Understanding the value of remarketing

Remarketing is a powerful advertising strategy to help closing pending sales and ​increase conversion rates for online leads.

Before we go into more details, let us clear up that ‘remarketing’ is the email-based marketing tactic to fight shopping cart abandonment rates.

The other strategy consisting of the display ads on 3r-party sites based on user’s behavior - also called remarketing by some providers such as Google Adwords - should actually be referred to as ‘retargeting’.

However as the damage is done we will discuss both “email remarketing” and “retargeting” in this post, look at the merits of each strategy and why you should actually use both for maximum impact and return on investment.

How email remarketing works

How retargeting works

Email remarketing, a cost effective way to boost conversion

Yes, remarketing is indeed a most powerful way to increase sales conversion with the simplest of all marketing tools: email. We’re not making this up from the top of our head, as statistics constantly show that remarketing beats every other tactic in terms of ROI (return on investment).

Some key stats about email remarketing:

• Studies show that over 75% of respondents prefer email for receiving promotions.
• 2 customers out of 3 made some purchases based on email promotions.
• Email is the third source of customer acquisition (7%) behind organic search and CPC, a number that has quadrupled in about 4 years.

The main reason for this is simple: email marketing is easy to setup, and once its process is intelligently automated with the correct tools, its cost is lower than any other type of communication.

Last but not the least, keep in mind you’re addressing messages to visitors that have shown strong interest in a specific product, so that your emails will perform outstandingly compared to any other email-based tactic. Just in case, here are some noteworthy stats you should keep in mind to understand why remarketing can really make a difference in your sales numbers.

From this, we understand that most potential customers complete their purchase only after several trips to your website and across many days. Yet, the overwhelming majority is intent on coming back to buy. Most times, all you need to do is to remind them, while appear more proactive and provide better customer service than your potential competitors.

Last but not least, email remarketing is pretty straightforward to setup. Not all Content Management Software embarks advanced email remarketing but if you’re lucky enough to use one that does, you will experience tremendous returns for such a small investment which isn’t much more than a little bit of your time.

For instance, ​SeoToaster Ecommerce integrates natively a pretty thorough email remarketing facility that lets you configure, enable, and automate easily and rapidly email messages based on your visitor’s actions or lack thereof. 

Screen of email automation facility in SeoToaster Ecommerce 2.4

Retargeting is a fast and efficient way to attract prospects

Creating a few templates-based emails for every type of interaction your website has with customers and prospects can go a long way. As many as 3 out of 4 of your visitors that have filled up a cart without pressing the ‘buy’ button actually intend to purchase, but they need some help and reminders, and this is exactly what email remarketing can do for you, automatically.

Retargeting is a fast and efficient way to attract prospects

If you are an avid online shopper, it is safe to assume that you’ve come across retargeting whether you actually noticed it or not. Nowadays it is nearly impossible to visit a commercial website without leaving some kind of trace, usually a simple cookie set by the site itself in your browser’s cache.

In the old days of internet advertising, publishers would simply rely on the sheer power of mass marketing, hoping that pushing thousands of ads daily on countless websites would somewhat yield more traffic and more customers. This just led to unwanted traffic, ridiculously poor conversion rates, and therefore high cost per clicks.

Just like mass mailing, this way of doing things is long dead. Smart businesses now rely on user-specific ads that will mostly try to guess your interests and display banners that match your interests based on your browser habits.

But what even smarter businesses do is to use ‘retargeting’ to display ads that are totally customized to give you extra value for products and services from websites you actually already visited.

So if you are shopping for shoes for instance, you will go site A then site B then site C to compare their offer, prices and conditions. Then let’s imagine you forget all about it and a week later you still haven’t bought those shoes you wanted. Browsing your webmail as usual, your eye might catch an ad that tells you that those very shoes are on sale at site B!

No dumb luck or extra lucid mind reading here, just a smart online business using retargeting for their benefit, and yours! You’ll recall that those shoes are too damn nice to pass on, click on the promotion, go to the web store and if the deal is good enough chances are you will finally buy on site B, while site A and C are left wondering why you never came back.

Sure, this won’t work every single time with every prospect, but you can easily see why smart retargeting can both give an edge on their competitors AND make a new, paying customer happy about the whole process.

Yahoo! Network for instance uses this a lot and displays ad based on their user’s behavior:

Some key stats about retargeting:

• Smart and efficient, retargeting can easily multiply branded searches and traffic ten-fold and routinely increases purchases by returning customers by 20% to 30%.
• 2 marketing agencies out of 3 and about half of big brands on the internet have moved from traditional ad display to retargeting.
• 2 online marketers out of 3 choose retargeting over other ad methods for their own marketing campaigns.

Using both email remarketing and retargeting for maximum ROI

Now that we’ve cleared up what ​email remarketing and retargeting can respectively do for you business, we’d like to share with you why doing both is important and can save you big bucks.

While email marketing can be quite simple to implement with the right tool, it requires a bit of work since you must craft various emails, setup the parameters that will be automated, and sync the whole thing with your ecommerce database to include your newest products and reflect your current marketing strategies.

On the other hand, retargeting requires yet more preparatory work to be really efficient. Namely, you must craft visually attractive ads and creative text, setup landing pages, elaborate promotional strategies, define appealing call-to-actions, identify customer behaviors and subsequent audience segmentations, ensure multiplatform compatibility, implement tracking, and so on.

To make the best of both remarketing and retargeting, you can setup marketing objectives that serve both purposes. Setting up a well-crafted retargeting campaign will boost traffic and customer acquisition, then you will be able to reuse all materials to create highly effective automated remarketing emails that will turn one-time visitors in highly targeted, valid prospects.

If you manage to turn visitors more prospects on one end with retargeting and strengthen customer retention on the other with remarketing, your ROI will simply skyrocket notwithstanding all the bells and whistles that come with a better customer reputation, higher brand retention and increased repeat customers.

In a next installment, we will look closer into build such winning strategies using only the best technologies and leveraging advanced online tools to give your business the success it craves for.

For now, we’d simply be happy to know that we were able to demonstrate the value of remarketing and retargeting, and why using both could be the smartest marketing decision you’ll ever make.

About marketing automation software SeoSamba

SeoSamba is the multisite & multistore marketing specialist, helping web agencies, etailers,franchises and enterprises build, manage and optimize websites for top search engine performance.

SeoSamba patent-pending, hybrid open source marketing framework is built around SeoSamba Marketing Operating System and SeoToaster. SeoSamba Marketing Operating System lets you manage SEO, social networking and online marketing across any number of websites through a single cloud-based interface, while our open source front-end SeoToaster let you build, manage and market easily corporate, directories and ecommerce websites.

For more information about SeoSamba, visit www.seosamba.com or contact info@seosamba.com, and in the US: +(1 ) 877.450-9894 or in Europe at +(33) 6756376.