Have you ever wondered how to turn those website visitors who didn’t make a purchase into loyal customers? The answer is email retargeting!
You’ve probably heard about email retargeting in the digital marketing sphere. Email retargeting involves sending targeted emails to a specific group of people who have previously shown interest in your business.
This email campaign aims to reengage these people for various purposes, such as reminding them about items in their shopping cart or enticing them with special discounts and offers to bring them back to your website. Studies have shown that retargeting can increase conversion rates by 150%.
Now, you should have questions like:
- What is email retargeting?
- What are its benefits?
- How do you start sending retargeted emails?
- What are some tools that can help you with email retargeting?
In this blog post, we’ll answer all these questions to help you understand how to get started with email retargeting, along with some best practices and examples.
Table of Contents
What Is Email Retargeting?
Email retargeting (also called ‘email remarketing’ or ‘email-based retargeting’) is a way to contact people who have shown interest in your brand but haven’t completed the desired action. By using a personalized email campaign, you have another opportunity to turn this visitor into a potential customer and make a sale.
Email retargeting is initiated based on visitors’ actions on your website, typically monitored using browser cookies. Unlike ad retargeting, which allows you to retarget anonymous site visitors after they leave your site, email retargeting focuses on reaching out to individuals in your email subscriber lists and prospect list data.
Although email retargeting may reach a smaller audience, it boasts a high conversion rate, making it an effective method for re-engaging potential leads. Retargeting emails can also be used to cross-sell or upsell to existing customers.
Benefits Of Email Retargeting
Email retargeting lets marketers target specific audiences with precision. Marketers using the retargeting methods experience a 2x conversion rate with quicker conversion time. Let’s see how it can contribute to your pitch.
Better engagement
Let’s say a customer named Sarah visited your website a couple of months ago, bought a product or two, and never returned again. This customer’s information, such as age, gender, what they purchased, and what they looked for, can help you launch a retargeting campaign.
You can rekindle Sarah’s dormant enthusiasm for your business by highlighting your benefits and offers.
You can send emails that can initiate re-engagement with the subject lines, such as:
- Discount on your favorites (Wishlist items)
- New arrivals are just for you! ((Product recommendations)
- Last chance for x% off (Limited time offer)
Higher brand recognition
Many firms, both B2B and B2C, see web traffic as a key performance indicator in marketing. With more traffic to your website or landing pages, email retargeting can increase your brand recognition. Let’s look at a real-life scenario:
A house remodeling company targeted certain regions to increase business and interest from homeowners who wanted to renovate their homes. To implement this strategy, they sent an introductory email newsletter advertising the client’s home renovation services to 55,000 potential clients within the specified region. Then, they launched an email campaign targeting mobile device IDs and IP addresses. How did it turn out?
- There was an open rate of 13.83% and a click-through rate of 1.73%.
- The campaign achieved 97% of all impressions, increasing brand recognition and traffic from targeted consumers to the website.
More sales at low cost
More interest in your offering results from more traffic, which increases the likelihood that a customer will convert. This is why retargeted clients are more likely to increase your company’s bottom line. Hal Open Science says retargeted emails may help you raise your conversions by 10%.
Why does email retargeting produce such excellent results?
The simple reason is that you reach the right person with the right message at the right time. As you track customers’ actions and behavior, you can better understand their desires to send them relevant emails. This increases the open rates as well.
Less cart abandonment
Around 70% of customers leave their carts abandoned due to several reasons, like the following:
- They are not ready to make the purchase.
- They are comparing your prices with competitors.
- They find the price too high.
Whatever the cause, shopping cart abandonment results in $4 trillion in lost income each year. However, email retargeting allows savvy businesses to recoup some lost revenue. Retargeting emails sent within three hours of cart abandonment can offer up to 20% CTR and a 40% open rate.
Read also: Re-Engagement Emails 101: A Guide [With Templates]
Getting Started: Email Retargeting in 6 Steps
Are you prepared to begin working toward a decreased cart abandonment rate, more conversions, and increased revenue? Here are the steps you need to take.
