Want To Run A Retargeting Email Campaign? See How To Ace It

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Email retargeting creates marketing campaigns specific to your email subscriber lists. By segmenting your subscribers based on their behavior or demographic, you can personalize your campaigns with advertising to attract and, more importantly, convert subscribers into paying customers.

Learn how to optimize email retargeting.

Graphic with a target and text that reads "Email Retargeting Campaigns."

Retargeting is a practical form of marketing that is affordable, and it converts. According to Invesp, traditional display ads have only a 0.07% clickthrough rate, while display retargeting ads perform ten times better by having a 0.7% clickthrough rate. Invesp also found that if you retarget customers who have previously visited the website, they are 70% more likely to convert.

If done right, retargeting ensures a higher conversion rate of viewers to buyers and is a great way to re-engage customers who have already shown an interest in your brand. But retargeting can be annoying and frustrating if it’s not done well. You don’t want to make your visitors feel stalked or burned out if they see the same display ads everywhere.

Any brand with a good email marketing strategy can use retargeting to develop highly specific advertising that pops up to your subscribers as they browse the web.

How Does Email Retargeting Work?

  1. Export your list of email subscribers based on their activity (subscribers who opened, clicked, etc.) or some other criteria to segment your lists.
  2. Add your subscriber’s email lists to the social or ad network of choice.
  3. Your ad or social network will anonymously identify your subscribers using consumer databases and tag the users using cookies.
  4. Your subscribers will see ads relating to your brand as they browse content online.
Three steps to show how email retargeting works.

Apart from influencing a customer’s familiarity with your brand, retargeting is effective because it enables you to deliver highly personalized ads to segmented email lists. When using retargeting, you must stay aware and deliver relevant content, as subscribers who have already purchased from you will respond differently and require different advertising creatives than those subscribers who have never purchased.

If you run an online store, we recommend that you segment your email lists based on:

  1. Customer’s demographic by using data on your subscribers’ locations, age, gender, interests, etc.
  2. Their behavior – see who completed their purchases, if they repeat their purchases, or what category of product they are interested in. This will help you determine product recommendations.
  3. Their frequency or inactivity – see how often the customer has visited your site and the volume of inactive visitors or how long it has been since they last visited your online store.
  4. How engaged they are with your brand – see which customers converted and who opened the retargeted emails. Customers can be segmented according to having an abandoned cart, who made multiple purchases, and more such criteria.

For each of these audience segments, you need to create unique strategies and creative engagement methods. To ensure the efficiency of retargeting, you must segment your advertising wisely. You need to develop specific tactics to motivate each segment to return to your website and perform better conversion.

What Are Good Strategies for Email Retargeting?

  1. Be consistent: Be consistent with your creative email marketing, display advertising, and landing page content to stimulate your customer’s interest in your brand. If you’re targeting subscribers who have recently opened your emails, keep the same visual style and marketing strategy used in your retargeting email ads. Strategize your content to create a consistent sequence for active leads that start with the email, continue with display advertising, and end at your site.
  2. Target vertically: If you segment your subscriber’s email lists based on product verticals, create a creative retargeting strategy that targets visitors interested in a popular niche or vertical. Use display advertising that goes deeper into this vertical, with new products and more benefits or opportunities. Then drive visitors to a landing page dedicated to this segment.
  3. Create specific retargeting campaigns: Divide your subscriber lists based on any relevant demographic information you have about them for your product or service, such as age, interests, and location. Accordingly, focus on the retargeting content. Develop a customer profile for these subscribers and create emails and display ads that feed into their interests, behaviors, and life stages.
  4. Take advantage of scarcity and urgency: Incentivize website visitors with last-minute deals and time-limited offers. Many people subscribe to various newsletters because they want to be informed about the deals that are happening. Some are motivated by the fear of missing out on a deal. Hit them with an even better (but time-limited) opportunity.
  5. Segment and retarget visitors: What happens to the visitors who don’t open your email? Make them their segment. Upload this list into your ad network and create its unique retargeting campaign with its creative material. Use this segment to test new email retargeting strategies that, if proven successful, you can use for other segments.
  6. Hire an email marketing expert: MarketerHire bridges the gap between qualified freelancers offering digital services and the email retargeting needs of their clients. It uses a rigorous freelancer screening process to look for proven experts with passion and drive.
  7. Consider the user’s experience: You can sometimes forget to step back and think about how a user will experience your campaign. It is important to occasionally take a moment and make sure all the creative steps are in sync and are still the best practices. Also keep in mind that users respond well to a personalized email compared to a generic one.
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