Welcome to the May edition of CartGenie News, our monthly newsletter dedicated to helping you get the most out of your online business. We’ll cover various topics related to e-commerce and ways to help you generate more business.  Most of all, we’ll try to keep the focus on how you can use CartGenie and the various services we or others offer to most effectively build your online business.

What’s Going On

It's been great to see how well customers have transitioned from CartGenie 5.0 to 5.1.  In most instances, it's been a very easy transition and we're especially happy to see customers utilizing the new features.  We're going to be releasing a system "update" shortly that addresses some minor issues so stay tuned for that update. 

With 5.1 solidly in place we're finishing up work on a new add-on module called CartGenie VT (Virtual Terminal).  CartGenie VT is a simple Web-based order entry tool that allows you and your staff to enter customer orders.  It's a great tool if you get a lot of phone or fax orders.  It's also handy if you’re at a trade show and want to take orders or you have sales reps out in the field who need to enter customer orders.  Unlike going to your Web site and navigating the catalog to add items to the cart, you simply login to CartGenie VT, select an existing account or create a new one, enter an item number or use the search option to look it up, and then add it to the cart.  If you have a customer on the phone you can tell them what their sub-total is in an instant and then take their credit card to quickly complete checkout.  The order goes into your CartGenie database so you can then process the order as normal.  Stay tuned for more information regarding the release of CartGenie VT.

Feature Spotlight: E-Gift Cards

This month we’re focusing our spotlight on the new CartGenie E-Gift Card module.  An e-gift card is an electronic gift card that an individual receives in email; there's no "physical" gift card/certificate mailed.  If you've been looking for a simple way to increase revenue and introduce your business to more customers, e-gift cards are a great solution because the person who buys the gift card is often buying it for a friend or family member who has never shopped at your store.  As a result, your business gets introduced to someone new and they have an e-gift card to make a purchase.  The CartGenie E-Gift Card module is a powerful feature that will automatically create a unique e-gift card number and PIN at the time the order is placed.  This saves you time since you don't have to create a gift card number on your own and ensures that the number and PIN are completely unique.  The module will track the e-gift card balance in the event that the customer does not end up using the entire amount when making a purchase.  If the customer wants to check their balance before making another purchase they can do so from your Web site instead of having to call you.  There are many tools in CartGenie Desktop Engine to help you manage e-gift cards.  You can easily search for a specific e-gift card, control expiration dates, reset balances, configure the email template used to send the e-gift card to the recipient, and view all the transactions associated with a specific e-gift card.  So, if you've been thinking of ways to reach out to new customers take advantage of the CartGenie E-Gift Card module.  To learn more check out the e-gift cards topic in CartGenie Help.  Also, take a look at the e-gift card ordering page on CartGenie.com to see how it might look on your site.  

Build Your Business: CartGenie & iContact Newsletter Integration

There are all kinds of ways to market your business and each one has its pros and cons.  At the end of the day, we're interested in the ones that we can afford and will be the most effective at helping us grow our business.  Today we're going to focus on how you can use CartGenie and "opt-in" email marketing (i.e. newsletters) to grow your business.  Why opt-in email marketing?  Opt-in email marketing is the one form of marketing where the customer has asked you to contact them.  In other words, the customer is saying "I'm interested so tell me what you've got and there's a good chance I'll buy from you."  With that in mind, how do you stay in contact with that customer with the least amount of effort and expense?  Enter CartGenie and our partner iContact.  iContact is a leading provider of email marketing tools that you can use to create and send newsletters and surveys.  We've integrated CartGenie with iContact so you can easily harness the power of email marketing to build your business.  The E-News sign-up box on your Web site can now be seamlessly integrated with iContact through a simple configuration file. When someone signs up for E-News their email address will go directly into iContact without the customer ever leaving your site.  There's no need for you to ever deal with copying email addresses from CartGenie over to iContact.  You can then use iContact to send eye-catching newsletters and surveys from any computer.  Once the newsletter has been sent you can immediately begin to measure response rates, click-throughs, and much more so that you can see how well your marketing effort is working.  For example, was the newsletter effective at driving visitors to a specific product?  You'll be able to tell in an instant.  So, the next time you're thinking about ways to market your business give email marketing a try.  You can learn more about iContact on our Web site and if you're interested sign-up for the 15 Day FREE Trial.  Once you have an iContact account check out the article in our Knowledge Base to see how easy it is to complete the integration steps.

Thanks!

Thanks for reading this month’s issue of CartGenie News! Stay tuned for next month's issue.  To view past editions check out the Newsletter area on our Web site.  As always, we value your feedback so if you have a topic you would like us to cover, drop us an email at Newsletter@JStreetTech.com.