How do we setup Email Marketing with Shopping Cart Elite?

Description: What Are the steps for setting up email marketing

Things We Cover:

Domain Registration
Amazon SES Services
Easy Mail Signup

We have perfected email marketing using a number of services that might sound odd to you at first, but they will make a lot of sense after your read this. Before we begin, let’s go over some best practices.

DO NOT USE THE SAME EMAIL DOMAIN AS YOUR WEBSITE FOR EMAIL MARKETING - Why? Because if your domain ever gets on a spam list, say good bye to your transactional confirmation emails (tracking numbers, order confirmations, etc.) and say good bye to customer service emails. Assuming you find out what happened in time, you can expect a week of disruptions. It is simply not worth it.

DO NOT USE THIRD PARTY EMAIL MARKETING PROVIDERS (EX: MAILCHIMP) - Why? Because even though services like Mail chimp have a good reputation in general from spam score, they use patterns such as “unsubscribe” text on the footer that is already triggered as a spam or promotional email with most Email Service Providers. You will fail with email marketing using Mail chimp because you will end up having all your emails in Gmail Promotional Tab, and Junk Mail everywhere else, unless your subscriber will white list you (unlikely). Shopping Cart Elite offers email marketing auto responders and segments, but our email provider only allows for transactional emails (receipts, and tracking numbers). Therefore, you will need to get an email outbound SMTP account through Amazon (called Amazon SES), among other things:

A new domain name (register it on Godaddy.com). So, you have a different domain from your website domain.
A cloudflare.com account (free account). So, it will allow us to configure the DNS on your new domain and set page rules. (Shopping Cart Elite will do this for you)
An Amazon SES Account. Amazon SES allows us to send emails on your behalf at $0.001 per email ( https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/). This is usually 1/10 of the price of Mail chimp. Here are instructions on how to sign up for an Amazon SES account http://www.glocksoft.com/easymail/gem-video-tutorials/easymail-amazon-ses/
Shopping Cart Elite can send out auto responders’ emails to segments, but if you want to blast out promotional emails we recommend using our partner Easy Mail by Glock. Easy Mail has an API integration with Shopping Cart Elite and the contacts and segments can be pulled into Easy Mail automatically. Easy Mail is a onetime fee of only $149, you can purchase it here http://www.glocksoft.com/easymail/
It is recommended that you have a virtual machine that runs your Easy Mail so any staff including Shopping Cart Elite can login to the computer to access the settings of the software. We recommend you sign up with http://www.V2Cloud.com. If you have under 5,000 emails to send 4GB is enough, if you have more we recommend 8GB machine

Once you’ve signed up for all the services above, and registered everything. Please fill out this form: https://shoppingcartelite.wufoo.com/forms/email-marketing-setup/

NOTE: If this was part of your setup we will do it at no charge, otherwise it will cost $500 onetime fee to set this up for you after you’ve completed steps 1-5.