The Mystery Shopper’s Manual

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As you register with mystery shopping companies, you will see a big increase in the number of emails you receive. Many companies send emails offering mystery shopping jobs, announcing postings to job boards and more, and they can add up to hundreds of emails every week. Add those mystery shopper emails to your regular volume of messages and spam, and you have a lot of emails to manage. How can you handle the flood of email?

A good start in managing your secret shopper email is to have an email account used only for shopping. Make sure this email address is one you will have for a long time. If your email address is through your ISP (the company you use to access the Internet) any change in your ISP means that your email address will change, too. And that means you will have to update your profile with every mystery shopping company.

Instead of using the email address that comes with your Comcast, Cox, Earthlink or other ISP account, you can use one of the free services such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo. Or, get your own domain name (e.g., www.YourDomain.com). If you have a web site, you can use email through that domain. If not, you can register for an inexpensive domain and email at http://www.GreatDomainsHQ.com/. So, for example, if your domain name was your last name, your email address could be firstname@lastname.com or shopper@lastname.com.

Many email programs allow you to filter or label your email messages for easy sorting. For example, I use Eudora to download and read my emails. By using filters, I can have all of my mystery shopper emails go in to one folder so that they can all be reviewed at the same time.

Act on your mystery shopping emails promptly. If you are interested in a shop, apply immediately. If you are not interested, delete the email. Do not allow the emails to pile up in your in box and get out of control. Most of the time, if you do not act quickly the job will be gone, anyway.

And if it all gets to be too much? In some mystery shopping systems  you can easily opt out of receiving email notices without deactivating your shopper account. For example, in the Sassie system, log in to your shopper account, click on My Profile and check the box that says, “I do not wish to receive mystery shopping offers by email.” You can still check the job board and apply for shops there, but you will not receive email notices of open shop assignments.

The more time you spend dealing with email, the less time you have to spend doing paying shops. Keep a handle on your email and use your time effectively.