Remarketing isn’t a new concept, but it is a seemingly underutilized resource.
Remarketing is the use of trigger-based campaigns to offset abandonment rates and win respondents back with a compelling and engaging offer, while creating new revenue out of previously missed opportunities.
In the past few years, however, remarketing has emerged as a successful technique for behaviorally targeting and messaging prospects and customers for those who choose to embrace the remarketing strategy. Think about the customer who comes to your website, adds several products to their shopping cart, but abandons the purchase. A well-defined remarketing strategy allows you a “second chance” at converting that respondent to an acquisition.
Most perceive remarketing as a non-necessity, but as you review your acquisition costs and acquisition rates, it’s important to pay attention to the number of respondents left on the table. Remarketing enables you to easily deploy a follow up strategy that targets that low hanging fruit.
Five Steps to Creating a Remarketing Strategy:
- Identify your business objectives. Do you want to target online and offline activities, or are you more focused on specific channels such as paid search, online advertising, etc.? The benefit of remarketing is taking the acquisition that you have already paid an acquisition expense to and keeping them engaged to see a healthy ROI. Determine which campaigns you can act on seamlessly.
- Start simple. In our excitement to create more sales activity, we often start big. Consider beginning with something small such as a remail to email campaign recipients who didn’t open. By testing a new subject line or from line, you may be able to create a higher response.
- Make certain you have the tools. Do you have an analytics solution that can identify your respondent’s behavior and provide you that data real-time? Do you have an email solution that allows you to segment your audience easily by their behavior? The more tools you have at your disposal that can take behavioral data and allow you to make it actionable, the more sophisticated your remarketing strategy can grow to be.
- Report and trend. Make certain all the work is worth the effort. As with any campaign, reporting on data is key to successful marketing. Whether you are trending sales, CTR, acquisition cost, or turnover, keeping a close watch on the numbers will guarantee that your remarketing strategy is moving in the right direction.
- Don’t over market. Are you sending multiple remail campaigns to non-opens? If so, your respondents may be experiencing email fatigue. Be cautious with your remarketing, ensuring that across all channels you aren’t sending too often. You don’t want to lose that prospect or customer because you are over zealous.
Remarketing is a tremendously powerful tool, yet many marketers don’t utilize it as a resource for gaining customers that they’ve already targeted through other campaigns. So if you’ve been considering incorporating remarketing into your market, consider no longer, get started today.
Sally Lowery
Online Marketing Manager at Bronto
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Hi Sally, I’ve listened to some of your podcasts where you talk about remailing a few days after if the subscriber did not “open” an email using the same message copy and a different subject line.
With the current number of email readers who default to images off how can you be sure whether or not an email was truly opened or not? I can see a common scenario playing out where a subscriber opens an email and reads it with images turned off and then gets the same email with a different subject line several days later all because we took a leap of faith and assumed that they never read the email the first time (No images turned on and no click activity from within the email.)
I can understand how remailing in theory makes a ton of sense however how do you handle the scenario i describe above? I can see subscribers with that scenario to be more easily annoyed by the duplicate message copy and high frequency of emails your sending.
Thanks for all your great blog posts and podcasts.
@Nick
You make an excellent point. There has been much debate about the value of open rates. See 4 blog posts below.
*Why The Open Rate Must Die: http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/email_insider/?p=627 (you may need to create a MediaPost account to read this one - well worth it) - make sure you follow comments as well.
*Email Open Rates: What’s the Alternative?: http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/email_insider/?p=635 (you may need to create a MediaPost account to read this one - well worth it) - make sure you follow comments as well.
*Opens rule! Opens rule! Long live King Open Rate!: http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/07/opens-rule-open.html - make sure you follow comments as well.
*Opens - The Term is the Problem: http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/07/opens—the-ter.html - make sure you follow comments as well.
Basically, an “open” is only recorded if the invisible image tag loads (images are turned on) OR if an action is taken within the email (i.e., a click-through). The scenario you describe in your comment is a “pitfall” of remailing. You are correct. In this case the subscriber may receive a duplicate email.
As with everything when it comes to email:
*Nothing is certain.
*Nothing works every time.
*There are tradeoffs to every decision you make.
I encourage clients to test remailing and carefully examine metrics. In other words:
1. Is there a higher rate of unsub/complain/junk on the remail?
2. Are the extra conversions worth it (depends how your team defines this)?
Thanks for bringing up this very important point.
dj at bronto
@dj
Thanks for the reply. I agree with carefully examining the rate of unsubscribe and complaint metrics when implementing a remailing strategy in addition to measuring the extra conversions you’ll hopefully be generating.
Also including new fresh content in the remail should help as well. Another thought is to include a link such as “Send me fewer emails”, or “Click to receive only one email per week” next to your unsubscribe link. This gives your subscribers more control over the frequency without loosing them all together via unsubscribing.