Attention, shopping cart abandoners: Adobe can now make followup offers in real-time

Here’s a note to those of us who put products into an online shopping cart — and then bail before making the final purchase:

We’re driving marketers crazy.

To help marketers stay sane, Adobe unveiled today real-time remarketing capabilities for its Adobe Campaign, one of six solutions offered in the company’s Marketing Cloud. Campaign is the rebranding of Neolane, a marketing automation company that Adobe bought a year ago.

The new capability allows a marketer to get real-time information from Adobe Analytics on who’s abandoning a shopping cart. And it’s not a small percentage. The company says 74 percent of all mobile or desktop/laptop shopping carts are orphaned before purchases are made.

Previously, Adobe Analytics-based marketing responses had a 24-hour lag, according to the director of product marketing, Kerry Reilly.

As it turns out, real-time might actually be too fast.

There’s such a thing as “the spookiness factor,” she pointed out to us. It happens when a shopper receives a “don’t you want to buy this?” message seconds or minutes after leaving without paying for the items in your cart.

In other words, it’s the online marketing equivalent of stalking.

So the key is to determine the “optimal time,” she said, which Adobe currently suggests would be about an hour later. “Ninety percent of leads go cold after an hour,” she said.

The abandoner would get an email or SMS message, using wording suggested by Campaign, with a reminder or an offer. When accepted, this remarketing results in an average 60 percent uplift in revenue, Reilly said, since the user often adds more products to the shopping cart than before.

Reilly noted that competitors such as Salesforce’s ExactTarget or Oracle’s Eloqua use Adobe Analytics for their Web analytics. But their link is through a connector and not integrated, and those competitors do not offer Adobe Analytics-based real-time remarketing.

She also pointed out that Campaign offers a unique “contact fatigue” component, so the marketer can see how many times the user has been messaged already.