest, the Cart Reminder is probably more interesting than No Checkout, so perhaps you could remove the queued no_checkout of the customer when the customer invokes the cart_reminder. Then you have just the cart_reminder in the Queue.

To my way of thinking this sounds like the best approach.

Dan

@Dan Cole We use both modules. The No Checkout email is sent after 14 days which should give most people time to look and buy something if there is something that they require. The Cart Reminder email is sent out after 1 day now of the customer adding something into their basket. We use the cron on these email and the emails are sent twice a day at 12 o'clock.

[Dan Cole]

Thanks for the input again Steve. I appreciate your comments and your taking the time to respond. If it weren't for you and Gary I'd think that there were only crickets in here.

Dan

[Dan Cole]

Next up, modules to handle our review requests.

Setting up the review request scheduler was a bit more involved than I expected or at least I made it so.
The first thing I did was to look around my site to see how reviews were currently being handled (I had upgraded from an earlier version of PhoenixCart and was still tweaking the newer site so I wanted to see what was working and what improvements I could make before putting the review scheduler in place. On the new site I had the Review Stars PI module installed as well as the Reviews Tabbed Product Tabs module. The Review Stars module was positioned near the top of my product info pages as shown in this image.

Review Stars.jpg

As you will see the “5 Reviews” is shown as being clickable so I was expecting it would take me to the Reviews Tab but it did nothing. I’m not sure how that came to be but clearly it would be helpful if it did link to the Reviews Tab so customers could benefit from the advice and comments from others. I then attempted to add a simple in page href link but for reasons I didn’t understand then, I couldn’t get to work. It was one of those hair pulling moments. In searching the web for a solution I discovered that you couldn’t link to a bootstrap tab, which is what this is, without a bit of javascript. You can refer to this thread if you’re looking for additional information about this. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1376g

I did find some javascripts that were intended to do this but I couldn’t get any of those to work so I called in the beer guy to get it resolved. Gary quickly produced a hook containing the javascript that was needed and it worked perfectly. Customers can now link to the tabbed reviews making those much more useful. The reviews tab that is opened looks like this.

Reviews-Tab.jpg

The next thing I wanted to do was to improve the way customers actually added a review. Clicking on the “Add Your Review” link as shown above works as expected but I wanted a more visible, in your face method that customers could more easily see and hopefully encourage them to add reviews for any product they purchased from us. This lead me to scan the add-on area to see what was available and I found Gary’s Account Reviews add-on that adds a review page to the customer’s account. It looks like this:

My Reviews Page.jpg

That is exactly what I was looking for so I went ahead, purchased it and got it installed. You can find that add-on here. app.php/addons/paid_addon/account_reviews

After getting that in place I decided to add a link to the My Account Navbar List to make it even more visible and in your face.

My Account List.jpg

Like I said this was a bit more involved than I expected but I finally have a reviews process that I figure customers will notice, find easy to access, and use. My fingers are crossed.

Now back to the queued reviews scheduler itself. That scheduler currently defaults to adding the review request to the queue and sending it 1 minute after clicking the option to send a request to the customer that appears on the Orders Status History tab.

Generally the last time I look at the customers Orders Status History tab is when I send a tracking number or indicate that their Order is being processed so I wanted to queue the request for 21 days after either or those events to give the package time to arrive and be used by the customer. With that decided I then turned my attention to preparing the actual template for the email that would be sent and this is what I came up with. It’s an email that I used previously that seemed to work quite well so I only made minor changes to it and created the template.

Reveiws Template.jpg

At some point I might try to add a note in the comments of the Order Status History to indicate that a review request had actually been scheduled. That might keep me from wondering whether I had actually remembered to do that at some future date.

I think that probably wraps things up for this scheduler module. If you are using this scheduler I’d love to hear whether it is leading to more reviews and indeed, if you don’t mind sharing your review request template, others might take inspiration from it so feel free to post it here.

I’d also be interested in any comments that you might have regarding the review thanks scheduler which is the next one on my list to work on. Other than the obviously thank you note, what else are you including in that review thanks scheduler template?

Dan

[Dan Cole]

Setting up the review thanks scheduler was pretty straight forward. I simply had to create the template and with a bit of help from my Gemini friend we made fast work of it. I seem to have a very early version of this Scheduler since I’m not able to easily set when the email is scheduled but it defaults to 12 hours after the review goes live so that is good enough for me.

Here is the template that Gemini and I came up with.

review thanks.jpg

Next up is the “Buy Again Scheduler”. This one is a little more involved but not that difficult. The scheduler can be found at: app.php/addons/paid_addon/scheduler_buy_again_reminder for those who might not be familiar with it. I'm looking forward to seeing how it is received by customers.

Dan

[burt]

I’m not able to easily set when the email is scheduled but it defaults to 12 hours after the review goes live so that is good enough for me.

I've just looked at my latest iteration and you're right, it is hard-coded for 12 hours after review is set live direct in the Hook. Unsure why I left it like that. Oversight, most likely.

You can change that number in the Hook that powers it -> includes/hooks/admin/reviews/injectQueue.php (in the iteration I am looking at that is on L23)...

When I have a spot of time I will update this module to match the rest (ie, shopowner can decide what interval at the top of the Module). IE, take the "send_at" out of the Hook and into the Module.

[cwh2000]

I had a similar problem with the no checkout emails being sent several times to customer with the 1 hr setting enabled. One customer received the automated queued no checkout email 4 times

.no_checkout_3.jpg

and another 3 times

no_checkout_4.jpg

. I changed the setting to Burt's suggestion of 12 hrs

I can't see the point of sending both of those emails and I'm thinking that the no checkout emails should be deleted when a cart reminder email is added to queue. When I move to sending the queue using a cron job I'll need think about that a bit more. Anyone else seeing the same thing?

No Checkout, I think (I haven't looked) just puts email into the Queue regardless of whether the user added items to cart. Whereas Cart Reminder, puts email into the Queue only if the user adds to cart.

They are slightly different...

Perhaps the answer here is to set the cart reminder to (eg) 1 hour
And the no checkout to (eg) 12 hrs

Then you have a funnel of two emails going out to the customer.

As you suggest, the Cart Reminder is probably more interesting than No Checkout, so perhaps you could remove the queued no_checkout of the customer when the customer invokes the cart_reminder. Then you have just the cart_reminder in the Queue.