It’s quite a shocking statistic that only approximately 22% of businesses find their conversion rates satisfying. For the other 78%, there’s a need to reconsider their marketing strategies and even incorporate email retargeting approaches. Email marketing, among other approaches, doesn’t always convert visitors into leads the first time.
If email marketing is your primary strategy of advertising, consider incorporating email retargeting. This is especially if your conversion rates are below par. You might be wondering what that is and how it works.
Let’s delve into it right away.
What Is Retargeting?
You’ve, at one time or another, seen a buyer get close to making a purchase, then just turned around and left your site. At this point, you tried to figure out how you can get back their attention. You also thought of the best way to remind them why they were just about to convert.
The good news is, there’s a way to draw back a visitor’s attention, and this is through retargeting. It’s a strategy that effective in closing sales that almost slipped out of your hand. Instead of letting the lion’s share of your traffic move away, you should take action to have them come back and convert.
Retargeting is the act of marketing to the same person more than once. The strategy is cheaper compared to other forms of advertising. Effective retargeting requires that you use ads with a higher potential for conversion.
Avoid putting too much effort into running awareness ads just for the sake of driving users down your buyer’s funnel.
Email Retargeting
One of the cornerstones of digital marketing is email marketing, which is a very effective way of reaching customers. About 77% of consumers would like to receive marketing messages through email. They’re also more likely to share email content as opposed to broadcasting it over the social network.
Consumers get information from unlimited outlets, and this poses a challenge for marketers. Creating an email frequency is usually not a viable solution for dealing with attention deficits. If your consumers feel deluged or bombarded with emails, they’ll most likely unsubscribe from your emails.
The most practical way to boost your email strategy is to supplement it with another form of outreach. Combined approaches tend to produce better results. One of the outreaches you can make use of is email retargeting.
Email retargeting refers to a simple yet useful approach to marketing. It supplements email marketing campaigns with display advertising. The strategy allows you to serve ads through email to people who have subscribed to your emails.
In other words, email retargeting is about refining the information you send to your customers through email. You collect customer information through browser cookies. These are tools that store information about sites they visit and links they click on.
Implementation
The technique is effortless to implement, as all you need to do is place a line of code on our email HTML. Anyone who opens your email will receive ads all over the web. The technique is potent in maintaining your brand at the forefront of your email list.
It prevents you from sending more emails and risking many of them to unsubscribe.
Email retargeting works best only if your readers are opening your emails. If they’re not, there’s an alternative to email retargeting that can save the situation.
CRM Retargeting
Customer Relations Marketing (CRM) retargeting sends ads to users through an email address. The users don’t’ need to visit your website or open your email to see the ads. CRM retargeting helps you serve ads to every person on your emailing listing regardless of your engagement status.
Through your anonymous email list, you can find the users online and retarget your relevant ads to them. CRM retargeting doesn’t require any action on behalf of the user provided you have their email address.
Both email and CRM retargeting can be used hand-in-hand to enhance conversion rates.
When to Use Email Retargeting
Email retargeting works best when applied with precision. It won’t always work in certain situations where email marketing has failed. Here are some cases when it can have the most significant impact.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
According to the Baymard Institute, about 70% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts midway. Some of the common reasons for cart abandonment include
- Price comparison on different sites
- Saving items for later
- Window shopping
- Exploring gift items among others
Most other users abandon way before the checkout flow starts. One of the reasons for this is a complicated checkout process. This can be rectified through website design changes. You can also offer a discounted price if the visitor purchases on the spot.
Whatever the reason for shopping cart abandonment, the loss incurred is quite significant. A smart marketer will recover all that through email retargeting. An email sent within three hours after the abandonment of the shopping cart has a higher open rate than one sent later than that.
Getting the Attention of Inactive Visitors
To get a visitor’s attention, email marketing targets two audiences:
- Those who have purchased something, downloaded a lead generation item or signed up for emails
- Inactive site visitors
In a lot of cases, retailers email targeting is used in combination with Facebook Pixel. This shows ads to people who’ve been to your site already. If you use this strategy, be prepared or additional costs of social advertising, but the impact will be more felt.
Messages Tailored to Visitor Behavior
A practical alternative to email retargeting is onsite retargeting. Instead of waiting for visitors to leave your site to follow them to the emails, you target them on the website. For example, when a visitor is about to leave the website, you can recommend products related to their search.
Strive to create personalized onsite messaging to the visitor’s purchases. You can also use an exit-intent popup to make an offer the customer can’t resist. Examples of onsite retargeting include offering gifts and quotes.
It’s also about directing customers to their area of interest.
