Humour

Chasing the lazy purchaser

T A Balasubramanian on why Web marketers should hound those customers who do only online window-shopping

We return, once again to the bustling IT bazaar known as the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE). You, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle Corporation, are doing the rounds, accompanied by Danny DeVito, your inquisitive walking biped humanoid CTO.

“Well, well, so we meet again,” says a familiar voice, and you turn to meet Gene Hackman, who, on last encounter, was the CEO of Virus Busters.

“Hey, you seem to live here permanently, Gene,” chuckles DeVito, pleased to find his old friend in the teeming crowd. “So what is the latest hi-tech brainwave that brings you back here to bamboozle helpless guys like us?”

“Well, Danny, we technology nomads have to keep the show going, or else this exhibition will have to pack up,” says Hackman, grinning. “But first, let me ask you—and Papyrus here—if you try on a shirt in a shop’s dressing room, but choose not to buy it, would a persistent sales clerk follow you into the street yelling, ‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want it?’ Or would you receive a call at your home the next day to check again if you want to complete the purchase?”

“There are uncivilized sales guys who might try that if they are reckless enough, but in general, no, that has not been my experience,” you say.

“Quite so, Papyrus. Now, in the online world, no such civilized rules of modest pursuit apply. Visitors to Web stores who touch the goods but leave without buying—technically called ‘abandoners’—may be subjected instantaneously to ‘remarketing,’ in the form of nagging email messages or phone calls.”

“Remarketing. What a lovely idea!” says DeVito.

“Lovely indeed, Danny,” you say, wryly. “Isn’t it wonderful to hound the customer who dares to abandon your product?”

“Exactly our feeling,” says Hackman, missing your sarcasm entirely. “For a Web marketer, minimizing abandonment by lazy customers is intuitively a good thing, but it raises two fundamental questions—how to track abandonment rates, and what to do to reduce them. Those two questions now have new answers, thanks to our innovative software called Hound Rebound.”

“Do you have a dog at each website?” says DeVito, curiously.

“Well, not a literal dog, Danny,” says Hackman. “Let’s say the shopper places an item in a shopping cart or begins an application and does not complete the final step. Our study shows that up to 70% of shopping carts, registrations, quotes and online forms are abandoned before they’re complete. Now we have the means to capture all this as it happens, instantaneously.”

“Do you have spies on each website, then?”

“No, of course not. Just a bit of smart look-ahead guessing. Technically, as soon as an address is typed into a box on a webpage, it can be sent to your server without even waiting for the visitor to hit the ‘submit’ button. Scripting technology makes it easy to send every letter you type on a keyboard to a remote server. Some search engines, for example, use this guessing game for a good purpose. As you begin typing in a search term, each letter is zipped to the server, which, without noticeable delay, pops suggestions at you that begin with the same sequence of letters.”

“Hold it, Hackman,” you interrupt, hotly. “I have to say that the idea that a visitor is not entitled to leave an online store empty-handed without being pestered relentlessly thereafter sounds distasteful enough. But having that chase begin immediately seems to be a new form of marketing brazenness. Remarketing, if you ask me, is a terrible form of organized customer harassment.”

“Well, Papyrus, it is true that some marketers have expressed revulsion at the idea of collecting a visitor’s information before the press of a ‘submit’ button. But then, making a sale is all about unfair persuasion, and all we are doing is putting smart technology to work here. The faster we can reach the wavering customer, the easier it is to push her to decide to buy. Hound Rebound remarketing depends upon knowing the email address of the wayward prospect. Knowing your phone number will make follow-up phone calls possible, too. And if you have signed in, a marketer would be able to find you with the email address you provided when you registered.”

“This is beginning to sound like a sequel to The Terminator movie series,” you say. “Besides, my good friend Bazzaro Buyani, CEO of Wonderfully Inventive Marketing Push Systems—better known by the acronym ‘WIMPS,’—dismisses shopping cart abandonment as a meaningless metric. He says there are many reasons why customers might not complete a purchase. He observes that the rate of abandonment rose substantially in the past few years, a reflection of intensified comparative shopping that visitors carry on with many sites simultaneously. Today, people are shopping at half-a-dozen sites at once, dropping items into carts at each one and reading reviews.”

“Buyani is entitled to his opinion. But I do get his point, Papyrus. Also, we are sensitive to the possibility that instant email remarketing might appear to produce an increase in sales, but maybe we can’t see the customers who are irritated and will never come back again.”

“Ah, that is sweet of you, Gene,” says DeVito, sounding relieved. “I think the guys with online shops should make a note of the self-restraint of retailers in physical stores. So when a visitor browses and leaves without buying, don’t chase her down the street.”

“We will do that in the next version of our software. It’s called ‘Hound Rebound Light’—which means we wait for a few days before dashing out after the abandoners.”