• by Neil Rosen , August 14, 2012

One perennial source of frustration for e-marketers is when a qualified prospect comes to your website, clicks on various pages and items, and leaves … without making a purchase. In the world of brick-and-mortar stores, this is called browsing. In the online world, it’s called a lost opportunity!

These page-views and clicks create “live” data that marketers need to learn to immediately take advantage of in order to connect with their customers and close sales. It’s not just about the sale: it’s about losing the opportunity to enhance your relationship with customers and prospects, including having that customer become an ambassador for your product or service. In other words, it’s about CRM!

Many companies engage site visitors once items have been placed in a shopping cart. They send emails to customers who abandon their carts, in an attempt to have the customers reconsider making the selected purchases. This is fine, but it simply doesn’t go far enough. The reality is that only five percent of site visitors ever get as far as the shopping cart. That can only mean one thing: that you’re missing out on an extraordinary opportunity to build relationships, an opportunity to show your customers that you’re in tune with what they are doing, thinking, considering, and want to help them with their decisions.

Good CRM eventually makes for great sales. Every marketer knows that acquiring new customers is more expensive than driving more business from current clients. Being a successful marketer depends on building existing relationships and staying foremost in current customers’ minds so that they will, in turn, make additional purchases and share their enthusiasm about your company with friends and people in their networks, eventually leading to the acquisition of these people as new customers.

Website chatter marketing is a process through which real-time, relevant emails are sent to customers, not just when they abandon a shopping cart, but when they leave any page of the website. The emails are customized based on specific website pages that customers/subscribers visited, not just shopping-cart pages. And there’s no problem with permissions, because every email goes to a customer or prospect who has previously opted-in to receive email communications from your company. 

Website chatter marketing technology is a logical extension of an email platform and provides a multitude of benefits:

• 25% or more of your total email revenue can come from these emails, with the email volume being less than 2% of the total emails you send.
• Activity rates are so high, with opens averaging well over 50%, that these emails actually improve your reputation and inbox delivery.
• Complaints and unsubscribes are lower than average because you are truly meeting customer needs with relevant responses to their actions.

Website chatter marketing changes the basic paradigm of online marketing. It enables marketers to segment in real time based on live customer data, saving tons of actual and resource costs associated with segmentation based on demographics—and get far better results.

Website chatter emails outperform standard email campaigns by as much as 10 times with results measured by revenue generated from online orders. For over 50 e-commerce, retail, and catalog brands using this technology, open rates consistently exceed 50%.

Bring them back. Make sure that you have a way of trapping the information about what customers do on your site so that you can follow up with the live data they’re giving you. You’ll have better relationships with your current customers, and because of this excellent CRM, they’ll become evangelists to bring other new customers to your website. And the best thing about it is that the effort you need to expend is minimal! Website chatter marketing is the best way for you to make additional sales and create additional relationships with the minimum of effort on your part.