Email remarketing refers to the email systems used by merchants to follow up with website visitors who do not make a desired purchase action. It is a development of email marketing that aims to re-attract website viewers or customers. In other words, the whole idea of email remarketing is attracting customers or users back for purchase, growing repeated customers.
Types of email remarketing
Email remarketing can be done through various kinds of emails, such as:
Browse abandonment emails
Browse abandonment emails reconnect merchants with website visitors who quit the site without purchase action, giving chances to turn window shoppers into actual buyers. Browse abandonment is on the upper side of the purchase funnel, and the next abandonment which stop customers accessing to check-out is cart abandonment. Instead of contacting everyone, marketers are more likely to send email to the people who have shown obvious interest on the products. For example, they are the ones who browse key pages of the website or who begin a process such as registering an account or downloading a white paper but then stop the action, without purchase any products or services.
Usually, browse abandonment emails are edited based on the receivers' browse and search history. In this case, the emails would be personalized, more targeted on individuals, compared to marketing emails. Browse recovery emails could make approximately 36.63% revenue and rise 2.79% sales effectively.
Cart abandonment emails
As mentioned, cart abandonment is the second prevention. Cart abandonment emails are worked as a reminder of what items the receivers have abandoned. They are sent to customers who have added products to their shopping cart but failed to check-out. In order to prevent shopping cart abandonment, marketers would send remarketing email to customers.
According to the research by Experian Marketing Services, simply sending an abandoned cart reminder increases purchase rate by 1.53% and open rates by 41%. Compared to the promotion and advertising emails, uncompleted order reminder increases purchase rate at 19 times higher.
Some people are worried that sending cart abandonment emails will annoy people, and while that make be the case, research shows that 69% of people found the 'reminders' to be helpful in some way.
Traditional cart abandonment emails require the advertiser to have contact information already in place to send the email. This requires that website visitors that abandon their carts must have previously subscribed, purchased, or otherwise provided their contact information. Newer technologies allow marketers to first identify anonymous website visitors using a cookie-based identification system, and then to follow-up with those visitors directly via email to convert them.
Retargeting anonymous website bounces
When individuals visit a website without converting there are tools available to identify anonymous website visitors, match them with their email address and follow-up directly to convert. Similar to cart abandonment, this type of email remarketing is done prior to the cart - with follow-up sent even if the visitor hasn't provided their contact information.
Post-purchase emails
After completing orders, merchants would send a review emails to consumers. Some of those emails are telling them what they have bought before, some are post-purchase survey, etc. Before consumers make purchase decisions, they are heavily rely on the customer reviews about the products. Here is an example. Sephora, a leading beauty retailer, thanks the customer for their recent purchase while simultaneously asking them to review their new products. Within the email they also give the shopper an additional reason to engage by promoting other content resources including Sephora TV and beauty news. This review campaign appears to be extremely successful. In addition, in the first quarter of 2015, the read rate for these campaigns was 58% higher than their average read rate and the deleted unread percentage was 44% lower. To sum up, post-purchase emails could not only help the companies to strength the brand identity, re-engage the existed customers, but also help attract new customers with advertisements and promotion.
Order follow ups, rewards or loyalty programs, inactive customer follow ups, and so forth...