How to settings BigCommerce Email, SMTP?

Email has long been playing an indispensable role in building your own eCommerce business. It is an effective tool for communicating with your customers, colleagues, wholesalers or even your competitors. Therefore, customizing a BigCommerce Email should be taken into consideration carefully at the beginning of your eCommerce journey.

This article will inform you about BigCommerce email settings, including how to set up a brand new BigCommerce email or even third-party hosted emails. Then further tutorials to expand the productivity of your email system. Keep reading to find out these spectacular features!

Initial steps to BigCommerce email account settings

The very first step of having your BigCommerce email settings succeed is to make sure that your BigCommerce email account is available. An advantageous point of using BigCommerce is that it helps your process of building and adjusting your email in the fastest time possible. Even if your technology-related skills are not that excellent, you can totally handle it yourself!

Inserting the company’s domain name

BigCommerce merchants should send emails to their customers that have the company name as the domain. There are reasons behind this statement; let’s take a deep look into each one.

First of all, a plethora of businesses using common types of mail email such as Gmail or Hotmail are most likely to be fraudulent. There is a higher chance that their emails will be attached with scam links. None of the customers want to receive and open anything causing viruses for their devices; therefore, a community-friendly approach is the last thing you want for your store.

Moving on to the second one, having a private domain name poses an image of professionalism and reliability for your online company. On the basis of this, people will be more attracted to your brand. Plus, setting your username in BigCommerce emails also affects consumers’ first impressions. For instance, a BigCommerce email address named “help@abcxyz.com” seems more engaging in the customers’ eyes.

Setting up your BigCommerce email account

If your domain name has been finally decided, then it is time to create your BigCommerce email account! We will break it down into 6 small steps so that you can easily follow:

• Step 1: Access your account on BigCommerce, then go to the control panel
• Step 2: Choose “Setup and Tools” located at the top of your website. Next, click on “Email Accounts”
• Step 3: Select “Create an Email Account” button
• Step 4: Fill in the form with your detailed information. This includes a name for your account, the type of your future account, and a password to secure it.
• Step 5: Other Advanced Options also need to be considered such as Spam Checking, Storage Quota, and so on.
• Step 6: “Save & Exit” and your BigCommerce email account are ready to go! In case you are attempting to create another email address, you can click on the “Save & Add Another” button.

Settings BigCommerce Email hosted by third-parties

Before introducing BigCommerce third-party hosted emails, there is one thing you need to keep in mind is that BigCommerce does not offer services related to emails. For this reason, it is best recommended to sign up for an email account supported by third-party service providers. If you are wondering about the term “Third-party emails” here, let’s review several outstanding features of them.

Email hosting offers a plethora of innovative capabilities, such as multi-device connectivity, advanced spam protection, or synchronization among diverse domains, all at an exorbitant price! In more practical terms, they may be used to safeguard your email against ransomware, including two-factor authentication, and avoid data leakage of the system’s confidentiality.

Gmail, AppleMac, Windows Mail, iPhone - these are only a few of the potential third parties providing email services that you can check out. We have prepared a guide for you while choosing and adjusting your hosted emails.

1. Choose an email hosting provider

The number of email hosting services providers is uncountable; it varies depending on the price range, features, productivity, and other factors. Picking the right one for your BigCommerce store is so vital that you have to take an insight into the list of possible alternatives. Below are some necessary criteria that store owners hardly can skip through while choosing their email host:

• Unlimited storage capacity and support
• Tasks, contacts, calendars - Collaborative information
• Protection devices (two-factor authentication, spam inspection, advanced filtering)
• Processing time
• Monthly cost
• Data leakage prevention and recovery
• Productive and helpful customer support team

2. Validate BigCommerce email domains

When creating a new account and setting your domain names, you may have to apply a META tag or a TXT record to your store’s web page in order to receive approval from the hosts. The two ways are both easy to implement; please choose the one that most suits your ability.

To make use of TXT record, the first step is to enter your Server Settings:

And choose “Email & DNS Records”:

After that, click on the “Web hosts” instead of the default one:

Scroll down the bottom of your page; you will see there is a button called “Add another” click on it:

Then fill in the boxes just like below:

Once you are done, do not forget to “Save” your work!

If you are more familiar with the Meta tag tool, we will show you how to add it into your BigCommerce online store. Let’s go to the “Advanced Settings” in your BigCommerce control panel and click on “Web Analytics”:

Now please select “Site Verification Tags” tab, and there you will see a box where you will enter the scripts like this:

If the Meta Tag has been filled in, “Connect” is the last button to finish the process!

3. Make changes to DNS records

DNS records must be updated in your BigCommerce store to represent your current email hosting provider. Browsing for your mail is like changing your address with the postal service. There are two features you will need to be aware of: MX records and SPF records. Each carries a different function.

Talking about MX records, this is a feature specifically designed with an aim to identify mail servers. All you have to do is go to the “Server Settings” in your BigCommerce control panel then choose “Email & DNS Records” and then you will see the “Mail servers” tab above the main screen.

There will be 4 boxes for you to fill in your online business related data such as Fully Qualified Host (your domain name), Time to Live (default), Priority (also default) and Value (the MX record that your host gave to you). Click on the “Add” button to save your work.

