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We have been discussing on solutions for boosting the online business and overall revenue through optimizing product pages and conversion rates. Also in our previous post, we understood the importance of converting visitors into buyers. All this is aimed at a single target of increasing the business revenue.
Today we will see how Remarketing has proven to be an effective tool in recovering abandoners to generate revenue.
Consider the scenario in a mall where you pick up stuffs and proceed towards the cash counter. Suddenly you decide you don’t want those stuffs any more and leave them. At this point the store clerk will not chase you and ask you to complete your purchase.
But this is possible in online business where you are contacted immediately in the hope of getting you back on the website to complete the transaction.
This is achieved simply by – ‘Sending An Email’. This in turn refers to Remarketing! A technique that has a direct impact on Return On Investment (ROI) as its serves as a solution to leverage your customer’s web experience in real-time.
This solution aims at sending timely, personalized, and service-oriented emails to lost buyers which works as a highly effective tactic for increasing conversion rates.
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing is a technique used to target and follow-up with visitors who get engaged to your website but leave before taking an action or completing the transaction. By showing them targeted ads, you can bring them back to your site and encourage them to make a purchase.
Remarketing also called Retargeting can be in the form of ‘Email Remarketing’ or ‘Adword Remarketing’. Today we’ll focus on implementing effective email remarketing strategies, different best practices, and overall impact based on statistics.
Email Remarketing – An Effective Tool!
Remarketing/retargeting statistics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of remarketing strategies. Email Remarketing is a highly effective tool that is widely used by online advertisers to recover lost sales and boost revenue. Remarketing can be a huge benefit to your advertising campaigns. And according to SeeWhy, email retargeting has proven to recover on average 20–25% of abandoned shopping carts. If you are not yet sure of what it can do, all you have to do is look at the numbers below.
Here are some remarkable statistics that showcase the effectiveness of using emails as a remarketing strategy for your business:
- According to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.99%.
- According to Internet Retailer, 66% of cart conversion comes through email
- According to Moosend, 45% of remarketing emails sent are opened; 21% of all are clicked on, while 50% of the users who clicked made a purchase.
- According to Barilliance, remarketing email accounted for 19.8% of all transactions – trailing only paid search (19.9%) and organic traffic (21.8%).
How Effective is Remarketing?
According to Forrester Research, remarketing emails can generate nearly four times more revenue and 18 times greater net profits.
This shows focusing on personalized emails and behavioral-based campaigns, email remarketing can boost conversion rates.
A report from SeeWhy shows the conversion rate of the top 10 converting websites is as high as 41%. The investigation on the performance of converting 4 out of every 10 web visitors of these companies showed that it could be achieved due to the below 4 main reasons:
- Excellent Customer Service
- Offering a Wide Range of Products
- Focus on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Email Remarketing
Important Remarketing Tips:
Below are important remarketing tips you should follow before starting a campaign:
1. Set clear objectives
Always be sure of your key objectives before diving into remarketing as this will help you manage your client’s expectations. This ensures everyone in the organization is on the same platform.
Educate the clients that remarketing will help to reinforce their brand to users who have already visited their site and have shown interest. It will greatly influence conversions but is less likely to deliver large levels of traffic in the same way PPC ads might do.
2. Plan your remarketing strategy
Planning an effective strategy is key to the success of your campaign. Therefore make sure you spend sufficient time in deciding and listing what you want to build.
Whether remarketing will work for your business or not, will all depend on this list that you have created and how well you utilize it. Therefore proceed with utmost efficiency.
Example – Kansas State University had it’s marketing plan made that included SWOT Analysis (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats), Goals, Target Audiences, Key Messages, Strategies & Tactics and Budget.
3. Update your Privacy Policy
Before you start coding and building your remarketing strategy, it is a good practice to update your Privacy Policy. This ensures no discrepancy in using certain initiatives, example DoubleClick cookie.
It also allows users to opt out of advertising by using DoubleClick opt-out page or the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.’
What Should eCommerce Remarketing Email Aim At?
eCommerce remarketing emails should aim at re-engaging customers who have previously shown interest in a product or service but did not complete a purchase. The goal should be to remind them of the product or service and encourage them to return to the website to complete the purchase. Here are a few points to consider:
- Direct Linking: A direct link should be created that goes back to the shopping cart and it should be the only call-to-action button in your email.
- Creating a Sense of Urgency: Creating a sense of urgency should be the highlight in your email copy. Nothing is worse than the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
- Making an Offer: You should always lay down your final and best offer in your email. Also highlighting your on-going promo can do wonders. Offers could be like free shipping when customers spend ‘x’ amount or offer a flat ‘x’ % of discount etc.
- Embedding Catchy Subject Line: Your email remarketing campaign can be successful only if your visitors are persuaded to read it. This could be done by embedding a catchy subject line which makes a good first impression on the readers. So always uncover the highest performing words in your subject lines.
What Are The Best Practices of eCommerce Remarketing?
Now we move on to showcasing the best practices in your remarketing endeavor which can bring in significantly improved results.
Below are the 13 Best Practices for your Email remarketing Campaign:
1. A/B Testing Your Remarketing Email
A/B Testing also called as Split Testing helps to compare two versions of a web page and determines which one yields better performance. Similarly, this testing can be used to find out the version of email remarketing that has a higher conversion rate when it is sent to the same prospect at the same time.
