A lot goes into designing marketing campaigns attracting customers to your e-commerce or physical retail store. There’s the investment made in upgrading your website, placing targeted ads, and featuring products and promos relevant to your online shoppers. One important aspect you may not be focusing on as much is email remarketing. Some may remember email retargeting best practices from the last digital marketing webinar you watched. But what is the best way retailers can use product email retargeting to sell furniture?
Regular email marketing can be one of the most effective ways of getting traffic to your website. Remarketing emails refine your focus towards customers who’ve visited your site and made a purchase, started to do so and changed their mind, or signed up for one of your email lists. What can you do to turn them from one-time visitors to regular customers?
It’s an exciting feeling when your marketing campaign efforts result in traffic or conversions. The key to continued success is following up after a customer makes initial contact and getting them to come back.
What is Email Remarketing?
Email remarketing. It’s also commonly known as behavioral targeting. Your goal as a business is always selling more product, whether it’s furniture or other home goods. In order to successfully meet your goals, you need to find shoppers who are most willing to purchase your product. Conversion rates, the rate at which you can meet your goal, are higher when you’re selling to someone that knows your brand and a little about your products. Remarketing or email retargeting takes the concept of a warm sell and applies it to your marketing strategy. If someone visits your website but doesn’t become a customer, you want to find ways to keep that person engaged so they’ll come back to complete the purchase. That’s remarketing in a nutshell.
At some point, a customer visited your website or store and took action. The information you collect from that interaction can help inform the content of remarketing emails designed by your campaign.
Email Remarketing Types
- Appeals to customers who abandoned products in their online shopping cart
- Follow-ups on orders placed in your store or online
- Specials for those who signed up for rewards programs or special coupons
- Reminders to customers who haven’t visited you in a while
An example would be sending an email to a customer who added a dining table to their cart but never completed the purchase. Or letting another one who bought a living room sofa that you’ve got new end tables in that would pair nicely with their purchase. These emails can be a powerful weapon when leveraged effectively in your digital campaigns.
How Email Remarketing Differs From Standard Email Marketing
Regular email campaigns go out to a more general audience. They can come off as less personal because you don’t yet have enough information about the individual to send information specific to their interests. You’re working with the information at your disposal.
With email remarketing, you’ve got a better repository of information giving you a better idea of what customers were interested in the last time they visited you. You’ve got their name if they signed up to receive other promotions and more guidance on where to group them when it comes to building out audiences for your remarketing efforts.
5 Steps To Effective Email Remarketing
Following these steps when crafting your remarketing emails helps you implement an effective strategy with discernable results. The last thing you want to do is waste time on poorly constructed communications that end up turning off your target.
1. Capture Customer Data
Gathering customer data should be one of the main components of any marketing strategy you have in place. How many of these tactics do you currently employ for collecting information from users browsing your e-commerce website?
- Analytic tools to collect visitor demographic information
- Pop-ups asking visitors to sign up for rewards programs or a newsletter
- Prompts for shoppers to leave reviews with their email address after a purchase
- Encouraging visitors to share their shopping experience on social media using a hashtag
Each of these strategies gives you a way to gain further insight into your visitors. You should also use this information as a baseline when you’re ready to set goals outlining what you hope to achieve through remarketing.
2. Segment Your Audiences
The data you gathered on your customers should be broken down based on things like gender, age, the types of products they were interested in, and how they arrived at your site. Look for trends like what age range of visitors came in through your social media channels versus coming into your store and signing up for a special rewards card.
It helps to have good CRM software in place for collection and segmentation of your data. Having a tool like this in place gives you a centralized data store allowing you to refine audience information after gaining further details about audience groups. Having this in place prevents you from continually targeting the same people too often in your efforts. You maintain control over the frequency of contacts directed towards them.
3. Lay Out Your Remarketing Goals
What is it you’re trying to improve on through your remarketing efforts? Having clear objectives in mind before you start typing out your first template gives you a better chance of achieving them. Why would you not want to make sure the effort put into data collection and audience segmenting used in a way giving you the biggest benefit in the end?
Here are some ideas on what you might want to achieve through your remarketing emails.
- Improving the abandonment rate of items left in shopping carts
- Getting the attention of visitors before they leave your website without acting
- Encouraging a return visit from past customers who haven’t come back to your site recently
It’s much easier to start crafting your email templates once you have a good understanding of what you hope to accomplish in the end.
4. Create Emails With Targeted Calls to Action
Your appeals will vary depending on many different factors. Use your audience information to come up with personalized subject lines and content. Remarketing emails present an excellent opportunity to include some targeted ads relating to their interests. It would be best if you made sure each email contains nothing more than what that reader wants to see.
End your email by encouraging them to take action. Try leaving links within the email body encouraging them to click and return to your website. Lead them to coupons needing to be used by a deadline. You can also lead them back to products left behind in a shopping cart.
5. Review Your Results
The theme you’ll see running through all these steps is using your data wisely. Look at which emails did the best job of attracting people back to your physical store and website. What messages seemed to get the lowest responses? Were they too aggressive? Not personal enough? Did you inadvertently include information immediately rejected by your target?
Create reports for examination and better tailoring of your remarketing emails. Build on what brings you success and gives you provable ROI on your investment in this strategy.
Make Sure You’re Doing Email Remarketing the Right Way
It can be challenging to come up with clear ideas on the results you’re looking to drive through remarketing. That’s where it can help to have professionals like MicroD come in and assist with your efforts. We can show you how to employ the right tools and use data to achieve your goals of bringing customers back again and again. With the quickly growing need for personalization and behavioral targeting, your website needs the best tools to convert a shopper. Contact today at (800) 964-3876 for a free consultation.