If there’s no statistical difference between them, then the multi-step is the better choice. Capture their email early and follow up about cart abandonment.
EDIT: this is a clear GDPR violation - you can't store and use user data without a lawful basis. Marketing requires consent. Consent has to be given freely.
EDIT: even if you worm out of the fine people hate getting unsolicited email like this so some non zero percentage of potential customers will avoid your business in the future.
That would exclude Remarketing services from GDPR-compliance, wouldn't it?
> even if you worm out of the fine people hate getting unsolicited email like this so some non zero percentage of potential customers will avoid your business in the future.
I'm not so sure about this. It may well be true for you and me and our peers, but I don't believe that companies send out annoying "newsletters" and marketing emails just to drive away business, annoy consumers and wake up regulators. They do work for a certain audience.
As an old school mail order pro once said "there is no such thing as junk mail, just a poorly targeted list". If McLaren (to name one of my favorite companies and website) started spamming me with the latest low-down on their hypercars I'd be in heaven... Paul Graham Essays, Jay Abraham ebooks; same deal--pure bliss.
> It may well be true for you and me and our peers
You and me and our peers are a non-zero percentage.
In my previous company we rewrote our checkout flow for this reason. Capturing emails and offering certain consumers discounts via emails after a few hours etc. was a successful move (given that a certain % of people will drop due to price sensitivity) - but GDPR removing that choice is a clearly a good thing for the majority who drop for other reasons.
As for creepy: I wouldn't consider these creepy (i.e. where I've entered my email), but maybe annoying. I had the creepy experience with Pavlok when I first looked into getting one. Browsed around on their site but didn't put one into the cart. Hours later I get an email from them. Turns out they were using some service that loads a beacon and tries to connect the browser via various third party services to an email address. That was creepy. I still ended up buying a Pavlok though, but at a later time.
If I abandon a basket in a retail store, I don't expect a phone call about it hours later after I've left the store and gone home. The first time an online-store followed up with an email about my abandoned basket, I stopped using that store.
Not naive enough to think other stores aren't tracking these metrics, but it's still creepy unless you've been subjected the obviousness of it a lot.
Very curious about your experience! Thanks.
Good to see you're still around, I've enjoyed using my Pavlok quite a bit.
Can't even tell you how many times I dealt with complaints about shipping costs, shipping times, customs costs, returns, etc. Whenever we'd get a complaint we'd just cancel the order and send them a link to a competitor.
Good riddance.
I could invisage a SaaS without ANY personal information, but if that even legal to do if you're taking credit card payments?
In e-commerce cases, you're usually just fine with an address (since you need to ship), an email or phone or some kind of order tracking ID.
In most SaaS cases you can ask for nothing - literally - as visitors try out your product. Allow them right in, and sprinkle a few "sign up" links or forms where appropriate. Build trust, basically.
More often than not, you can delay creating an account proper until you're beginning the formal trial period or processing the credit card.
/s...?
They got the legal compliance as a checkbox during the process. The whole process had 15+ steps and it was when I learned that we were all wrong about how many clicks and actions a user is willing to go through to get a result.
Feels like filling out a paper order form to buy something but not mailing it.
I think the whole "if something can happen, it will happen" rule works nicely here. You can write on paper all you want, but the recipient will never be able to know what you wrote unless you explicitly mail them or send them a copy of the paper. On the other hand, for the web, it is very possible for the client to send the server information at any time.
Say you phoned a company to enquire about some new windows and receive an estimate, if they call you back a few days later you wouldn't be that surprised. However you wouldn't want them to phone you every month until you buy from them, or to give/sell your phone number to another company without consent (maybe you need roofing too?).
This is based of an assumption that cart abandonment is some sort of mistake. What I would guess usually happens (based on my experience with shopping online) is that stopping just one step shy of actual payment is the only way for the customer to get the total cost of orders, that includes discounts and shipping costs. When I close the page at this point, it doesn't mean I got distracted - it means that once I finally got to see the actual costs, I decided not to proceed.
> Say you phoned a company to enquire about some new windows and receive an estimate, if they call you back a few days later you wouldn't be that surprised.
I wouldn't be surprised, but I wouldn't be happy about it either. If I asked for an estimate, I asked because you didn't publish the costs up-front, and I need them to make my decision (whether by comparing with my budget, or the price offered by competition). If I wanted to buy from you, I'd call again.
You would need to show that a person entering their email into an input expected that email to be stored by the other party without submitting the form.
Unless you have a commercial relationship with a customer, don't assume you can email them anything or phone them up.
If the company calling you back isn’t unsolicited (ie I asked them to or they told me they would and I said OK), then its an expected part of the interaction. Cart abandonment emails are not expected or even necessary (from the customers point of view). If I called a company and they called me back days later, without telling me they would or asking if I mind, I would absolutely report them for that too. (At least in my country, data protection says they can’t do this)
Cart abandonment is just like any other marketing and honestly, I report any cart abandonment emails I receive as GDPR violations to my local data protection commission.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...