UCD Concepts

I received my first cart remarketing e-mail from Circuit City recently and was pleasantly surprised.

Well, how often does your shopping cart take the time to contact you while you’re offline?  I subscribe to a few retailers and register at those I purchase from.  Sometimes I am forced to register and sometimes I am not.  Either way, none of the retailers have actually gotten my attention as much as Circuit City has this past week.

Sure enough, I open my e-mail to find the words, “Having trouble deciding? We can help.”  Now, granted, I don’t recall looking at the Polaroid 32″ LCD HDTV, but I must have if it is displaying there.  I do recall the rest of the items though and that led me to believe, even more, that I must have looked at the 32″ television.

So have you received a friendly e-mail like this from one of your retailers? If not, expect to in the near future.

Cart remarketing is a great tool for increasing conversion, but there is a fine line between building the customer relationship and being annoying.  At first I had to ask myself whether I was feeling violated that Circuit City was keeping track of the items I viewed or if I was happy they took the extra step of contacting me so I wouldn’t forget about the items I viewed.

Here is how I really feel.  I’m not ecstatic that these items were added to my cart, but I understand that it is one step less for me to perform if I wanted to purchase any of those items.  Maybe they should have added the items to my Wish List so that I could then choose when I wanted to purchase instead of being forced to make a decision the next time I visit my shopping cart.

If you don’t know about Circuit City’s Wish List, I reviewed the functionality in a previous post.  I have grown fonder of their Wish List functionality since I last reviewed and think it is the perfect choice for storing items I may want to purchase in the future.

Aside from this e-mail, I expect to also see remarketing e-mails geared toward items I may have left in my cart or added to my Wish List and then left the site.  The key is knowing when to send these e-mails and to which shoppers. 

I am certainly not an expert on cart remarketing, but you can find some good information out there in From talk to reality: Successful remarketing techniques written by Angel Morales over at DMNews.

Cheers.

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