Whenever you go shopping at almost any online store and at many brick-and-mortar retailers, the store will ask for your email address. Perhaps it needs it for your account. Maybe it wants it for a mailing list. Sometimes it’s needed for the purpose of signing up for a customer rewards program.
In any case, as soon as you hand over your email address, you’re on the mailing list. Offers start popping up in your email, describing sales and discounts and in-store offers.
Those emails aren’t always a bad thing, but they can be annoying when you have to sift through a bunch of them in order to find the important emails you’re looking for. They’re also a constant temptation, an in-your-face reminder of some discount on an item you might want or information about some great product that might appeal to you. They’re practically begging you to open your wallet.
Still, sometimes that email comes along that really does point out something useful for you — a sale on something you were intending to buy. You don’t want to just lose those emails.
That’s why a special “shopper email” account is a great idea. It keeps all of those commercial emails out of sight and mind when you don’t want to see them, but gives you easy access to them when you do want to see them.
[See: 12 Shopping Tricks to Keep You Under Budget.]
Here’s how it works.
First, sign up for a separate email address. Gmail is a perfect choice for this because of the large free storage space and great search capabilities. Choose an email address that you’ll easily remember, so that you don’t have to write it down and try to come up with it later. Perhaps something like your initials followed by the word “shopping.”
If you need to, don’t hesitate to write it down on a piece of paper and keep it in your wallet until you have it memorized. Just make sure not to choose an address that you’ll have a difficult time memorizing because you’ll want to share this email address often, and you’ll be better off having it in your mind than having to find that piece of paper each time.
Once you have that address, go to each of the customer rewards programs that you’re involved with and change them to this new address. You can find them by digging through your current email and clicking on the relevant link at the bottom of such emails, which will give you the ability to change the email address associated with the rewards program. When you do that, the emails will stop coming to your main address and will start going to your new shopping address.
You may want to consider doing this for all of your online accounts, especially ones associated with retailers of any kind.
[See: 10 Money-Saving Websites to Check Before Shopping.]
From here on out, sign up for every relevant customer rewards program that you can, and use the new address when you sign up. That way, you can start building rewards at pretty much every store that you shop at and the emails won’t interfere with your primary email use. Similarly, you should use this new account when signing up for new online shopping accounts, so that the emails from those go to your shopper email.
This is a big benefit of the strategy. Quite often, the concern of having our email address used by spammers or for endless marketing emails will keep us from signing up for customer rewards accounts. If those emails are going to a separate address, who cares? Let the emails come in.
That’s not the only benefit of using this strategy, though. Once you’ve moved over all of your accounts to this new email address, those emails become a resource for you. Are you thinking about going shopping or going out to eat? Fire up that email account and start searching through the alerts for sales or bargains for the stores or restaurants you might be visiting. Are you considering buying a particular item? Go into that email account and search for any sales that might be relevant.
[See: 10 Ways to Save on Your Wardrobe.]
This email account will have all kinds of sale listings and other such material customized for where you shop, which makes it a great resource when planning out shopping trips, but it also keeps all of those emails out of sight and out of mind when you don’t want to see them and just want to deal with your regular emails.
Having a shopper email simultaneously solves several problems. Those include having advertising in your face all the time, having emails you don’t want to deal with when you’re busy, having spam in your email as a result of these companies selling off your email address. And it introduces some useful features, like the ability to do targeted searches through emails that contain sale items that are uniquely targeted to you and keeping all of that out of sight when you don’t need it. It makes customer rewards accounts easier to manage as well. Get yourself a free shopper email account today and enjoy all of those smart benefits.
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How to Set Up a Shopping Email Account to Score Sales, Not Spam originally appeared on usnews.com