Step 1. Gather customer Info
The cornerstone of effective email retargeting is the collection of detailed client data. The data you may need will include:
- Email addresses
- IP addresses
- Browser types
- Purchasing history
- Personal preferences
You may collect all this information from sources such as:
- Website analytics
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Email analytics
Pro tip: You can also build your email list with the following strategies:
- Email sign-up popups offering incentives like discounts
- Dedicated fields for email-sign up in the website footer
- Social media posts for signups
- Registration for offline or virtual events
Step 2. Create an audience segment
The next critical step is to divide your target demographic into specific subsets. That is, segmenting your email list so you’re not bothering customers with irrelevant spam mail. For example, some of your customers may be:
- Still waiting for their purchases to be delivered
- Haven’t made any purchases yet
- Have successfully finished a purchase before
- Waiting for confirmation
- Are interested only in specific products
You can segment your audience based on:
- The status of their cart
- Purchase history,
- Product browsing habits
- Demographic
- Geography
After all, no one wants to get an email and wonder, “Why are you sending this to me?”
Step 3. Create campaigns
After you’ve broken down your audience into smaller groups, you can send them personalized emails. Be meticulous about your email campaign planning and coming up with exceptional emails that have:
- Alluring headlines
- Relevant content
- Compelling calls to action (CTAs)
For example, if you’re sending an email to a set of people who haven’t finished their purchase, you can:
- Begin with a friendly reminder
- Offer some incentive to make a purchase
- End with an appeal to their sense of urgency and fear of missing out
Step 4. Email personalization
Personalization of content in your retargeting emails is crucial; always ensure they remain as relevant as possible for the reader. If you have a large selection of products, personalized retargeting emails may save customers a lot of time by narrowing down precisely what they need.
Attributes for personalization vary from the user’s location to the kind of products they’re looking for to the price ranges in which products are suggested.
Step 5. A/B test everything
How can you tell whether your content, images, subject lines, or offerings require improvement? This is where A/B testing comes in handy. You may test and optimize everything using A/B testing, including:
- Subject lines
- Offers
- The time of email delivery
All you have to do is design two separate campaigns targeting the same demographic and split people evenly between these two endeavors, ensuring visitors won’t get duplicate emails.
Using A/B testing, you can see which campaign is more successful and learn which approaches resonate more with your target demographic.
Read also: eCommerce Email A/B Testing Basics For Beginners
Email Retargeting Best Practices and Examples
Like any other marketing effort, email retargeting has its own set of tried-and-true methods for achieving the greatest results. Here are seven recommended practices and examples of retargeting emails to help you create the ideal campaigns.
Abandoned cart email
Casper Mattress follows up with a very catchy email if you leave anything in your shopping cart and leave the page without completing your purchase.
The title of the email, “Did you forget a certain thing?” in the subject line instantly demands your attention. The email’s fun, attention-grabbing subject line—”COME BACK TO BED”— entices the reader to read more.
What do they do right?
- It has a clean look and is easy on the eyes
- Catchy subject line
- Easily scrollable content
- Clear CTA to direct reader to checkout
- Includes testimonials to provide social proof
Browse abandonment email
People may look at the items you offer on your website, but they don’t add to the cart. Just as J.Crew Factory does, you may appeal to people’s vanity by sending them tailored emails with information on what they have just seen.
What do they do right?
- Creates a fear of missing out on the play on the words
- Visual cues, such as highlights on price to show the price is affordable
- Provides recommendations based on your browsing history
- It Piques the interest of the reader to know what will look good
Back-in-stock email
There’s nothing more aggravating than a product you want not being in stock. You may entice these disappointed buyers by telling them when the item is back in stock.
Check out Kylie Cosmetic’s “MINI FRIDGE IS BACK” announcement. The message played on recipients’ fear of missing out (FOMO) by urging them to purchase a product before it sold out again quickly.
What do they do right?
- Compelling design to go with the products
- Minimal yet powerful message
- Stress on urgency
- Clear CTA under the product
- Relevant product recommendation
Upsell email
Email retargeting can also help your business sell more to your existing customers and build loyalty. How? Take a look at the Adidas email titled “Complete Your Look.”
The business employs a simple upselling method by suggesting related items to the one the consumer recently purchased.
What do they do right?
- Thanks for the purchase and soft upsells
- Piques interest with missing letter headline
- It makes each product easy to click and purchase
Cross-sell email
Cross-selling emails are a great way to drive repeat business from existing customers. You can send it after a purchase, along with a cart abandonment email, in a regular email, or even as a welcome email series.
We love this Crate & Barrel order confirmation email that seizes cross-selling opportunity.
What do they do right?
