One tactic that really turns me completely away from a marketer is the “Hey, wait a minute. What if we let you buy this right now for 50% off?”

That makes me feel like their original price was a rip-off and that therefore THEY are rip-off marketers.

I’ve even had some sites hit me with TWO markdowns when I try to leave.

Often, the only reason I went to the “buy” button was to find out the price – which should have been on the sales page.

Now, if there’s no price on the sales page, I leave without satisfying my curiosity.

“I’ve never been approached about not purchasing a product at a retail store, but this type of Gorilla Marketing happens all the time at the local flea market, what a turn off!”

Then the WorldWideWeb is like a giant flea market. even mega companies resort to this kind of tactic..

And it annoys me a lot.

I like the way you really got your hands dirty analyzing the poor reasoning that goes into a marketer’s decision to “block the exit” so to speak. To me it seems like common sense, and it astounds me that marketers think their buyers are so dumb/gullible/intimidated by these tactics.

I also like the way you humanized this by applying it to a brick and mortar store. Funny but poignant.

Of course these emails can and should go further. Why not try asking consumers why they left with a simple survey. Those learning’s could easily be translated to identify issues (like an account barrier, high shipping, etc…) and to help you tailor an offer for future, opt-in abandons.

You can start by measuring how many people are NOT converted by your remarketing techniques.

If you have their IP addresses, you can come up with a measure of how many these unconverted visitors don’t come back to the site (over a 2-3 month timeline).

You can take that list of e-mail addresses and check them against your list of repeat customers / accounts and see how many of your formerly repeat customers drop out.

You can search your company / website name on twitter, FB, blogs, etc.

Will you arrive at super-accurate figures? No. But you’ll end up with some rough percentages that you can work with. If only 5% of the remarketed people convert, and of the remaining 95% about half never come back to the site, and of that 42.5% about a fourth are (or were) repeat customers. You can at least crunch some rough numbers on whether the added sales are worth the erosion to your loyal customer base.

- Jeff

Useful information/offers that is provided in a non-confrontational and non-invasive format – similar to your message about a 25% off sale – probably would work online as well.

Translating that to an online experience, imagine a pop-up that occurs either at the moment that the item is deleted from your cart or the moment you proceed to check out, which advises the visitor of the sale.

That’s quite a bit different than preventing me from leaving the site or contacting me through e-mail when I have not given the company permission to contact me.

Oh, and 25% sales are worth hearing about while most 5-15% sales really aren’t (or at least not to most shoppers). Give ‘em a real savings / discount / special offer, as opposed to a transparent excuse to pester them into buying.

As I said in the article, I think remarketing can be done well – I’ve just seen quite a bit of it done poorly.

- Jeff

I’d be sold.