Moving on to the SPF records, choose the “Web Hosts” tab in the DNS Settings section of your BIgCommerce control panel. Following that, there will be a little adjustment you need to add on the Value text like below:

• Default: v=spf1 +a +mx include:_spf.bigcommerce.com ~all
• Adjusted: v=spf1 +a +mx include:spf.bigcommerce.com_NEW-SPF-RECORD ~all

4. Customize SMTP server settings

You may use third-party email services to submit your store emails ranging from invoices and order confirmations to news related to your online business using the host’s SMTP data if they give you credentials. This is helpful, especially if you have spoofing security and have the demand to keep track of sent emails.

The initial step is go to the Store Setup section on your BigCommerce page.

Pick the “Store Settings” alternative along with the tab named “Miscellaneous”:

Scroll down, and you will see the “Use SMTP Server” - click on it and select “Let me specify my own SMTP server details” out of the two given options. This is how your screen will appear as:

With the SMTP Hostname, remember to insert a prefix (ssl:// or tls://) before your official host name. For instance, instead of myhost.com, you must fill in ssl://myhost.com.

Settings BigCommerce Newsletter and Marketing Emails

Using email to stay in touch and establish a long-term friendship with your customers who come to the store is an excellent tactic. Email marketing is a cost-effective way to do all three of these things - get more business, concentrate on target shoppers, and sell. Many marketing applications are already incorporated into the BigCommerce platform to support the company with BigCommerce email settings.

If you want to set up automatic newsletter sending to your customers, go to the Marketing > Email Marketing, where e-tailers will be able to manage whether a customer adds their name to the mailing list or fills out a sign-up form to receive a newsletter or not.

As you can see on the screenshot above, there are a total of three boxes for you to check-in. The first one - Allow Newsletter Subscription - allows you to decide if the customers can subscribe to your store’s newsletter.

Below it, there is a section called Tick Newsletter Checkbox, if you tick on this one there will be a box asking your consumers “Do you wish to subscribe to our newsletter” appears on your emails.

Last but not least is the Show Newsletter Summary checkbox - in case you want to update your newsletter subscribers with information about the frequency it will be released as well as the usual content included in your email newsletter.

How to set up BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Saver Emails?

It is unacceptable to not mention an awesome tool solely designed for BigCommerce users - Abandoned Cart Saver in BigCommerce email settings. The BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Saver is built so that online merchants can quickly send promotional emails to any shopper who adds one of their products into the shopping cart but leaves it before the transaction steps. If you have selected the most relevant and useful newsletter, they can be sent to customers with coupon codes, too. This is how a typical BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Saver emails settings will look like:

However, this spectacular tool is only available for selected BigCommerce pricing plans, so if you are using the standard one, you may have to update to a more expensive plan.

Within a few steps, store owners can quickly set up an Abandoned Cart Saver for their emails. First thing first, you need to go “Marketing > Abandoned Cart Notifications” on your BigCommerce control panel page.

BigCommerce has already offered its users with several templates for the emails if you are interested in creating an unique email template for your brand, click on the “Add an Email Message” button. This is how your templates will appear:

Let’s explain some of the subject placeholders:

• %%STORENAME%% — The name of your brand
• %%FIRSTNAME%% — First name of your customers
• %%LASTNAME%% — Last name of your customers
• %%FULLNAME%% — Their full name
• %%CARTCONTENTS%% — The products displayed in your customer’s cart
• %%COUPONBOX%% — Where you include the coupon codes

When you have more than three templates, only two of them can be in an “Active” status. The only way to deactivate the prototype is to deselect an active template. Click on the checkmark with the green color next to the template you wish to deactivate and the red X on the template suitable for activating.

There are three types of notifications you can set for the BigCommerce Abandoned Cart emails:

• Abandoned Cart Notifications: when you notice that your customers have left some items in their shopping carts, BigCommerce will automatically send an email as a reminder for them.
• Converted Cart Emails: if the abandoned cart now has been changed into a successful order, your customers will also be notified.
• Abandoned Cart Emails: just like the Abandoned Cart Notifications, whenever your potential customers left something in their carts, the system will send them an email but more frequently.

If you want to make use of these setting alternatives, choose Store Setup > Store Settings section, then there you will see a tab called “Miscellaneous”.

Personalize BigCommerce email settings

Configuring emails helps you to adapt your communication to fit your needs and build upon the personal relationships. If you are using third-party hosted email, disabling any or all of the built-in emails for your store seems to be more reasonable.

If you want to make sure that email templates are suitable for your customers’s uses, go to Marketing > Transaction Emails. Here, you can effortlessly disable or enable everything, including BigCommerce Abandoned Cart email settings, to reset your passwords.

Next to every template of your emails, there is an icon of three dots. Click on it, and you will be provided with two options, either edit it or disable it to change to a new template.

Final thoughts

There are a lot of things that need to be taken for granted while setting up BigCommerce email settings because emails contribute a crucial part of building relationships with your customers and even increasing your sales.

We hope that today’s post will clear your mind, answer your questions related to setting BigCommerce emails, even if you are using the one with your own domain name or any hosting emails.