Objectives and Best Practices of Email Retargeting
When email targeting is correctly applied in marketing your business, it helps the marketer achieve the following goal
- Make offers to existing and potential customers
- Make upsells to customers interested in particular products
- Display popups depending on the stage of the sales process
For you to achieve these objectives at a satisfying rate, the process calls for some very basic best practices. These include
1. Tailoring Your Campaigns
On the internet today, there are several types of software you can use to check the active users, those who are inactive or unsubscribed. Depending on the results, you can create marketing campaigns to suit each segment.
2. Targeting Your Opt-ins
Haphazard targeting of the market could create the opposite effect of what you intended. If for example, you show an offer meant for the undecided segment to those who’ve already signed up, you’ll turn them off.
3. Leave Subscribers out of Retargeting
Email retargeting done to already loyal subscribers will work against you. Instead, focus on those users who look like potential buyers. A no-brainer incentive will keep them hooked.
4. Make Use of CRM Software
Customer Relations Marketing, when used in combination with email retargeting, creates powerful results. There are several available CRM software will make your efforts more focused and productive.
5. Take a Short Time to Send Retargeting Emails
As a best practice retargeting emails should be sent within an hour after a customer leaves your site. This is especially so if you aim to trigger an email campaign. In so doing, you leave the visitors with no window for forgetting.
6. Be Precise and Personal
Address your readers by their names. Personalization is a powerful marketing strategy, and it guarantees your e-commerce success. The emails should also give the readers a specific action to complete. For example, the email could remind them of a selection they made at your store and provide a link to it immediately.
7. A Goal for Each Campaign
You need to have a reason for every retargeting campaign you create. The goals range from first time purchases, payments, or upgrades depending on your business. It’s hence crucial that each campaign has a different content type.
It can be a turn off for the customers you target to see the same message time and again. Get creative in getting the attention of the users. A single campaign should have a series of different content.
8. Measure Your Campaigns
It’s impossible to know which campaign is producing results if you don’t measure. Check the media o retargeting that is most effective and utilize it the more. In the same breath, analyze campaigns to see the response they’re getting.
For campaigns that get no action, make changes in the content copy or image and rerun them. The more the campaign resonates with the user, the higher the chances of conversion.
It’s also best practice to control where your ads appear, their quality, and content. It makes no sense to be haphazard in your retargeting efforts. Ensure you only offer ads for the subsequent 30 days a customer abandons a shopping cart.
This is what marketers call the 30-day “look-back window.”
Pay attention to the duration and frequency of your ads so that you don’t overwhelm your customers. Once the users have taken action as you desire, don’t retarget them. Achieve this by use of a “burn code” which gets rid of the original retargeting cookie.
Advantages of Email Retargeting
One benefit of email retargeting is that it works best with customers who’ve expressed interest in your stuff. If you do it effectively with the best practices observed, there are high chances of realizing potential benefits. You’ll not only get past the interest of the users but also drive offline action.
Retargeting also helps to improve organic search because it drives traffic to a particular page. It’s a multichannel approach that transcends user emails and social pages.
Email retargeting is a low-cost advertising approach compared to other forms of advertising. There are no charges for billboard exposure or printing. The most significant investment is in specialist software to automate, evaluate and track emails.
The marketing strategy targets an already engaged audience. You don’t have to look for an audience from scratch. You only give to the consumers what they ask for through their browsing habits.
Since you only target consumers with interest in your products, conversion rates are much higher. Email retargeting eliminates the temptation to send unsolicited marketing messages. Uncalled for ads are only likely to annoy users.
Through email retargeting, you can take advantage of impulse buying. If you can give discounts and other related offers just before they exit your site, customers are more likely to buy your product. Not many online marketing platforms allow such an opportunity to buyers.
A combination of consumer psychology can successfully improve the results of email retargeting.
The Takeaway
Retargeting is a powerful marketing strategy that has many categories. Among them is email retargeting, which entails serving ads to customers through their emails a second time. The purpose is to reinforce their interest in your products and to make them buy.
Email remarketing works best if you can personalize the marketing content. Being able to meet your customers at their level of interest is more likely to yield fruitful results. Less is more, in this case meaning that you need to factor in the number of times you retarget your ads.
If a customer feels bombarded with marketing messages on their email, they’ll most likely retract, and you’ll lose them.
This strategy of marketing comes with its fair share of advantages. Besides being cost effective, it eliminates the casual audience. It focuses only on those with an interest in your products. This increases your chances of having conversions.
Combined with other social marketing tactics, retargeting is guaranteed to give you a high success rate. Be specific about the content, and remember to personalize it for your audience. Most importantly, don’t forget to measure how effective your marketing strategy is to see what requires improvement.
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