Retargeting and remarketing are very similar words and have similar purposes, but are executed in different ways. I am willing to bet you have seen both in action as a consumer. Let me explain.
Let’s say one day you are doing some searches on Amazon.com for a new camera. You look at several cameras, but you are not ready to make a purchase so you leave the site and go about your business. The next day you log into Facebook and you see ads in your timeline from Amazon and the included picture and product information is the exact camera you looked at yesterday. Coincidence? Nope. That is retargeting in action.
When you were on Amazon’s site, they placed a cookie in your browser which communicated with Facebook to serve you that ad. Facebook isn’t the only place you will see these retargeting ads. They are pretty commonplace on a lot of sites. As a consumer, I still find these ads to be a bit like Minority Report, but as a marketer it is a powerful tool to remind people of what they were looking at and entice them to return and make the purchase.
Remarketing has to do with email and abandoned shopping carts. Shopping cart abandonment is a huge problem for e-commerce websites of all sizes. A person puts products in their cart, fills out their information and then for some reason leaves the site with products sill in their shopping cart. Maybe they were interrupted by something or changed their mind due to shipping costs. Using email remarketing, the merchant is able to follow-up with an email to see if they had problems during the buying process. They can even follow-up days later to offer a discount that may entice the buyer to go back and complete the order.
Email remarketing is another great example of marketing automation at work. Many marketing automation tools allow you to program this into your e-commerce site, set up the emails you want to send and set the time between emails. Companies often see an increase in revenue due to adding email remarketing into their mix.
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