Memaila Webinar - Introducing Auto Responder

Some of the attendees are still joining. I guess I’ll start just to give some introductory information about this webinar. A lot of you guys were at the User Conference. That was great. About three weeks ago, we launched this product Memaila, which brings CRM functionality to the suite of Sellercloud products or modules. And I wanted to focus on one of the features of the app. Just to let people know, we attached a two-page document describing some of the basic features. It’s kind of unique, the way it works, which was explained at the User Conference. There is actually a video of the actual presentation that was given.

Memaila can help you manage all the incoming emails, and you have some tools so that you can actually have group mailboxes, shared mailboxes. What that means is that you can have multiple people on your team answering customer service or sales-related emails from a shared mailbox. Without having to log into a CRM interface, you can actually answer those emails from your own mailbox.

Today’s webinar is specifically going to focus on some of the features related to autoresponders. Now, some people might be thinking, hey, autoresponders, that is something really simple, I just go into whatever email app I have and I set a calendar schedule of the autoresponder and I’m done with it. We’re going to explain what the benefits of using the autoresponders through Memaila are and it goes beyond what a typical autoresponder does. Autoresponders have been around for many years, but because they’re so simple, and they’ve been around for so long, they’re very predictable. What is unique about the autoresponders here is that it is geared towards you guys, our customers, where we’re dealing with emails that are coming in from various places, whether it’s Amazon, eBay. Very often, those emails are actually channeled through the marketplace, where you’ll get an email that’s a relayed email through the Amazon system. What it means is that these channels are actually monitoring the communication between the buyer and the seller. Primarily they are doing that to make sure that the messages that are going back and forth are compliant. At the same time, what’s happening more and more is that there’s an expectation that emails are responded to within a certain amount of time. And unfortunately, those expectations are very high that after a certain number of hours, those emails are going to be answered, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a holiday or a weekend. And the systems are also smart enough to detect autoresponders. So not that we’re geared towards necessarily tricking anyone, but the way the system is set up, gives you an opportunity to set up an autoresponder that’s a little bit more natural and unpredictable. And what that means is that when you’re unable to answer the emails, the customers will actually get a response and you won’t be penalized for not responding. It also prevents the emails from being blocked because sometimes autoresponders are automatically detected and go into people’s spam emails and things like that.

As I said, I attached a two-page document describing what Memaila is all about over here. And there’s also a video from the User Conference that’s accessible on YouTube. There’s a link from the webinar. What I’m going to focus on today are autoresponders. And like I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, the autoresponders and Memaila go beyond the typical autoresponder that you might use on your regular email accounts. And primarily it’s geared towards you guys where you’re getting emails from buyers. Because those emails are being channeled through marketplaces, we want to make sure that the responses get through to the customer, and that works out.

So let me go into a little bit of detail. Now, obviously, if you’re not familiar with this product yet, you might want to watch those videos. I can’t go into too much detail. I don’t want to bore anyone about it. I’m actually quite excited about it. This is a new app that anyone who is a Sellercloud customer can sign up for. There’s no cost, we’re not going to be billing anyone for it until January 2020. We want people to try it out and to get as much feedback as possible. But basically, it’s a new app that everyone could benefit from, that will give them the ability to answer their customers’ emails in a better way. I think everyone should take advantage of it. It’s so new that we don’t yet have documentation to spell everything out to explain how it works. But we are hoping that this webinar is a great opportunity to sort of answer some questions and also focus on some of the features. Some people are curious how to answer emails while they’re out, some people are going to be out over the weekend. This can be used to solve that problem also, so we’re going to focus on the autoresponder.

Now, obviously, to sign up, you can literally just sign up directly from the website. There’s a payment step over here, but you can just skip it. Once you sign up, you will get an email to confirm, and then you’ll be able to log into your own Memaila account. You’re going to be asked for a team name. That’ll become part of the web address of the account that you’ll use. As you can see over here, this is just a dashboard of incoming emails and responses.

