I’ve been talking a lot lately about chatter marketing (I literally wrote the book on it!) and I’m still often taken aback when I see companies that are not using the easiest component of chatter marketing to put the R back in CRM: the concept of website reengagement. Shopping-cart abandonment programs are everywhere. And there’s no question but that they work—to an extent. Opted-in customers visit a company’s website, they look at a number of items and put one or two or three of them in a cart, and then leave the website without completing the purchase. The company then sends the customer an email, noting the items placed in the cart and assuring the customer that, yes, they are in fact still available. As I said, these emails work. And they’re necessary. Last fall, a study noted that the average shopping-cart abandonment rate jumped from 71% to 75% over the previous year, as more consumers began using the carts for other purposes than simply purchasing. Some use their online carts to compare prices before making a purchasing decision, others abandon their carts due to high or unexpected shipping costs; and then there are, of course, the usual suspects in terms of reasons for abandonment, including running out of time, being interrupted, etc. But if shopping-cart abandonment emails work so well, imagine the lift you could receive when you’re responding not just to the abandonment of a shopping cart, but to everything that the customer did while on the website. There’s a clear need to identify and pursue those opted-in customers who show interest in the ecommerce website and yet do not place items in a shopping cart. There are a lot more of them, for one thing: many more people abandon web pages than abandon shopping carts … and these are your customers, people that you want to keep engaged! And it’s not just good business: it’s a necessary component of a robust CRM program. When you communicate based on exactly the content someone is viewing, you eliminate random messaging and you show consideration—in terms of both time and relevancy. Once these customers/subscribers are identified, their actions on the website can be tracked. The tracking analytics will give you a plethora of useful information about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each webpage. Interesting as that is, it’s really just a useful side effect of the main point of this technology, which is to identify each recorded visitor’s actions and – most importantly – to respond to them appropriately and positively, thus increasing your overall ROI. So how does it work? After identifying opted-in customers from your email database when they visit your website, and seeing that no transaction has been completed during the visit, a special email campaign is sent out automatically shortly after the customer leaves your site. In order to keep within emailing best practices, only one reengagement email is sent to each customer in any preset time period (12 to 24 hours is optimum), no matter how many times that customer visits your website. The point is to reengage them in a positive way! There are three types of messages that can be deployed: