Help CenterUsing AluraHow to use Alura Followup Reminder

How to use Alura Followup Reminder

Followup Reminder is the tool to help you get more reviews on Etsy and build better customer relationships.



It reminds and helps you to send followup messages to customers after they’ve received their order. This is the optimal time to thank your customer for their purchase and ask for a review. After we started using this approach, we saw our store more than double its review rate from 7% to 15%. 

This is crucial as Etsy says that reviews improve your shop's score and search ranking. 

How it works


Here we have a list of orders that have been delivered. To follow up with Lynga here, simply hover over the row and click on the send now button. 


This will do two things:

1. Open the order on Etsy

2. Copy a personalized message to your clipboard


To send the message, simply click on “Message Buyer” and paste the message from your clipboard. 


If you look at the message, you can see that it automatically contains the customer's name and some other personalised variables. Finally, just send the message and you’re finished following up with this customer.

Taking a closer look at the follow-up table

In the follow-up table, you’ll see all your orders from the past three months. As default, you’ll only see orders with the status “send now” which means that you should send a followup message to these customers.


You can change the filter up in the right corner.


We have three types of main order statuses: (1) scheduled, (2) send now and (3) completed.


When you mark an order as “complete” on Etsy, it’s going to be marked as scheduled in this table. Once the order has been delivered to your customer (based on your settings), the order status will be updated to send now. Finally, when you send a message to the customer, the order will be updated to Completed.


If you hover over an order, you have the option to manually mark an order as Completed, send now, or ignore. You can use the “ignore” status if you have an order you’d like to skip. Note that when you click on the “send message” button we’ll automatically mark the order as complete. Consequently, you don’t need to manually mark an order as complete when you use the Followup Reminder.

Customizing your message and delivery time


If you click on the settings button (upper right corner), you’ll see the message you are sending to customers. You can change/customize your message at any time.


When you write, you can use smart tags. These are personalised variables specific for each customer's order. To add one, just click on the smart tag and you’ll see that the tag is added to your text. 


First name = Customers first name

Shipping city = The city the order will be sent to 

Order date = Date of order creation

Day of week = Today's day of week


How to change when a message should be sent


Scroll down to the “Schedule” section. How the schedule setting works is that it will change the order to Send now, based on the number of days that you chose. The number of days is days from when you mark an order as complete on Etsy.


The schedule option is important, and you should edit this based on your delivery time. 


For example: If your orders are normally delivered within 5 days, we suggest that you add a couple of days, e.g. chose 8 days. This is just to make sure your order has been delivered before you are sending the message.


Advanced filter

The advanced filter is if you’re selling to multiple countries. 


Let's say that you’re selling to the US, and you also offer international shipping. Your international orders might take up to 30 days, while US orders are delivered within 10 days.


What you can do then is to set the scheduled message to 30 days, and set 10 days for customers from “United States”.



Agreement

Sending these messages are within Etsy’s terms of service. Etsy actually encourages following up and thanking your customer for their purchase.As you can see in this article here. Please note that you are not allowed to send any form of unsolicited advertising or promotions.

Repeat customers


We have also added a smart solution to give a special message to your repeat customers. Change the text in the “Repeat customers” tab to schedule a different message to your repeat customer. We automatically check if a customer has purchased from you in the past, and if they have - this message will be copied to your clipboard instead. You can customise this message any way you like.

Tips on using this tool

Followup Reminder is automatically updated once a day, so you will see new orders here daily. The way we use this tool is that we go through the follow up list once a day and follow up with orders that have been marked as “send now”.


Thank you for reading and feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions!


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