Remarketing is the process of convincing consumers who have abandoned an online purchase to come back and convert. Online businesses typically remarket to shoppers using display ads across the web or emails delivered to their inbox. There are thousands of nuances to writing successful remarketing messages, but the goal is always to generate conversions from potential customers who have turned their attention elsewhere.

Today, we’re going to look at the basics of email remarketing. We’ll explain what it is, what it’s for, and what you should know about remarketing as an online vendor.
 

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What Is Remarketing?

Email remarketing is a fairly simple concept with a complicated execution. Not every customer who reaches your online store is going to follow through all the way to checkout. In fact, according to our research, 96.7% of customers abandon purchases before completing them. However, somewhere along the line, many of these abandoning customers enter some kind of user information.

Companies can email consumers who have volunteered their email address during the shopping process, typically either via newsletter sign-ups or ecommerce purchases. Successful remarketing emails are typically highly segmented and personalized, giving the reader the feeling of receiving individual attention. Following the link included in the email, readers return to the website and (hopefully) complete the conversion.

What Is Remarketing For?

To this day, many people hear ‘email’ paired with ‘marketing’ and conjure up an image of spam and junkmail. However, as email regulations have become more strict and ecommerce has matured away from massive email batch sends, remarketing has become a very natural-feeling, elective channel.

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Email remarketing, at its most basic level, recaptures the attention of users who had once expressed interest in your product or service. Messages are designed with the individual in mind, customizing the contents of the message based on user’s browsing and purchase history. Their primary purpose and advantage is that they can be sent in direct response to user action. Relevance and personalization are key to successful remarketing campaigns.

How Does Remarketing Work?

The process is relatively simple and involves two main components: the remarketing database and the remarketing message delivery.

Building a ReMarketing Database
The first step in email remarketing is to collect the addresses of recipients. There are a few common methods of doing this,

• Newsletter Sign-Ups – Email newsletters are nearly as old as email itself and yet, to this day, they’re still a very fruitful marketing channel. With some clever cookie use, websites can pair email addresses with user sessions even without a log-in. By using emails provided for newsletters, merchants can successfully remarket to a wide host of users who do or don’t come back to the site at a later date.
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• Emailing Incentives – Offering a purchase incentive to abandoning shoppers in exchange for an email address is a remarketing fundamental. This tactic is in use on many big-time ecommerce sites and continues to prove fruitful. Much like newsletter sign-ups, when a shopper volunteers their email and later abandons, companies can pair the session with the email and contact the user.
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• Checkout Forms – As a customer brings their shopping cart through checkout, they’re likely going to need to enter an email address. In multi-page or accordion checkouts, there’s typically some type of ‘submit’ button between email entry and confirmation that allows websites to keep entered information. If a shopper abandons their purchase, the email can be used to remarket. Using a real-time information collection tool, like PreCapture, can help businesses shed the dependency on the ‘submit’ button, by collecting email addresses in real-time.

Delivering ReMarketing Messages
With email addresses collected, it’s up to individual companies to design a message or series of messages to recapture the interest of previous visitors. To boost conversions, there’s an endless pool of email remarketing ideas to draw from that include the use of purchase incentives, user details, creative subject lines, customized imagery, product photography and more.

Part of what makes remarketing so potent is that the timing and content of messages are easy to align with the consumer’s purchase journey. Unlike newsletters and other static marketing campaigns, remarketing is a reaction to user action. By monitoring visitor details and session behavior, marketers can easily deliver the right message at the right time.

Remarketing or Retargeting? What’s the Difference?

It’s impossible to define remarketing without taking a look at retargeting in the process. Though the two terms get tossed around a lot interchangeably, they’re actually quite different. Remarketing is most often associated with email, while retargeting is typically used to describe “ad retargeting” or “display retargeting.” Display retargeting is the process of displaying off-site ads to users once they’ve visited and left a site. Using cookies, retargeting gives brands the ability to stay top-of-mind by seeming showing up everywhere online.

 
 
Remarketing is a uniquely effective technique in that every email is sent to an individual who expressed some purchasing intent. Ultimately, remarketing is what some companies depend on for driving revenue through a dynamic, affordable channel. To learn more about the finer points of email remarketing, contact UpSellit.

 
 
Written by Joe Rosenthal