What Is Email Retargeting And How Does It Boost Your Marketing Campaigns?

With so many e-commerce stores out on the web, there is no guarantee that a potential customer will stay on your site to make an online purchase.

Email retargeting is one of the top performance tools that evolved in the last ten years for marketers to increase their customer base.

According to Emarketer, one the leading market research website, almost 80% of retail professionals rely on email marketing to attract potential clients.

emarketer.com Source: emarketer.com

A McKinsey report has indicated that when compared to the popular social media such as Facebook or Twitter, emails are 40 times more effective in acquiring new clients.

What is email retargeting?

Unlike normal marketing campaigns, email retargeting is the technique of re-engaging the existing customers by sending emails based on their interests and behavioural traits.

When compared to other popular techniques, this is a highly effective approach. The idea is to use the information that you already have about the potential customers.

Email remarketing is a method to help your customers to refine the information you send them through email.

Email retargeting is primarily of two types:

  1. Targeting with retargeted ads- This can be done using the browser cookies. The people who revisit a particular site can be identified and based on that information they can be targeted with a specific advertisement on Google and social media.
  2. Targeting with triggered emails-This is also done with the help of a browser cookie. The browser cookie records all the behaviour information about the various interests of the users. With the help of this information, it is possible to send specific emails to the customers based on their likes and dislikes.

Thus, in short, email, retargeting is simply an effective utilization of the information that is already available to you.

This will allow you to:

  • Target specific ads to the people who are interested in purchasing the product.
  • Design and show unique popups to people depending on where they are on the sales process.
  • Persuade the customers to buy products that are costlier compared to the one they were looking for.

How does email retargeting work?

The technique of retargeting is enabled with the help of cookies.

Cookies are nothing but small files which the browser stores as cookie.txt. These files contain information about the sites that you have visited, your interests, and your details such as name, gender and location.

The email senders work this out by sending emails that are marked with unique codes in HTML. As soon as an email subscriber opens the emails, they get to see personalised brand ad every time they surf the web.

Since the ads are highly targeted based on the interest of the user, they are very likely to notice and click on these to make a purchase. This means that every time the user visits a website that is enabled with the retargeting, your ads will be automatically displayed, thereby luring a potential customer to purchase the product. 

businesscreatorplus.com Source: businesscreatorplus.com

Effective steps for email retargeting

Following are the essential steps to create a retargeting campaign:

Step 1 - Collect the customer data.

This is the foremost step when you need to undertake email retargeting. To start with, you need to decide on what data you need to collect from the customers to retarget your mails successfully and the ways to gather the said information.

By using data analytics, social analytics and all the information that you have gathered through your CRM solution, you can map all your customers and what they usually do on your website.

 Customer data that is usually collected for the process includes:

  • Total amount spent on shopping
  • Details of past purchase
  • Number of purchases made in the past
  • The pages of your website that the customer repeatedly visits
  • The emails that are opened
  • Different types of pages that the customer has clicked on
  • Response rate to an email

Further, it is also important to keep a record of the pages that are highly viewed before the visitor proceeds to make a purchase.

You could also make use of online forms to gather the information that is hard to obtain through regular site tracking.

The form should include relevant questions to gather details like:

  • First and last name
  • Social media information
  • Geographical locations
  • Date of subscription
  • Occupation

Step 2 - Categorise the audience

Once you have finished gathering all the data, the next step is to divide the audience into different categories and subcategories. This will help you to target each group with specific emails that are custom-tailored to suit their unique preferences.

Most email receivers end up sending your mails right into the trash bin.

Yes, this will be the reaction if you continually send insignificant emails to people. Chances are high that the user will immediately spam the sender mail id without even opening it.

Customer segmentation is a vital step as it will not just help to prevent a lot of unsubscribes but will also eventually build a positive authority for your brand.

Some of the examples of segmented groups are:

  • People who have opened your email, but haven’t yet visited your site.
  • People who left midway while doing online shopping.
  • Regular readers who haven’t opened the emails for more than a month.
  • Young women within the age group of 30 who haven’t purchased anything for more than two weeks.

Step 3 - Set the objectives of your marketing campaign.

Once the above two steps are done, the next step is to set the objective of your marketing campaign. Some of the crucial goals of the retargeting campaigns are:

  • Increase the number of customers within a specific age group.
  • Converting regular visitors into subscribers.
  • Increase customer retention rate.

Step 4 - Build your own email retargeting campaigns: ads, emails, and actionable CTAs.

Now is when you need to create custom-designed emails to market your stuff: Understand the importance of the following:

  • Content: Make sure that you create emails with engaging content explicitly designed in a way to attract customers.
  • Advertisement: Sending a retargeted email doesn’t give a guarantee that the customer who views the email will buy the product. Instead, you could increase the bandwidth of your strategy by displaying custom made ads on Google and Facebook.

This will depend on what type of emails does the user read and the web pages that they visit.

Email retargeting best practices

1.Show custom-designed popups based on user behaviour

By using popups that are designed based on user behaviour, there is a higher chance to convert visitors into customers.

You might have noted that customers who are midway during the process of purchase sometimes end up leaving abruptly.

Onsite retargeting is an effective strategy by which several attractive offers are made to a returning customer to tempt him to buy the product. These include offers like shipping discounts, bonus points, etc.

2. Send a gentle reminder/notification emails to the customers.

Leaving the shopping cart somewhere midway during the shopping process is one of the top reasons why many eCommerce businesses end up in a loss.

According to a survey done by Statista, the global cart abandonment rate for Q1 2017 was 75.6%,

There are several reasons as to why the customers leave the purchase midway. These include issues like excessive price, sudden interruption due to a phone or simple double-mindedness about a product.

In scenarios like these, sending retargeted emails such as gentle reminders or notification emails that motivate the customers to continue with the purchase or offering a discount could increase the chances of sale.

3. Stay connected with existing customers.

This is another effective method to boost your sales. Here,  you re-target your existing customers with emails by offering them various products that your eCommerce site offers.

digitalmarketinginstitute.com Source: digitalmarketinginstitute.com

The logic behind this is quite simple. If a customer has purchased from your site, the chances are high that they will be willing to try out new products that your website offers.

4.Implementing offsite ad campaigns

Many of you might have noticed seeing an ad on your social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that comes directly from a website that you have previously visited.

This is a popular technique of retargeting customers with ads based on their preferences.

5. Bringing in the inactive visitors

There is a specific category of visitors who visit your site just to read some blogs and look at the price range.

Visiting your site proves that they are interested in the products but somehow not willing to buy. By continually sending retargeted emails there is a higher probability that you could turn them into customers.

Final words

The email has evolved from a simple way of communication to a fantastic way to market your ideas and products over the world wide web.Email retargeting is so valid that with the right kind of research and ideas, you could target customers around the globe.

If you are planning to try this method for the first time, go-ahead as this is a proven strategy to gain more customers.