We’re going to focus on some of the settings related to the autoresponders. Over here, I have two accounts that we’re going to use as examples. One is for scanner gear, related to emails that are coming in, related to the purchase of barcode scanners from the use of Skustack. Then we also have a test company called Thirsty Tea, which I just connected a few days ago, which sells some test products that we use for testing internally Sellercloud.

When you go to Settings, and see over here, you can have a general generic mailbox, and then you can have the emails forwarded to a particular person or group of people. That’s what we really call team members. In this particular case, there’s just one team member that I set up today. When I go back to Settings over here, we’re going to focus on this area over here ‘Autoresponder’. Now, simply click over here. And if you see over here, I’ve already set up three different autoresponders. Some people might be wondering, why do we need three? You know why, why isn’t one enough? The truth of the matter is most email systems only allow you to set up one autoresponder. The reason there are three over here is I want to show you guys how with this autoresponder, you can actually have multiple options, meaning anyone who sends an email to this address will get a response, which is randomly going to be chosen from these three options.

I’ll just show you. I’m going to click on it, it says, This is how to respond to something that’s configured between the fourth and the eighth. I just did it very simply, you could make this look much nicer, you could add pictures to it, make it look like a proper email. I just did it for testing purposes. If I click on the next one, you’ll see a different message. Yes, your message is important. The third one, you know, just as an example, I could add even more and more, there’s no limit to how many options you’ll have. Now the good part about it is that if 3,4,5, 10 customers email, it’s going to be alternating between the messages. So as far as detecting robots or autoresponders, there’s less of a chance of that.

Another option we added is that a customer gave me this idea at the User Conference to add a greeting text at the beginning of the message, which basically means that based on the time of day that the email comes in, they’ll actually add a prefix. The first few words of the autoresponder message will be like Good morning, Good afternoon, or Good evening, and that way we can also randomize the message. Another factor that, as I said, we don’t want it to be considered a robotic response is to randomize the time it takes for the auto-response to go out. Now typically an autoresponder will immediately send. Let’s say you have it set up on Outlook or Gmail, within seconds of the email coming in, it’ll actually send the response.

Right over here, we’ll actually randomize the delay between when the email comes in and when the response is sent out. Over here, you’ll also see just how to enable it. Between those few factors, it’s relatively simple, we can actually control, you know, emails that are coming in and make sure that the auto-response is sent. Now, as I mentioned before, the Memaila system is set up so that it can actually track whether the customer has been responded to. So if you see over here, an example of a message came in as I was testing yesterday, just wanted to do my homework. So you see over here, you can actually see that an auto-response was sent out, one of the ones that you saw before, I think this is auto response number three. Now, if you look over here, you can see this message hasn’t been answered yet. And I can actually respond directly through this interface over here or I could respond from my actual personal email. This is one of my email addresses over here. And it’ll track which messages were responded to.

If I go to the scanner gear accounts, for example, I’ll show you another option with the autoresponder. You can see that all the emails from sales for scanner gear actually go into five different people on the team. When I click over here, you’ll see the five people. If I click over here, you’ll see those five people listed over here. And if I go into setting the autoresponder, you’ll actually see that we have an auto-response going from last week until 2020, I guess, that’s when we’ll start billing for Memaila. If you use it, the trial period will be over.

I have it set to use the greeting text. This autoresponder is set to only send outside of office hours. So over here, I wrote a message about the fact that after office hours we will respond in the morning. Obviously, you could still respond to the customer’s email, but this at least gives them a heads up that it might be a delay. Now, when I click on the Office Hours link, it’ll actually give me the option to set my office hours. Let’s say you’re completely closed on Saturday or Sunday and maybe close early on Friday in the summer or something like that. You can also set your company time zone and Eastern time zone and simple as that. Any email that comes outside of these office hours will get an auto-response. Just like before, when you set up that autoresponder you can have multiple ones. So just the fact that you have this one autoresponder number one set up doesn’t stop me from adding another autoresponder that’s unique to the holiday. That way, you can have one response, after office hours another response that will be over the holiday period of time.

