A Buyer's Guide to Remarketing Services

What is Ecommerce Remarketing?

In the world of ecommerce, trends come and go -- but remarketing visitors to your website is a trend that undoubtedly is here to stay. Remarketing is a term that has been used in advertising and marketing long before the onset of ecommerce, where the phrase was used to describe the process of "reviving or renewing interest" in a product.

 However, in ecommerce, the term is now more frequently used to describe the automated email systems used by merchants to follow up with Web site visitors who abandon their shopping cart. Merchants remarket to those abandoners in order to bring them back to complete a transaction on an ecommerce website. For this reason, sometimes people refer to ecommerce remarketing services as "conversion marketing" or "cart abandonment email marketing."

When you use remarketing tactics, you are targeting only previous visitors of your site who did not make a desired action, usually a purchase. This type of conversion marketing is all about the website visitor who abandons his cart and what you can do, in terms of reaching out to that person at the right time, to turn him in to a paying customer while he is still in the buying mood.

Think of it like this: you market to bring a visitor to your website, and if he or she doesn't make a purchase, you then use remarketing tactics to bring the visitor back to your website and convert him or her in to a paying customer.

To do this effectively you must start the remarketing process shortly after the cart abandonment has taken place. You'll realize higher conversions when you reach out to that prospective customer while he is still thinking about the purchase.

How Can Remarketing Help Your Ecommerce Business?

Remarketing is a technique used to help reduce cart abandonment. A study by Experian, called "The Remarketing Report: Benchmark and Data Analysis on Connecting Web Behavior to Email Marketing," claims that online shopping carts are abandoned at a high rate of 56.2 percent. The report also indicates that using remarketing techniques, such as triggered emails to remind users of their uncompleted transaction can result in more than 20 times the transaction rates, compared to sending standard bulk emails.

When you use remarketing as a tool, you aggressively promote you product, brand or service to previous site visitors in order to retain them as a customer. Remarketing through a conversion marketing platform provides highly targeted and aggressive promotions, but it can also provide the opportunity for up-sell and cross-sell and build a loyal customer following.

As ecommerce remarketing systems have evolved, we're at the point where remarketing services are more reliable, more targeted and also provided in real-time. Remarketing services can help boost your conversions and also drive sales, but when looking for a good remarketing service provider, there are a number of things that a remarketing vendor should offer as part of its service.

How Does Remarketing Using Conversion Marketing Services Work?

Remarketing to website cart abandoners is the most common and popular ecommerce remarketing technique. Most merchants, especially those without a large in-house technical and development team, tend to use remarketing platforms in the same way they do many other ecommerce software solutions -- on a SaaS (software-as-a-service) basis. This allows you to find a vendor, subscribe to the service, set-up your account and remarketing targets, and simply add code to your own website to make it all work.

The vendor will offer a software-based solution that will help you engage potential customers with the goal of converting them into paid customers. For example, if you track a website visitor from an email campaign and see that she visited your site and added products to her cart, but left without completing the purchase, you would follow up with remarketing techniques to encourage that shopper to return and make that purchase.

The remarketing messages should contain relevant and targeted details, such as images of the products they considered purchasing but abandoned, and a direct link to return to the cart to continue the check-out process. If the first remarketing attempt is not successful, follow-up communications will usually offer a discount or promotional incentive for the consumer to go back to the website and checkout.