No touch, no sale:  Your customers, and shoppers everywhere, are not bots; if anything, they’re cats.  And we all know how effective it is to try to herd cats.  Yes, you can entice any cat once or twice to do something because the reward is attractive enough or because the experience for the cat is entertaining enough.  But we all know how quickly a cat loses interest in jumping through the same hoop time after time no matter what the reward.  Yet, there is this belief, as the 150 million spam email messages sent every day suggest, that web retailers can succeed by blasting customers time and again with the same basic message – buy this, buy that, buy now, buy right now, tell Aunt Sue to buy now, buy, buy, buy!

This isn’t customer service.  This isn’t selling.  This isn’t even marketing.  Yes, behavioural targeting has a place in contemporary multi-channel retailing.  But relying on behavioural targeting to be the primary driver for your marketing and customer service, expecting to repeatedly trick your customers, or cats, into doing what you want them to do is just plain dumb.  It’s dumb for many reasons.  Starting with the obvious...you’re not the only marketer blasting messages at your customer. 

Whether she signed up for your email marketing megaphone or not, you are only one in a crowd of marketers filling your customer’s in-box with their latest buy messages.  How loud does your message have to be for it to be heard?  How delighted do you think your customer will really be to have you shouting in her ear and pulling on her purse strap in hopes of getting her to open a link to your webstore?  And what sort of relationship do you think is going to develop with your customer when her experience with your webstore is all about your hand on her back pushing her down the path you have greased “just for her.” 

High touch online:  Don’t think for one minute that you can control your relationship with your customer and have it be successful over the long run.  Yes, on occasion, and until your customer gets bored or annoyed, it can appear that you have control – that you know when and what she wants to buy, and that staying in control is simply a matter of timing and the right presentation.  But is that why we shop – to be told what to buy? 

The first reason that no-touch shopping never came close to dominating the retail channel is that shopping is much, much more than simply buying something.  Shopping is entertainment.  Shopping is social interaction.  Shopping is discovering something new, something unusual, something that you never thought about buying until you happened to see it.  No-touch shopping delivers none of this experience.  Which is not to say that shopping online can’t deliver the experience.  But it needs to be high-touch shopping, not no-touch shopping.

High-touch shopping includes many things whether online or at your local market.  Understanding high-touch in the local marketplace is easy.  Smell the fresh peaches, feel the luxurious silk, taste the rich chocolate.  High-touch translates to the web in other ways.  Think of it as giving control of the shopping experience to your customer and gaining the relationship you truly want – one built on her appreciation, respect, and loyal patronage.

Giving up control:  What mistakes are you making while trying to control your customer relationships?  To start you thinking about how and where to give control to your customers, here are four examples of common mistakes that web retailers make, most likely to keep control of the relationship with their customers.  I am not saying that these are the top four mistakes (although they are widespread) and they certainly aren’t the only mistakes.  But these are four practices that always annoy me when I bump into them while shopping online.

• Making me register to shop:  Talk about lousy first impressions.  Other than to secretly track me and push stuff at me, why does any webstore operator need me to tell him who I am before I can get a shopping cart or before I move into the payment process?  If I need you to know who I am early in my shopping, give me a button to click that provides a login or registration form.  Otherwise, just let me shop.  You will find out who I am when I’m ready to pay.  

• Keeping my cart active without my permission:  Nothing says “big brother” more clearly to me than a webstore that hangs onto my abandoned shopping cart without me asking.  So that it can be shoved under my nose if I ever visit the store again.  Or worse, triggering emails reminding me that the abandoned cart is still there, waiting for me.  Give me a button to click if I want my cart kept active.  It’s for me to decide, not the store.  

• Making me shop in your maze:  Once in a while I wander into a retail shop where the aisles are jammed, merchandise is a jumble and I can’t find a thing.  Why does anyone think this is the best way to serve customers – online or off?  You want me to enjoy shopping in your webstore – give me an easily accessible and properly detailed sitemap.  Give me a navigational tree to show me where I am and how to get to other departments.  

• Pushing stuff on me:  We all dislike pushy sales people, -the ones who follow us around shoving stuff in front of us that we haven’t asked to see.  Just because there isn’t a live person pushing stuff at me in a webstore, the practice is no more tolerable.  Give me a button to click for similar items, complementary items, and related items.  Then I can decide whether I want the stuff pushed on me.