Now, that being said, the customer will only get one response, they’ll first get the one that’s from the holiday period of time where it’s completely blacked out. And office hour one is super specific for days where you’re typically open and just delayed and responding to the email. I don’t know if there are any questions. But I see over here actually, someone asked the question.

Can I see customers’ emails in Sellercloud?

Yes. So the quick answer is that right now you can actually see a link to the customer’s email in Sellercloud. So what will happen is, I think it’s actually detailed on this document. This is typically what will happen if let’s say you get an email from a customer. If you get an email from a customer in your native email, whether it’s Gmail or Outlook, you’ll get a little panel that shows up that gives you information about the customer. Similarly, inside Sellercloud itself, whether using the new interface or the old one, you’ll see a note with a link to the threat of the customer. We’re planning on adding the full conversation to another panel on the order called Customer instructions. But that’s still in development. Right now in Sellercloud itself, you’ll see a reference to the thread number, basically the reference to the conversation number. And then you can just click that to navigate to Memaila to see the related conversation.

Can you apply email filters to an auto-reply?

Okay, so let me explain a little bit. Right now there are filters that you can filter out which emails should be handled by Mamaila altogether. There are no filters specific to the autoresponder. But first things first, we have email filters where you could set a bunch of filters. Let me just show you over here where you could exclude certain emails from being handled by Mamaila. That way they won’t show up in the Mamaila user interface. That also means that they won’t be forwarded to the team members. Over here, I just put some examples – Amazon recommends. Any email that comes from this email address campaigns responses, or payout-related emails, active listings, report emails, and things like that. So you could set up a whole bunch of excludes, and those will firstly exclude everything. Then basically, we have another set of filters that can be used to assign messages to specific team members. And then afterward, it deals with the actual autoresponder. So it goes in order of operations like that. So that way, theoretically, you could use these filters to exclude certain emails altogether and then use the autoresponder. But the filters are not specific to the autoresponder

If I’m only using Outlook or Gmail, how would I know if my team lead already replied to this email?

If you’re using Outlook, and you set up yourself as a forwarding address what will happen is when someone else on the team responds to a message, you’ll actually get an email from Memaila, that tells you that that message was closed down. You’ll know that the email was answered and in the event that for whatever reason, you decide that you’re going to respond to that message accidentally, through your Outlook. There is this feature in Memaila called collision protection, which will prevent that email from going back to the customer. You’ll get a notification that the email wasn’t sent. Now, theoretically, there are some features where you could disable forwarding emails. Some people just want to answer all the emails from Memaila, which is a feature that we added where you could say no forwarding, check that box. But by design, the idea was that the primary way you would answer emails would be through your regular email interface.

Will the demo be available to watch the watch later?

Yes. Not only will this webinar be available to Watch Later, but the presentation from the User Conference. We’re going to be posting it to YouTube. I think there’s a link in the webinar to a private video, but there’ll be a regular video on our YouTube channel shortly.

What happens if the reply goes to someone that also has an auto-reply? Will the two computers keep on talking to each other, resulting in tens or hundreds of emails in one thread?

I believe that that is something that’s built in to be covered. I don’t know if people have that problem with regular autoresponders. But typically, those emails will get suppressed. And I don’t believe that that’s something to be concerned about.

Assuming that the auto-reply will mark the message as answered on Amazon, will the ticket stay open on Memaila? Yeah, so that is true. Memaila is treating the auto-response as different than a regular response from one of the team members. So the ticket thread will stay open on Memaila. So after you come back to the office, after the weekend, or your holiday, or whatever, you’ll be able to see which messages were answered and those with threads will still be considered open. As you see over here, when you go to the team inbox, you could filter by the status and see ones that are just opened over here and go through those. As you respond to those messages it will clear them out of that list.

Is there any way to reply with a canned response without manually closing the thread?

Maybe an issue needs to be escalated to someone. Okay, so that’s a feature that’s still being worked on. If you’re using Gmail, and you’re using Memaila, and you’re actually answering emails from your Gmail account, there is a built-in feature in Gmail as well as some other email clients where you could use their canned responses. After the initial launch of Memaila at the User Conference, there was a lot of interest in people using the Memaila user interface to answer the emails. And we are working on improving that. But at the moment, there is no option like that.

