6 steps to creating an email retargeting strategy
Do you want to interact with shoppers who have expressed an interest in your brand? Or are you aware that it is past time to follow up on those annoying abandoned carts?
Email retargeting is two words for you. It’s a strong tool for growing brands and has forever changed the way businesses engage with buyers and customers. While you may understand the fundamentals of email retargeting and how it works, getting started can be more difficult.
Fortunately, we’re here to assist with our step-by-step guide to developing a successful email retargeting plan — let’s get started!
A Reminder: What Is Email Retargeting?
Email retargeting is a marketing strategy in which you send triggered emails to customers depending on specific activities they do on your website, such as abandoning a cart or visiting specific product pages.
Unlike retargeting advertising, which allows you to reach anonymous site visitors, email retargeting is restricted to persons who are already on your email subscriber list.
Step 1: Determine Your Email Retargeting Objectives
Before you start messing around with fonts, colors, and layouts, you need to know exactly what your retargeting emails need to address.
Are you attempting to:
- How can you increase email opens and clicks?
- Increase existing customer engagement?
- Increase conversion rates on your website?
- Can you turn casual visitors into paying customers?
- Encourage new consumers to buy anything else?
What is the key to identifying your email retargeting objectives (which should now be as clear and measurable as possible)? Understanding how customers now interact with your site and other marketing initiatives and then turning these findings into a detailed map of your customer journey and touchpoints. With this in mind, you should attempt to develop a retargeting email plan that answers the demands of different shoppers at various stages of the funnel.
Step 2: Examine Your Target Market
You must be familiar with your target audience in order for any email retargeting campaign to be a smashing success. Enter your buyer personas, a thorough portrait of who they are, what they enjoy, and what they require – in other words, the ideal reference for crafting relevant and enticing retargeting email campaigns later on.
As you consider your various target audiences, keep the following questions in mind:
- What are the most appealing offers to them?
- What is the customer journey like for them? What additional marketing touchpoints have they encountered?
- How well do people know your brand?
Step 3: Develop a Segmentation Strategy
Building an email retargeting plan can be a difficult endeavor due to its flexibility – the sorts of retargeting emails you can send are nearly unlimited.
Fortunately, this is where segmentation comes in. You may quickly establish various email retargeting campaigns by segmenting your email list into groups depending on particular criteria. It’s the best approach to ensure that you’re sending suitable and relevant messaging — and establishing trust along the way! — rather than blasting a generic email and praying it gets to the correct individuals.
You could, for example, build a group of cart abandoners, with emails sent when a customer adds things to their basket but does not check out within an hour. You could also segment based on specifics and traits such as:
- Their current location.
- Whether they are a first-time or returning customer.
- Which product categories piqued their curiosity.
- The worth of their carts
- Their previous purchases.
When it comes to segmenting your audience, there are no right or wrong answers. However, keep in mind that it is critical to creating restrictions that exclude people who have signed up, purchased, or downloaded content in the appropriate manner. You don’t want to continue telling a consumer who has just clicked the “check out” button that their abandoned carts are still there.
Step 4: Establish Your Email Routine
As you decide on your email retargeting plan and start creating content, make sure to establish an email timetable that is appropriate for your business.
This is when things get a bit complicated. According to one study, emails sent within three hours following cart abandonment have a 40% open rate and a 20% click-through rate. Meanwhile, some experts advise firms to send retargeting emails within an hour of a consumer leaving their website.
Sorry to disappoint, but there is no magic number. Finally, depending on the type of retargeting emails being sent, each brand will have its own unique retargeting email schedule – once your email retargeting campaign is up and going, don’t be afraid to experiment with different times and frequencies for different audience segments.
Step 5: Examine Your Email Capture Methods
Given how effective retargeting emails are, it stands to reason that there is a limit to who they can reach. Because your recipients must be subscribers, one of the most critical aspects of any email retargeting strategy is optimizing your email collection processes.
Regardless of how useful an email capture form on your website is, it is not a surefire means for marketers to obtain user data. Consider the following:
- Including an email sign-up form in your website’s footer.
- Obtaining email addresses from event attendees (whether in-person or virtual).
- Social media is being used to urge followers to subscribe.
- Exit intent pop-ups are being launched.
All of your email capture messaging, including the headline, CTA, and offer, should be A/B tested.
Step 6: Create a Plan for Your Retargeting Emails
Now that you know your email retargeting campaign’s goals, target demographic, and segmentation, list your retargeting emails and map them into your marketing funnel. You’ll need to determine where each email will appear in the client journey and its triggers.
Consider the following sorts of retargeting emails:
- Encourage people who leave their carts empty to come back to your site and finish their purchases.
- Recent customers can be upsold or cross-sold.
- Existing consumers should be informed about your loyalty program.
- Re-engage clients who haven’t visited your website in a long time.
- Introduce new products to returning customers.
- Make a big deal out of an approaching sale or product launch.
Use this map as a guide when structuring the flow of your retargeting email campaigns in your email platform; this exercise will help you identify any content gaps.
Begin Your Email Retargeting Campaign
Retargeting email is an effective method for recovering abandoned carts, increasing click-through rates, and increasing purchases… When utilized in a well-planned strategy, that is. Fortunately, you’re all set with this guide!
