Email remarketing

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Email remarketing comprises the email systems used by merchants to follow up with website visitors who do not make a desired purchase action. [1] It is a development of email marketing that aims to re-attract website viewers or customers. In other words, the whole idea of email remarketing is attracting customers or users back for purchase, growing repeated customers. [2]

Contents

Types of email remarketing

Email remarketing can be done through various kinds of emails, such as:

Browse abandonment emails

Browse abandonment emails reconnect merchants with website visitors who quit the site without purchase action, giving chances to turn window shoppers into actual buyers. Browse abandonment is on the upper side of the purchase funnel, [3] and the next abandonment which stop customers accessing to check-out is cart abandonment. Instead of contacting everyone, marketers are more likely to send email to the people who have shown obvious interest on the products. For example, they are the ones who browse key pages of the website or who begin a process such as registering an account or downloading a white paper but then stop the action, without purchase any products or services. [4]

Usually, browse abandonment emails are edited based on the receivers' browse and search history. In this case, the emails would be personalized, more targeted on individuals, compared to marketing emails. Browse recovery emails could make approximately 36.63% revenue and rise 2.79% sales effectively. [5]

Cart abandonment emails

As mentioned, cart abandonment is the second prevention. Cart abandonment emails are worked as a reminder of what items the receivers have abandoned. [6] They are sent to customers who have added products to their shopping cart but failed to check-out. In order to prevent shopping cart abandonment, marketers would send remarketing email to customers. [7]

Some people are worried that sending cart abandonment emails will annoy people, and while that make be the case, research shows that 69% of people found the 'reminders' to be helpful in some way. [8]

Traditional cart abandonment emails require the advertiser to have contact information already in place to send the email. This requires that website visitors that abandon their carts must have previously subscribed, purchased, or otherwise provided their contact information. Newer technologies allow marketers to first identify anonymous website visitors using a cookie-based identification system, [9] and then to follow-up with those visitors directly via email to convert them.

Retargeting anonymous website bounces

When individuals visit a website without converting there are tools available to identify anonymous website visitors, match them with their email address and follow-up directly to convert. Similar to cart abandonment, this type of email remarketing is done prior to the cart - with follow-up sent even if the visitor hasn't provided their contact information.

Post-purchase emails

After completing orders, merchants would send a review emails to consumers. Some of those emails are telling them what they have bought before, some are post-purchase survey, etc. Before consumers make purchase decisions, they are heavily rely on the customer reviews about the products. Here is an example. Sephora, a leading beauty retailer, thanks the customer for their recent purchase while simultaneously asking them to review their new products. Within the email they also give the shopper an additional reason to engage by promoting other content resources including Sephora TV and beauty news. This review campaign appears to be extremely successful. In addition, in the first quarter of 2015, the read rate for these campaigns was 58% higher than their average read rate and the deleted unread percentage was 44% lower. [10] To sum up, post-purchase emails could not only help the companies to strength the brand identity, re-engage the existed customers, but also help attract new customers with advertisements and promotion.

Order follow ups, rewards or loyalty programs, inactive customer follow ups, and so forth...

Comparison to email marketing

Email marketing is more similar to newsletter which is broad and impersonal, like sending a direct email to existing customers or potential customers. On this stage, marketers may have little information about the receivers. The purpose of Marketing email is solely to deliver promotional messages. Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages.

On the other hand, remarking emails should be much more personalized. As vendors probably have collected information about the customers on the first stage that the customers exposed, they are taking the information they already have and using them to send relevant emails. For instance, when a customer bought an item at his first visit, vendors would probably ask him to complete a form about his contact information. Afterwards, marketers would use those contact details to do their remarking campaigns. "Remarketing is so powerful because it allows marketers the opportunity to continue the conversation, that otherwise may have only been a 30-second decision on the part of the consumer," said Jason Hobbs, founder and president of digital marketing company The Found Group. [11] Furthermore, Forrester Research found that remarketing emails can generate nearly four times more revenue and 18 times greater net profits compared with marketing using simply untargeted mailings. [12]

Email marketing gives vendors a chance to promote their products at the beginning, but email remarking allows the company to continue the business but targeted at less customers. In conclusion, email marketing covers wider area of customer group, while email remarking methods are more targeted and effective.

How email remarketing works

Benefits

The principle of advertisement [13] is basically to give a persuasive argument for a product then put it in front of the public. With the development of technology, it makes advertising much easier. The word 'easier' means convenience and lower cost. [14] In the past time, marketers usually printed the promotion messages into brochures then delivered them to thousands of mailboxes. Nowadays, marketers just design and edit the content into emails, then send those emails to countless email addresses in one second automatically. With no shipping fees, delay, and printing cost, companies definitely have decreased much of their advertising costs in the present decade. Lower cost leads to higher revenue sometimes. Moreover, the data displayed above proves that email remarketing are bringing vendors brand loyalty, financial return, and so on.