Example – A European real estate agency named Spicerhaart, underwent A/B Testing for the subject line. There were two different subject lines to determine which format would get a higher open rate.
Version A: Mill View | Join us for our pre-launch weekend to find out more about these exciting new homes
Version B: Mill View | Pre-launch weekend | Quality homes affordably priced
The result showed version B was more effective as it increased the open rate by nearly 74%, and Spicerhaart was able to reach 97.5% of its list using the optimized subject line. This was because version B was simple and easily understandable as it was a little bit shorter and broken into three distinct parts than version A.
You can check out many more examples of A/B testing on Behave. There are more than 150 ideas or variations for A/B Email Split Tests to try out.
2. Re-market in Real-Time
The practice of remarketing in real-time is pivotal. SeeWhy performed research where two sets of cart abandoners were sent emails, one was sent immediately and the other was sent after 24 hours. The result showed that 30% more shopping carts were recovered by real-time email.
Thus it’s proved timing your email-sending process would turn out to be fruitful. There are different plugins to serve the purpose as well, out of which the Abandoned Cart – Lite version is free and helps in boosting conversion rate.
3. Make Your Remarketing ‘Mobile Friendly’
The trend of using mobile phones in today’s era is on the top and to grow stronger, the only way is to make your emails easy to read for mobile users. This will lead to successful remarketing as more people access the internet via mobile than on laptops or desktops.
InMobi has launched a new remarketing platform that features Ad experience and Targeting tools for better user experience and ROI.
4. Segment based on needs and interest
Segmentation involves dividing your customer base into different groups based on their behavior or attributes. This allows you to target specific groups with messaging that is tailored to their needs and interests.
For example, you can segment your customers based on their purchase history or their level of engagement with your brand. This can help you create more effective remarketing campaigns that are more likely to result in conversions.
5. Give Targeted Special Offers
This practice is the most effective as offering special discounts or coupons to customers who have shown interest but did not make it through the checkout process, would persuade them to get converted.
Giving special deals at the time of cart abandonment to your top leads is the most successful move to get customers back.
Example – The way Booking.com does this is excellent. When you make a search on the site for hotels and leave without booking one of them, they start sending you ads with special offers with ‘Best Price Guaranteed‘ tag.
The ad keeps popping up with all the hotels that were searched by you earlier and highlight the price with the amount you would save upon booking it. The below image clearly showcases this:
Once you book the hotel, the ad for that hotel would vanish and new offers would keeping appearing. This is a clever tactic and has been most effective in remarketing.
6. Set Up Educational Email Courses
This implies providing 5 to 10 email courses that explains your product’s benefits to your prospects that educates them, making them aware of the product’s efficiency over that of the competitors.
Customers who already have your products would sign up for email courses to help them resolve any issues occurring from it. Whereas those who have not purchased the product may sign up to learn more about it.
7. Avoid Sending The Same Emails Back-to-Back
You should be aware of not to repeatedly send the same email to the customers as they would later ignore these emails and put them in spam folder. If same people are targeted with same emails within a couple of days, they tend to lose interest in you.
Therefore sending unique emails would increase your chances of gaining interest as well as good response from prospects.
8. Capture Email Addresses Early
This is the most important activity where you should capture email addresses before visitors initiate an order. Email sign up is an essential part of this and offering incentives is a great tactic to ensure visitors provide their email addresses at the time of signing up.
This will help you to target the lost buyers by sending remarketing emails.
9. Make Your Call To Action (CTA) Prominent
When you target remarketing emails, always highlight the call-to-action or the link which visitors have to click on to get to the checkout page. Never provide a link to the homepage.
This type of prominence in the email will make it easy and clear for visitors to head towards completing the transaction.
Example – The below image depicts an email sent to the visitor who had left behind a chain with pendant in the cart. This remarketing email clearly makes the CTA button stand out with an extra persuading copy ‘Grab It Now’ as shown below:
10. Get Your Copy Spot on
It is undoubtedly the most important aspect of email remarketing as the email content is the only thing that drives abandoners back to the website to complete the process.
Therefore the tone should be more personalised, engaging and helpful which would persuade the visitors to move ahead in the direction of transaction.
11. Tempt Visitors With Related Items
It could be that sometimes visitors save items to the cart and then are unwilling to purchase them because they no more need them. In this scenario if your remarketing email has images of related items displayed, it will tempt the visitor back to the website.
Displaying the most popular items related to the ones the visitors had selected would definitely delve visitors into the purchase process.
12. Remind Them of What They Have Left Behind
This email should serve as a reminder to the visitors where they are informed about what they have left in the cart. An image of the products which were added to the basket should be displayed in the email as people tend to respond better to images than text.
Provide all the relevant details like price, colour, size etc that they selected which would provide ease in remembering what items were left behind.
Example – ModCloth company has set a very good example with respect to email remarketing. The below image is an ideal email sent to the visitor for reminding her about the item that was left behind by her in the cart.
13. Include Customer Reviews
Provide your visitors with social validations in the email while remarketing it. This creates a strong impact on online purchasing decision.
The customer reviews displayed on the product pages should be sorted and the most favorable ones should be made the part of remarketing email.
Conclusion
We have discussed how bringing the lost buyers back to the website can be a key to increasing sales. Cart abandonment is actually a great signal of willingness to engage, so by sending remarketing emails to abandoners using the above mentioned eCommerce remarketing best practices would lead to more conversions and ultimately boost the overall business revenue.
