Step-by-step email retargeting strategy (+ examples)

Step-by-step email retargeting strategy (+ examples)-Overview

Doing a good  retargeting email  is the dream of every marketer: to be able to identify users who already know us and feed the relationship with them step by step until reaching the conversion and beyond, all at low cost.

But if we do not have a meaningful email retargeting strategy, we run the risk of overwhelming users by offering them things that they are not interested in and end up achieving the opposite effect to the one sought. Horror!

So that this does not happen to you, in this article I want to tell you what are the  steps of an email remarketing strategy  and how to carry them out with examples. Let's go for it!

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The key steps of an email retargeting strategy

The fundamental key to email remarketing is to  do things with meaning . Each email we send must have a clear justification and objective, and be personalized according to the user's needs and the moment of the purchase process in which they are.

In the end, each user action will correspond to a specific response on our part: a person who visits us for the first time is not the same as one who has left an abandoned shopping cart. 

Therefore, we are going to see the 6 main types of emails that are sent within an email retargeting strategy and how to maximize the effect of each of them.

1) Welcome email

As they said in the movie  Casablanca , this can be the beginning of a great friendship ...

The welcome email is the  first communication  we send when a new user registers in our database. In many cases, it is one of the first points of contact we have with them. And you know that first impressions count a lot.

A good welcome email should have these characteristics:

Be well designed.

Be actionable, that is, clearly indicate to the user what we want them to do next.

Connect with the customer. 

Remember, email retargeting is not just an isolated action, but a way to nurture the relationship.

Convey the values ​​of the brand.

Help generate sales, but without being overtly commercial. Keep in mind that we are still in the early stages of the conversion funnel, there will be time to sell later.

Within the email remarketing strategy, we can distribute the welcome email in up to 3 different communications:

• An email to confirm the registration and offer a coupon for the first purchase.
• An email with other contact channels, a link to the news and the customer service contact.
• An email type "we want to know more about you" (for example, the user's birthday).

In the case of Ikea, we can see how they combine several resources in a single email: an invitation to join the Ikea Family, a request for more user data and inspiring suggestions on decoration.

welcome email

2) Email retargeting per visit

As the name suggests, these emails are sent when the user  visits a specific category or product . Retargeting emails per visit do not offer a very high conversion rate (approximately a third of cart recovery), but they compensate because the visit is the most frequent event (up to 5 times more than the cart abandonment).

These are the guidelines to create a good retargeting email per visit:

The email must be focused on a "hook" product. In general, this is the most expensive that the user has visited, but we can apply other criteria if we consider it appropriate.

The email should serve as an excuse to recommend other products (other visited, similar, alternative ...).

It is not necessary to send them whenever there is a visit, since we could cause saturation. Normally it will be appropriate to send them if we have not been in contact with the user for a long time or if it is a high value customer.

My recommendation is to send a single email per visit, a maximum of two. The first would be shipped 2-3 days after the visit, and the second 2-3 weeks later if the product is of high value and there is no better reason to contact.

As we see in the example, in this type of emails we can play the segmentation options such as "the user has NOT visited X" or "the price of the base product is Y".

Retargeting email per visit

3) Cart recovery email

This is one of the key emails in an email retargeting strategy: the one we send when a user  adds a product to their cart but does not complete the purchase .

To realize its importance, it is enough to know that more than 70% of ecommerce carts are abandoned for multiple reasons: indecision, use as a wish list, shipping cost calculator ...

To make your cart recovery emails super effective, write down these tips:

• Show the content of the cart in the email.
• Offer alternative or complementary products.
• The tone should be helpful, rather than commercial.
• Optimize and even segment content based on key variables.
• Within your email remarketing workflow, you can configure 2 or 3 cart recovery emails:
• The first would be sent between 20 minutes and an hour after abandonment, to capture the user when the purchase attempt is recent.
• The second is sent the day after abandonment.

And finally, we can send a third party in case it is a product with long decision-making cycles. In this case, it would also be convenient to adjust the times of the first two emails.

cart recovery email

4) Purchase recovery email

This type of email is very similar to cart recovery, but with the particularity that here the user  has already started the payment process.  So you are even further down the funnel.

Write down these tips to improve your purchase recovery emails:

• Apply the best cart recovery practices.
• Try to find out why the user has left the payment halfway: unclear payment or shipping options, lack of trust ...
• It encourages the user to finalize the transaction with a discount coupon or free shipping (especially in the first purchases).
• Segment and personalize the email as much as possible, depending on the product that the user is visiting. You can also take the opportunity to offer suggestions for related products, as we see in the example.
• Regarding the number of communications and the frequency, we recommend following the same guidelines as for cart recovery (2-3 emails maximum).
• purchase recovery email

5) Post-purchase email

!! Congratulations!! You have succeeded in converting the user into a customer, but that does not mean that the email retargeting process is over.

Of course, we have to send a transactional email immediately after the conversion, but that's not all. We can get much more juice from post-purchase emails with these recommendations:

Take the opportunity to ask the user to leave you an   honest opinion about the product. If it is positive, it will help build social proof and trust in future users. And if there are aspects to improve, surely you can learn a lot from them!

Recommend other similar or complementary products, to sow the seed of future sales.

Starts a richer dialogue with the user.

Within your email remarketing strategy, post-purchase emails can be used to activate and automate various workflows for each of the following phases:

Activation: 

make the user start using the product.

Achievement: 

getting the user to solve their needs and achieve their objectives in relation to the product.

Adoption:

 getting the user to adopt us as a preference.

Promotion: 

encourage the user to recommend us, generating a word of mouth effect.

 6) User reactivation email

Has a person not bought or visited your website for a long time? Not everything is lost! Within an email retargeting strategy, there is also room  to win back inactive users .

It is inevitable to lose the attention of a part of our audience. But if we don't do anything to reconnect with her, we'll eventually be missing out on a great potential source of income.

recovery email from old customer

To avoid this, follow these recovery email creation guidelines:

Customize the products you offer, based on the information you already have about the user and their behavior in the past.

Offer some kind of excuse to reconnect, for example a discount coupon, a promotion, etc.

Be direct and transparent, but don't forget to give a human touch and close communication. After all, you are trying to seduce your prospect again ;-)

In general, it is recommended that the email remarketing workflow include 2 or 3 reactivation communications. The first two would be about 3-6 months after the last visit or purchase and 3-6 months after the previous one. In case of sending a third party, the frequency would be similar, but we would have to find a good excuse to justify the reconnection.