On my site, I have an e-mail sign up on the home page and I also have "contact us" where customer can write a message and and enter their e-mail.

The "Contact Us" message is forwarded to my primary IMail e-mail address where I can read it and respond manually. However, even though I have an auto responder set, nothing is forwarded to the customer who contacted me with a message through the site (the auto responder will only work if an e-mail is sent to the same primary address from the customer's own e-mail system).

Similarly, I cannot figure out how to auto respond whenever a customer signs up their e-mail address on my home page.

In both instances, for excellent customer (and future customer) relationship management, an auto response acknowledging and thanking them for signing up or contacting us is key. Other sites do this (particularly my competition). The customer has begun the relationship and it needs to be very carefully managed as customer acquisition and retention is so costly. An auto response is a very important as the new relationship begins.

Would be grateful for your direction.
Thanks!
ekeller
www.men-uusa.com

Elgarble-

I believe the root of the problem is two things.

The Email Sign Up that is provided by default simply places the email in your newsletter signup table in your admin panel. There would need to be custom programming built into the software itself to send an auto-response (similar to the way your customer's order confirmations are sent). The software is not designed to do this by default, though, for the email signup.

I see on your contact.asp page you are using our default formmail script. The "From" address you are getting is probably not that of your customer. So, because of that, they do not receive that auto-responder email.

You probably will want to talk to our custom design team at 877-663-5169 so they can create you a form (or give you some consultation on how to create one) that will actually put your customer's email as the reply-to email address, and then should effectively solve the problem of them not getting the auto-response.

Thanks Andy-
I'll follow up!

Also, I wonder if both instances of auto response wouldn't benefit everyone using , as auto response is part of the foundation of managing good customer relations. Would it be possible to incorporate it into the upcoming release of 4.0?

Feature additions for 4.0 have been closed for several weeks (we had to wrap up feature additions) in order to begin testing phase.

Submit your request to the feature request DB and we will work on it.

Do you mean for 4.0? Or for future releases? When the time comes for 4.1 development, we will let customers vote for their most desired features. The most popular get implemented first.


We are shifting to a 100% client driven development model.