- Clean, minimalistic design
- Prioritizing order confirmation
- Only four-item display, making it easy to choose
Replenishment email
Teapigs collects information from purchase histories and retargets customers based on what they may need again with a replenishment email. If your items have a limited shelf life, you may get repeat business by sending out emails reminding consumers to reorder.
What do they do right?
- The headline conveys the intent of the email
- The content uses questions to prompt readers to think if they need the product
- Clear CTAs under each product
- Contact information to promote relationship-building
Win-back email
A win-back campaign is a series of emails sent to former customers who have ceased responding to your marketing messages and purchasing your goods. Check out LastObject’s re-engagement-inducing email, highlighting some of their most recent content.
What do they do right?
- They address the issue right away
- The top content displays their brand value and does not promote sales
- They introduced a new and increasing product range to create excitement
Read also: The 14 Best Opt-in Email Strategies (with Examples)
Automation Tools For Email Retargeting
Now that you know what kind of retargeting emails work best, we’ll quickly review some of the top email marketing tools that can help you add retargeting to your marketing strategy.
EngageBay
EngageBay is an integrated suite of tools for promoting and selling products and assisting existing customers, designed with small companies in mind. Regarding account-based email marketing, EngageBay is one of the best tools available in the market.
Features
- Easy email personalization
- Enable email automation
- A/B testing for every email element
- Advanced reports and tracking of campaign performance
- Easy segmentation of audience to run hyper-targeted campaigns
- Trigger emails for drip campaigns, cart abandonment, birthday wishes, and more
- Use over 380 easy-to-customize email templates for a professional look
Pricing
EngageBay provides users with four different pricing tiers. The Free plan offers basic functionality to help new companies get off the ground. You can start scaling your company with the Pro plan’s enhanced automation, web traffic analytics, and account-based marketing for only $99 monthly.
Read also: The Top 13 EngageBay Alternatives of 2023 [With Pricing]
Omnisend
Omnisend is a user-friendly platform that can automate processes at every point in the customer lifecycle. Its omnichannel features allow you to reach your target audience more effectively, no matter where they may be.
Features
- Wide range of eCommerce email templates
- Customization based on segmentation of the audience
- Easy automation of workflow
Pricing
There are three different Omnisend price options available:
- a free version
- a paid configurable version
- a paid, unlimited version
Try the service risk-free with their no-obligation trial, and choose the package that best suits your needs.
Read also: 14 Omnisend Alternatives For Smart Email Marketing & More
MailModo
If you’re a marketer looking to develop app-like email experiences without coding, MailModo is the software for you. You may use it to make and send AMP-compatible emails with ease.
Features
- Drag-and-drop workflow builder for automation in time-based drip series
- Track responsiveness across devices and get suggestions for in-built open rates
- Add interactive features like reviews, polls, gamified widgets, etc.
Pricing
Three different Mailmodo price options are starting at $39 per month. Each plan has a monthly limit on contacts and emails sent. Mailmodo provides a free trial period of 21 days for anyone interested in trying it out before making a purchase.
Read also: 9 Best Email Marketing Software for eCommerce in 2023
Moosend
Moosend is a cost-effective email marketing automation platform that provides various capabilities. Use it to your advantage by automating repetitive tasks and sending targeted emails.
Features
- Drag and drop editor to create newsletters from scratch
- Create interactive content with videos
- Segment the audience with automation features and assign workflows for relevant sequences
- Reports on campaign performance and user engagement
Pricing
There are three levels of Moosend subscription. The free version offers unlimited campaigns but doesn’t offer automation or the creation of landing pages and forms. You get those capabilities; you need pro plans starting at $9 per month.
Read also: 13 Moosend Alternatives That Can Boost Your Marketing
Wrapping Up
Email retargeting is the most effective marketing approach since it allows businesses to deliver customers relevant content. By acquiring pertinent data about your subscribers, you may re-engage them with tailored communications encouraging action.
Create excellent retargeting emails using this article’s tips and techniques to increase sales and boost conversion rates.
FAQs
What is email retargeting?
Email retargeting is the process of sending emails to customers who have shown interest in but haven’t made a purchase of your goods or services.
What is an example of a retargeting email?
A good example of a retargeting email is a cart abandonment email or email to remind a customer who has left products in their cart without purchasing. Some other examples include upselling emails and cross-selling emails.
How effective is email retargeting?
While just 2% of consumers convert on their initial visit to your site, over 60% of shoppers claim that promotional emails impact their buying choices, demonstrating the clear benefits of email retargeting.
