Online shopping: How to get the impulse purchase

Inboxes Stuffed Like Turkeys

If you've ever shopped online, your inbox is getting filled now because e-mail is the most cost-effective and successful tool for customer retention, according to Forrester. Seventy-three percent of retailers send e-mails about new products to customers.

Lands End and 1-800-Flowers, for example, have begun a steady drumbeat of e-mail, sending one every two to four days to some customers. "Last day for cool savings on outerwear!" reads a recent missive trying to draw shoppers to Landsend.com. 1-800-Flowers tries to appeal to bargain shoppers with "Send Gorgeous Autumn Blooms for US$29.99 and get a FREE vase!"

Piperlime, the online-only shoe store owned by Gap, has launched a weekly campaign. Its e-mail goes for cute, with puns only a cobbler could love. Two recent pitches offered the subject lines "Oh, wellies" and "Flat-out cool."

Still, for e-commerce companies, e-mail come-ons can be more effective than the direct mailings the US Postal Service delivers. While response rates to paper mailings are 2 percent or 3 percent, response rates for e-mail pitches can range from 5 percent to 30 percent, Spool says. In part that's because the mail goes to interested people who have, presumably, opted in or at least didn't opt out for them. The attitude among marketers being, "Hey, it's not spam if you sign up for it!"

Working to create "atmosphere" online

To put people in the buying mood, physical stores sometimes use diffusers to waft scents through the air that encourage good feelings. Bloomingdale's, for example, uses coconut among the bathing suits and evergreen mixed with chocolate and sugar cookies in home decor (and hired a company, ScentAir, to supply those smells). The aroma of coffee can lead to a physical craving for some, spurring shoppers to open their wallets for a cup-and perhaps, too, for a fancy ceramic mug to take home.

The scent of hot sand and cocoa butter can evoke memories of a happy time, inducing an otherwise focused shopper hunting for a specific product to shift to a more exploratory mindset, says Tim Girvin, principal of Girvin Creative Intelligence, a brand and marketing consultancy in New York.

Here's the principle: A smell prompts a shopper unconsciously to recognize something familiar, and at the same time, feel recognized, Girvin says. That connection often makes people buy more.

Online, the same idea works, he says. But because we can't (yet) rely on smellivision, aroma-emitting technology, e-commerce sites have to tickle recognition nerves in other ways.

Amazon.com, for example, is known for seeming to know you, making product recommendations based on buying histories. Order Ronnie: The Autobiography by Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood and at next log-on, surmising you like senior citizen rock icons, Amazon suggests Raising Sand, the new album Robert Plant made with Alison Krauss.

By using business intelligence tools to analyze data about individual shoppers and those who have made similar purchases, Amazon finds relationships between products and buying behaviors.

"The concepts of scent in shopping and online relational tools are aligned," Girvin says. "They reach into the psyche of the shopper and evolve them to a new experience." Indeed, this shopper probably will buy Plant's new record.