How it works

By definition of 'remarketing', it restricts the volume of customer group that the marketers could reach. However, instead of direct emails, email remarketing are reaching the customers whose purchase intent is highest. The remarketing email receivers are existed customers and potential customers who have shown attention and obvious interests on the products and services. In this case, a persuasive argument on the items could easily drive them to buy. When to send the remarketing emails is a substantial problem. Experian Marketing Services found that emails sent closer to the abandonment is more likely to make lifts in revenue. Generally, it can be as early as 30 minutes to 1 day. For the promotion and reactivation emails and the other emails, they are suggested to be sent at 2 p.m. on every Tuesday and Thursday. [15]

What to send should be given careful consideration as well. For cart abandonment emails, the items left in the shopping cart should be shown in the email directly, as it leads to highest rate of transactions. The continue bottom to check-out should be shown in the obvious position in the emails, as well as the option for the transaction tools, such as 'via PayPal' or 'Paid by MasterCard'. For the Thank You for Purchase email, it works better if it includes a discount information for the next purchase.

Frequency is the key. Experian Marketing Services recommends that cart abandonment emails should be sent at least twice after the first attempt, because the survey shows 54% lift in revenues when the second reminder email sent.

Further reading

Related Research Articles

Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies use data analysis and digital technology to show adverts to individuals based on their perceived characteristics and interests. Marketers use methods from data collection, analytics, digital electronics, and digital economics then use technology to analyze it and show personalized ads based on algorithms that attempt to deduce people’s interests.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Direct marketing</span> Model of communicating discounts and other sales offers

Direct marketing is a form of communicating an offer, where organizations communicate directly to a pre-selected customer and supply a method for a direct response. Among practitioners, it is also known as direct response marketing. In contrast to direct marketing, advertising is more of a mass-message nature.

Marketing communications refers to the use of different marketing channels and tools in combination. Marketing communication channels focus on how businesses communicate a message to their desired market, or the market in general. It is also in charge of the internal communications of the organization. Marketing communication tools include advertising, personal selling, direct marketing, sponsorship, communication, public relations, social media, customer journey and promotion.

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Online shopping</span> Form of electronic commerce

Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2020, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.

Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.

In online marketing, a landing page, sometimes known as a "lead capture page", "single property page", "static page", "squeeze page" or a "destination page", is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. Landing pages are used for lead generation. The actions that a visitor takes on a landing page are what determine an advertiser's conversion rate. A landing page may be part of a microsite or a single page within an organization's main web site.

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel online marketing technique focused at reaching a specific audience on their smartphones, feature phones, tablets, or any other related devices through websites, e-mail, SMS and MMS, social media, or mobile applications. Mobile marketing can provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes goods, services, appointment reminders and ideas. In a more theoretical manner, academic Andreas Kaplan defines mobile marketing as "any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Advertising media selection</span>

Advertising media selection is the process of choosing the most efficient media for an advertising campaign. To evaluate media efficiency, planners consider a range of factors including: the required coverage and number of exposures in a target audience; the relative cost of the media advertising and the media environment. Media planning may also involve buying media space. Media planners require an intricate understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the main media options. The media industry is dynamic - new advertising media options are constantly emerging. Digital and social media are changing the way that consumers use media and are also influencing how consumers acquire product information.

Webtrends is a private company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, United States. It provides digital analytics, optimization and software related to digital marketing and e-commerce. It provides services to approximately 2,000 companies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital marketing</span> Marketing of products or services using digital technologies or digital tools

Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Targeted advertising</span> Form of advertising

Targetedadvertising or data-driven marketing is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.

Behavioral retargeting is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is targeted to consumers based on their previous internet behaviour. Retargeting tags online users by including a pixel within the target webpage or email, which sets a cookie in the user's browser. Once the cookie is set, the advertiser is able to show ads to that user elsewhere on the internet via an ad exchange.

Demand generation is the focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company's products and/or services. Commonly used in business-to-business, business-to-government, or longer business-to-consumer sales cycles, demand generation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really the marriage of marketing programs coupled with a structured sales process.

Site retargeting is a display advertising technique used by marketers to display advertising to people who have previously visited their website. The marketer includes a pixel within their webpage which sets a cookie in the user's browser. That cookie allows the marketer to target the website visitor with advertising elsewhere on the internet using retargeting.

In electronic commerce, conversion marketing is marketing with the intention of increasing conversions—that is, site visitors who are paying customers.

In marketing, abandonment rate is a term associated with the use of virtual shopping carts. Also known as "shopping cart abandonment". Although shoppers in brick and mortar stores rarely abandon their carts, abandonment of virtual shopping carts is quite common. Marketers can count how many of the shopping carts used in a specified period result in completed sales versus how many are abandoned. The abandonment rate is the ratio of the number of abandoned shopping carts to the number of initiated transactions or to the number of completed transactions.

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations automate repetitive tasks and consolidate multi-channel interactions, tracking and web analytics, lead scoring, campaign management and reporting into one system. It often integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platform (CDP) software.

Email retargeting can refer to either:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SaleCycle</span> Behavioural marketing company, does software engineering

SaleCycle is a UK based global Behavioural Marketing firm. It works with online companies to reconnect with customers they've lost online, providing On-Site Remarketing and Email Remarketing solutions or application forms with dynamic and personalized messages in real-time. SaleCycle also offers segmentation and customization of online shopping experiences for consumers. Key features of its services include real-time reporting and IT service management.

References

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