Follow-up marketing when consumers abandon the purchase funnel
In light of the recent iPhone 3GS announcement this week at Apple’s WWDC conference, I investigated pricing and navigated through the “upgrade” steps made available on Apple’s site. My wife currently has an aging Nokia phone that is eligible for an upgrade and the 8GB iPhone fits the bill for her needs.
Abandoning the purchase funnel
Having said that, I went through the multi-step validation process on Apple’s site, but it was unable to retrieve our account information from AT&T, to which I was prompted to search for a local Apple Store. Not needing to do this, I simply abandoned the purchase funnel with a mental note to “visit the store this weekend” since I hit a dead end on the site and wasn’t going to be able to complete the upgrade online.
Automated follow-up to purchase abandonments
About 15 minutes later, I received the following, automated email:
Very impressive — an automated follow-up recognizing that I abandoned the purchase funnel for the iPhone upgrade. I must say that I am not used to this type of marketing where the website acts like a true salesperson.
Technically speaking, it’s not difficult to implement this. It’s a perfect blend of leveraging technology to solve a business problem: how do you capture the consumer’s attention after they’ve left your site without making a purchase?
The Devil’s Advocate argument is that can seem very “big brother”. We certainly market to those who don’t go all the way through our purchase process online but we do so as if they are any other prospect. Do you see any negatives to the strategy you described above by Apple?
David – it all comes down to knowing your communications preferences. In my opinion, if I left my contact information at a car dealership and the salesman calls me back after a couple days, it's a pretty standard follow-up. I knew what I was getting into when I left my contact info. In this case of Apple's site, I wasn't fully aware that I'd receive a follow-up email, but given my past purchase history with Apple, I wasn't irate that they had automatically followed up with me.
In an ideal world, they'd follow up automatically with anyone and everyone who abandons the purchase funnel but to your point, there probably needs to be a bit of "pre-qualification" (through means of evaluating past purchase history, how long they spent on the site through the purchase decision process, etc.) so as to not alienate potential buyers from the product.