Imagine that you walk into a retail clothing store, try on a few apparels and finally decide to buy them. But then, as you walk towards the cash counter you start to have second thoughts about making that purchase. So you ditch your cart at the store and leave without buying anything.

Afterwards, you go to a coffee shop and you find the salesperson from that clothing store along with the clothes you ditched with a 15% off tag attached to it. 

And much later, you find the same person again when you visit the library enticing you to buy the same items by offering an even better deal.

At last when you reach home, shockingly you find him there too.

The picture looks creepy offline, but you are surely going to have a hard time trying to forget that salesperson or that brand.

This is called retargeting in the digital marketing domain and that creepy salesperson who followed you around can be display ads, search ads or it can be an email waiting in your inbox when you get home.

According to the statistics published by Adroll, only 2% of the shoppers convert on their first visit to an online store. And, the best way to bring back that 98 % strayed sheep flocking back to your product is through retargeting.

Display advertising and email campaigns are two widely used tools employed by marketers with retargeting objectives.  

Remarketing is another word which resembles retargeting and both are often used interchangeably. In fact, remarketing and retargeting serve the same purpose of bringing the users who have already expressed interest in your product or service back to your website. But there is a subtle difference in strategy.

Retargeting usually pertains to display ads whereas re-marketing refers to retargeting via email campaigns.

For the ease of comprehension, let us stick to ‘retargeting’ as we explore this marketing strategy in the context of display Ads and email campaigns.

But before we move on, you should know that both display ads and emails work best when you have skilled people working behind them. Our team of digital marketers specialise in making every ad profitable for our clients. Talk to us here. We’d love to help you out.

Site Retargeting with Display Ads

Strategic display Ad campaigns with retargeting goals are employed to re-engage the customers who have interacted with your website in some manner. This interaction triggers the retargeting ad causing a snippet of javascript code called a pixel placed on your website’s footer, to drop a cookie into the shopper’s browser. The browser cookie is then used to determine when to serve the re-targeting Ads to that visitor.

Once the user has left your site after taking some kind of action but without making a purchase, these display ads can be used to follow them around while they browse their favourite website and direct them back to your page following an Ad click.

Banner and display ads are often visually bypassed by the user while surfing online. Conversely, Ads created with retargeting goals are highly personalised and relevant to the visitor. This accounts for the higher click-through rate of 0.7% for retargeted ads as compared to 0.07% for standard display ads.

Retargeting email campaigns

Email is the most direct approach for reaching and interacting with your prospective customers. Shopping cart abandonment, upsell or cross-sell campaigns are the commonly used retargeting email campaigns.

Shoppers may abandon their cart before completing the purchase due to any of the following reasons:

• • The items are priced too high
  • Excessive shipping charges
  • The shopper wants to compare rates on other sites
  • The shopper wants to explore other options
  • There are no offers or discounts

Looking at the list above you might have got an idea about what should be included in your email campaign to make the shopper come back to his cart and complete the purchase.

Email campaigns with retargeting objectives are not like the spray and pray emails you send in bulk to people in your mail list. They are a gentle personalized reminder to nudge the visitor into converting.

Which one should you use?

Retargeting Ads are preferred when the marketer intends to tempt the visitor back to their website with attractive offers or discounts on the products he has shown interest in. A display Ad copy is crisp and to the point but there is a constraint on the amount of content that can be put into it.

On the other hand, an email campaign would be the better option when you want to offer additional information for upselling or cross-selling other products in addition to the ones in the abandoned cart.

Both display ads and email campaigns with retargeting goals are powerful tools in the digital marketer’s arsenal that can generate the highest ROIs. Therefore, instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, the smart move here would be to integrate both of them as a part of your retargeting strategy.

But do you know what would be even smarter than that? Talking to us! Let our team of experienced digital marketers design, build, monitor and optimise your campaigns for the best results. We’d love to help you out. Check us out here.