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Even though the majority of the world is stuck at home, people are still spending their money.
eCommerce sales are up by 37% with email remaining the best way to connect with customers and generate revenue.
While that’s all fine and dandy, the truth is your customers are still easily distracted from your marketing messages meaning the effectiveness of your campaigns may have dwindled.
But you don’t have to take that lying down.
Using a handy little tactic called Email Retargeting, you can bring those distracted people back to your store with cash in hand.
Let’s talk a bit about that and how you can use it to boost the ROI from your eCommerce email marketing efforts.
What Is Email Retargeting and How Does It Work?
Email retargeting is a rather common practice of generating revenue by using your customer’s behavior and interest to then personalize your follow up messaging to be more tailored to each individual person.
The best part about email targeting is that you can target current and active subscribers with emails based on their interests or target website visitors with retargeting ads on social channels with the aim of turning them into customers.
At Sendlane, we make tracking browser behavior and effective retargeting easy.
Our built-in tracking pixel Beacon lets you track all your user’s website activity and then use that data for email and cross-channel retargeting. And our Deep Data Shopify integration marries perfectly with it to utilize marketing automations to make retargeting campaigns highly personalized and effective.
To really get the most out of email retargeting, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. There are a few common practices that you can start incorporating into your email marketing.
3 Best Practices for eCommerce Email Retargeting
1. Segment & Upsell Based On Past Purchases
Segmenting your list simply means finding people in your audience that have certain things in common and then grouping them together so you can talk to them about the thing they have in common.
There are plenty of reasons you’d want to segment your list:
- You can easily personalize the experience your customer has with your brand
- Personalized content increases open-rate which has a positive impact in your deliverability and email marketing overall
- It gives you a chance to retarget customers to upsell or cross-sell other products
Did you catch that last one? It’s rather powerful.
You are 60%-70% more likely to sell to a current customer rather than a brand new one.
When you segment your list based on the products or product categories your customer has purchased, you can retarget them with both campaigns designed to upsell or cross-sell a product relevant to their interests.
Since you’ve personalized this email to them, it makes it even more likely for them to purchase from you.
Curious if there’s a difference between cross-selling and upselling? Technically, yeah, there is but it’s slight.
Here’s an example to help you picture how your customer would experience this. Let’s say you're the home furnishing company, Wayfair and someone purchases a specific table from you.
They spend the money, you ship them the table, and all is well in the world. But…
If you segmented them by this product purchase, you could then have this purchase trigger a retargeting email later that would upsell a product directly related to this table.
Like, these matching counter stools for instance.
Or you could have the email cross-sell a product that didn’t upgrade their current product but instead offered them a different product that complimented the table.
Maybe a dining set, a rug, a shelf... you get the idea.
From a very high level, you can see how retargeting with upsells/cross-sells would work to earn you more money. And on your end, you would be bracketing off a growing group of people into a segment that you could send very specific messaging.
Something like, “How to care for wood furniture” would be a much more personalized topic of interest to someone who bought this table and they’re likely to open and read it.
See the power here?
It’s a rinse and repeat method that, with the right tools, can be automated and doing the heavy selling for you.
With Sendlane, you can use Beacon to set up Event Tracking to make this sort of flow we just covered a reality. What this does is make note of the products that your customers purchase so that you can then segment them and upsell as you with.
Hooray for you!
//[inject:ad-ebook-segmentation]
2. Target Based on Website Browsing Behavior
Tracking browser behavior is exactly what it sounds like. Using a retargeting pixel like Beacon and then placing it on your website lets you track the pages that someone visits and it holds on to that data for you.
More than that, certain actions made by both a logged-in subscriber and someone who is just browsing your website can trigger retargeting messaging.
For email subscribers, certain behaviors can trigger automated retargeting emails.
One example of those would be abandoned cart emails (which I’ll touch on in a bit), but that’s not the one.
You could trigger retargeting emails based on products or the category someone has merely peeked on on your website.
Say, for instance, let’s say you have been looking at a website after website trying to figure out a Mother’s Day gift but you didn’t purchase anything.
However, later that day you get an email that looks something like this.
This email places products from pages you visited into the emails and calls out “hey, we noticed you were here but didn’t buy anything. Need some help?”
This is a perfect example of a retargeting email based on browser behavior.
Better yet, you can automate these emails. Using Beacon to set up a conversion rule and tracking events on your website, you can then trigger an automated funnel that sends these emails for you.
You can learn how to do this step-by-step right here.
Now, you may be wondering...
Is email the only way you can retarget email subscribers?
Nope, there are other ways.
But you’ve got to read to the end to find out more(*wink, wink*).
3. Recover Lost Sales With Abandoned Cart Emails
The most common type of retargeting email is abandoned cart emails.
These are emails tailored to current email subscribers in an attempt to recapture their attention and drive sales to items they left in their cart.
While you may get a bit downhearted by your abandoned cart rate, you’ll be happy to know that nearly 50% of all automated abandoned cart emails are opened so this funnel/retargeting campaign is invaluable for online stores like yours.
Since this is an automated marketing funnel, you can build it out in the backend of Sendlane and then set and forget it while it runs in the background automatically.
And if you’re using Shopify for your online store, you can use our dynamic Shopify pre-built automation funnel called Recover Abandoned Carts.
If you want a bit of help with the technical side of configuring this funnel, you can check out this help doc here that will walk you through all you need to know.
BONUS! Retarget Email Subscribers Through Ads
That’s right! We’ve got a bonus tip for you.
Earlier, I mentioned that email isn’t the only way to retarget your customers.
When email retargeting is the topic of our blog, in general, cross-channel retargeting via social ads is a very common practice that generates a decent ROI.
There are a few ways that you can do this, but with Sendlane, we’ve created a simple, pre-built automation to help you retarget your customers with Facebook ads.
This automation is triggered by an abandoned cart, but instead of only getting emails reminding them they forgot something, it also will automatically create a custom Facebook audience for this customer and trigger your retargeting ads to them on that social platform.
The end result could look something like this.
After they’ve converted, they’re automatically removed so that ads don’t keep showing to them.
Cross-channel retargeting has continued to be a proven marketing strategy that many, even us here at Sendlane use to help grow our business.
//[inject:ad-demo]
Email Retargeting: An Effective Marketing Approach For eCommerce Brands
If you do the math between your website traffic and your sales, you’re sure to learn one inevitable truth:
Traffic doesn’t equal revenue.
We have to really work to turn that traffic into a sale, and you have to do it again and again.
Marketing automation and email retargeting can help you do a lot of the heavy lifting in this area.
If you haven’t tried the tips above, why not start implementing them for your online store? And if you ever need help (or a new email marketing tool) we’re always here to help you go from good to great!
