The truth about ecommerce is that it’s a numbers game. While the quality of your products and the layout of your pages are significant, more than 92% of first-time visitors to your site aren’t there to purchase, regardless of how appealing the experience.
The objective, then, is to get them to come back.
If someone has already left your site, it can be tough to get them to come back. It’s not like you can type your domain name on their keyboard. This is place retargeting comes in.
To retarget a customer is to keep on getting your name in front of them after they leave your site, through ads on different pages, in their email inbox, and on social media networks. The latter strategy is known as email or newsletter retargeting.
What is email retargeting? How can it work? What’s more, how can you use it to capture customers that you thought you’d already lost — just as re-engage shoppers who abandoned their shopping carts, browsed your digital shelves, or even purchase from you yet hasn’t been back in for a moment?
Let’s run down what each ecommerce entrepreneur should know about retargeting.
What is email retargeting?
The process of retargeting a customer can start in various places, from your website to their inbox.
Generally speaking, to retarget a customer, you place a line of retargeting code on your site. When users access your page, they are tagged via a “browser cookie”. These cookies help distinguish users as they move over the web, which is the reason you may see ads for a product on a wide range of websites after you search for it just once.
Email retargeting works similarly: That targeting code stays within an email that you send to your subscriber, who will then be served ads about your business, or a particular product, as they surf the web. They’ll get that email because they signed up for discount code or your newsletter,—displaying interest in shopping with you.
That code identifies the customer as they move throughout the web, serving them advertisements to encourage them to return to your site. These ads can target specific demographics or appear within specific contexts, so the majority of your ads are important and cost less overall.
Now, one automated email may be sufficient to remind someone to come back to your page and finish their orders. If not, however, these retargeting ads can keep your business top-of-mind—and do so without bombarding customers, certainly encouraging them to unsubscribe and end their email relationship with you for good.
Email marketing boasts an incredibly exceptional return on investment, and a well-timed and well-placed email can transform reticent new browsers into first-time customers, or old customers into reliable buyers. Retargeting gives different parts of the web work for you and helps convince consumers to return to you when they’re ready to become buyers.
What are some amazing practices to follow when retargeting?
Just as with any sort of marketing campaign, your retargeting efforts ought to be a decent utilization of your time and money. You’ll need to follow some best practices when starting to retarget customers, so as not to blow your budget on the individual you ought to prohibit.
Here’s what you should do to create the best retargeting campaigns:
Always collect data
Your email subscriber list is the starting point of your email retargeting. Therefore, take each opportunity you can to gather visitor email addresses. Create pop-ups with discounts on first-time purchases that urge visitors to input their email addresses immediately; make email addresses one of the first snippets of information you ask for during check-out.
If your customers don’t give your email address, you can’t email them.
Furthermore, regularly monitor and scrub your email list of awful email addresses and bounces so you aren’t wasting money sending emails to no ones.
Move quickly on abandoned carts
Most retargeting efforts to recently engaged customers ought to happen within a 30-day “lookback” window. In fact, abandoned cart retargeting ought to typically occur within an hour or so of the cart being abandoned.
Keep your business and their transaction fresh in their minds and you’re bound to get a completed purchase.
Send image-based emails
A decent way to hold yourself to an “exact CTA” standard while additionally giving eye-catching email content is to keep your retargeting efforts simple: Send picture-based emails rather than text-based emails. Make sure to add “alt-text” to your images, so subscribers who don’t enable images to load in their emails will understand what you’re trying to demonstrate to them.
You’ll be forced to contain your CTA to a couple of choice words while expressing your point across to visitors that they should come back to your site to complete their order, or to get a great deal on a hot seller.
Stop retargeting once your mission is complete.
Little is more disappointing to a customer than making a purchase, just to continue seeing advertisements and emails about that product show up throughout their internet browsing experience.
Exclude converted users from your campaigns, which will spare your customers and save you money — or, move them into an alternate track that involves upselling or cross-selling.
Additionally, avoid utilizing multiple retargeting providers to maintain a strategic distance from mixed messages to customers.
Conclusion
Email retargeting is an incredible tool for turning what might have otherwise been lost customers into the new and repeating business. What’s more, recurring business is better business: As per BI Intelligence, new online shoppers are just half as likely as returning customers to place an item in their cart.
As an entrepreneur, your job is always to minimize costs while boosting profits — and retargeting, when done viably, uses some of digital marketing’s most effective tools to make the greatest financial impact.
Start having a greater digital impact with retargeting, and see how well it can work for you.