As far as escalating there’s a feature in Memaila called Redirection an email where you could, instead of necessarily closing or responding to a thread, you could actually redirect it to another user. And when they respond, it’ll go back to the original person who sent the email.

Is there an option to mark an email from Amazon as No reply needed?

No, I wish there was. There is an option to add a tag or to flag a message that you keep track of the ones that need to be flagged like that on Amazon. But that’s just the over here add tags. There is no option directly to, unfortunately, to mark it as No reply needed.

Okay, I see someone who just came late, and they may be missed a good part of what I spoke about. But then no worries, it’s all recorded. You can always watch it at your convenience at another time.

What about if a thread closed, someone responded, do we have to manually open it in order to respond again, or if the message has escalated, or something like that?

Yeah. Automatically, it’s going to assume that a response is going to close the thread. You have the option to manually close a thread like this. Or you can also manually open it up again. When you add a message, you’ll see a tag added to that thread. If you want to open it up again, you just hit a button, and when you’re ready to go, you can already send the message. When you close it, it requires that you write some kind of reason why you’re closing it. But when you open it, it’s just a matter of hitting a button, and it shouldn’t be a big deal to do that.

Is the goal of my Memaila to create a full-fledged CRM to compete with the big guys, that has all the features of full integration with Sellercloud?

The goal is to meet all the needs that you have for CRM, without having to use any other CRM. There are a lot of CRMs out there, there’re a lot of features that they have that Memaila does not have yet. That being said, we’re continuously adding features based on feedback. And on a weekly basis, you’ll see updates. Due to the unique design of Memaila, which’s really different than any other CRM type of application, where you can actually respond from your own inbox and it gets channeled through the Memaila system back to the customer through the team mailbox, that unique structure gives you the ability to really use all the convenient features that are in Outlook or G Suite and puts us in a unique position to give you all the convenience you have currently of responding to emails, without, you know, necessarily having to log in directly into a CRM system. It also gives you the ability to answer messages directly through your cell phone. And so that we can answer questions faster. That being said as I mentioned before, there are definitely some people who want to manage all those messages through the Memaila user interface. And for that reason, we’re actually adding a lot of CRM features to that as well.

Are you able to write notes on the email, and then redirect this and reassign it to another person, for example, answer this, please?

Yeah, that’s basically what I showed you before. You can always add notes to the actual message. And then there’s a redirect feature where you could actually redirect it to another user. I don’t want to go into the details of that right now. But maybe if the goal over here was primarily focused on the autoresponder, all these questions, and answering tourists or extra credit, but there is that there is such an option.

Will emails remain unread until they’re replied to?

Similar to being unread. Basically, every thread starts off as open and they’re going to remain on open until they actually respond. The autoresponder will not actually close out the thread or mark it as read. A lot of people are used to treating emails as unread until they reply to them. Over here, this is a better system where every thread conversation is either open or closed. And that way, you don’t have to mark anything as unread.

That’s the bulk of the questions. I hope I answered most of them over here. I think we’re good. Okay, so thank you all for joining this webinar. And like I said, I encourage everyone to sign up if they haven’t yet for Memaila and we’d be happy to help them through it. We have a couple of the people on the Support team who are very familiar with it and they can walk you through the steps. There are a couple of examples where people had unique setups with their email where they have trouble connecting their accounts, we’d be happy to assist you. And in some cases, there are scenarios that we haven’t tested. We’ll make whatever changes are needed so that we can support as many email providers as possible and make sure everyone can take advantage of it.

Like I said, in the beginning, there’s no charge for it. It’s included in your Sellercloud subscription. Starting in January 2020 we’re going to start charging, but this is like an extended free trial right now, for the next six months, a little bit less than six months. And there’s a channel on the forum. There’s a document that’s attached to the webinar, as well as a link to the presentation that was given at the User Conference.

Thanks, everyone for joining and I look forward to hearing more questions and hearing from you about Memaila.