When you manage a website, it is essential to generate traffic in order to have enough leads to convert. But the volume of visits by itself is often not enough to achieve a good conversion rate. Indeed, the moment of the visit does not always match the moment of the purchase decision. Email retargeting enables you to drive a visitor back to your website to bring him/her to carry out the expected conversion action: downloading content, requesting an offer, buying, registering… To be efficient your communication should be adapted to the behaviour of the visitors on your website in order to meet their needs as precisely as possible. Engage potential clients and build customer loyalty on your website by sending them personalized messages at the right moment of their purchase journey thanks to Mailify’s automatic email retargeting campaigns.

The concept of email retargeting

What is email retargeting?

Email retargeting helps you to send an automatic sequence of targeted and personalized emails to the visitors of your website to bring them to complete a conversion action (purchase, registration, download, etc.). This smart technology is based on the concept of classical advertising retargeting, i.e. the display of targeted ads triggered by the visit to a website or a specific page.

Everyone has already seen these banners displaying the products you have previously viewed on an e-commerce website such as Amazon or Ebay… Well, email retargeting uses exactly the same concept except that instead of displaying banners on other websites, it enables you to send targeted and personalized email sequences based on the visited pages. It can be an order confirmation, a thank you email following the download of a white paper or a products recommendations workflow based on the products visited by the contact. If abandoned shopping cart reminders are part of automatic email retargeting campaigns, we will not (or hardly) talk about it here as Mailify has created a specific trigger for this type of follow-up emails. For more information, have a look at the article related to abandoned shopping carts.

How does email retargeting work?

The idea of email retargeting is based on the creation of an automatic campaign workflow triggered by a visit to a specific page of your website. The email sequence sent is different depending on the page visited but also evolves differently depending on the behaviour of your contact (opens or not your retargeting campaigns).

How do you identify visitors of your website?

The idea of the workflow is clear, but you’re probably wondering how to identify these visitors? Indeed once they have left your website, you will need at least their email address to send them a first follow-up campaign, bring them back to your website and drive them to your conversion goal. So without going into technical details, here are some of the most common methods used to collect data about a visitor:

The visitor fills out a form on your website: by completing the fields of the form, the visitor himself fills in the information you need for the sending and personalization of your automatic campaign (POST method).

The visitor clicks on a link in a campaign sent with Mailify: when a contact clicks on a link in one of your campaigns, the URL of the link can display your contact data by including personalization variables in the URL (GET method).

The visitor is logged into your site: he will be identified thanks to the cookies corresponding to his session and you will thus have access to his log-in information (email, first name, last name, etc.).

Why should you create email retargeting campaigns?

You did the hard part! Attracting visitors to your site was the most challenging step. Don’t stop there and keep their attention on your brand. Bringing back visitors who have already shown an interest in your products will be much cheaper and just as effective as acquiring new potential customers.

Optimize your conversion rate

Do you want to increase the volume of conversions on your website? Of course you are thinking of increasing the traffic on your website. Indeed technically, if you triple the number of visitors on your website, you will triple your revenue. Actually, this is not exactly true. If the volume of visitors increases, it does not necessarily mean that the leads brought by this additional traffic have the same quality level. By creating email retargeting campaigns, you’ll be able to contact your website visitors automatically at the right moment in their purchase journey with a personalised and appropriate message.

This marketing automation method is therefore especially effective in optimizing your conversion tunnels and increasing your ROI while preventing churn, shopping cart abandonment and any visit that does not lead to a conversion action.

Optimize your customer relationship management

Order confirmation, thank-you email following the download of a white paper, satisfaction survey after a purchase, we have all seen at least once in our lives as Internet users an email retargeting workflow. These email sequences aim to nurture a more personalized and natural relationship with customers.

From acquisition to customer loyalty, email retargeting increases the performance of your customer loyalty strategy: you contact the right customer, at the right time, with content that meets their expectations. This way, you give your visitors a good image and make it easier for them to come back and make more purchases.

Some concrete examples of email retargeting

Products recommendation scenario

It is about offering your customers products close to those they have consulted or already purchased. These products usually match your customers’ interests. This increases the chances that your customers might be interested in them and that visitors will buy them. With an intelligent personalization of your messages adapted to your visitors’ interests, you can move to a much more appreciated individual and appropriate communication. This leads to a better engagement rate, an improvement of your company’s reputation, as well as an increase in performance and ROI.

Order or booking confirmation

This kind of automated scenarios is triggered by a purchase made on your website. Once the user lands on the order or booking confirmation page, a confirmation email with the main details is sent automatically within a very short time after the online purchase. You can add a second email asking for a customer review and a third email with product recommendations one to two weeks after the purchase.

Automated thank-you email and lead nurturing

Send your customers an automated thank-you message after a purchase or a download has been completed. This is a great opportunity to offer additional content. You can also tell them more about your products or offers. This way you can learn more about the needs of your visitors. You are able to drive them towards your conversion goal as your workflow progresses.

How to set up email retargeting campaigns with Mailify?

Connect your website to your Mailify account

Do you want to create automatic workflows triggered via Mailify when a page of your website is visited? You have first to activate and configure the «website connector» in your account settings.

Then get the JavaScript code to copy-paste and to customize on all the pages you want to track. You will then be able to connect your site to your Mailify account.

Create your automatic campaign and define the retargeting settings

You must now create an automatic campaign with the «page seen» trigger.

You can use the trigger settings to define whether your scenario is to be triggered:

• On each visit (for order or reservation confirmations)
• Only on the first visit (e.g. when a contact downloads the same white paper several times)

Create a visitor recovery workflow

Once the trigger has been set up and the retargeting settings have been defined, you can now create your recovery scenario. To increase your efficiency, we recommend to create a diagramm of the different recovery workflows that you want to schedule. This will give you better visibility of the content that have to be produced for the different follow-up emails that will be sent after the visit. Also, remember to take care of the marketing pressure on your contacts by not contacting them too frequently.

Let the magic of marketing automation operate

Once your scenario is ready, you can validate it. Your campaigns will be sent automatically to your visitors at the right moment of their journey. However, setting up an automatic email retargeting scenario doesn’t mean you have to leave your campaign unattended. Make sure you adapt your content and analyse your campaign statistics to refine your strategy if necessary and thus optimize your performance.

We suggest you to have a look at our detailed tutorial on how to create automatic email retargeting campaigns.