For most people, Email-Based Retargeting is a completely new concept in Email Marketing.
This post is all about best practices for Email-Based Retargeting with Retention.com.
A long-standing best practice in Email Marketing is to send a welcome sequence immediately after someone signs up for your newsletter.
These emails always have ultra-high open rates, and it gives you an opportunity to tell the subscriber about how your brand is different, provide free value to build trust and move the subscriber down the funnel, and make compelling offers for them to come back to your website and become customers.
The Retention.com customers who have seen the most success with Email-Based Retargeting have all started with a welcome series.
Most of them have simply added the Retention.com addresses into their existing welcome series, but you can get as sophisticated and targeted as you’d like, since we also give you the landing page that the visitor landed on.
For tips on how to create a successful welcome series, check out this post from Litmus here.
For examples of killer welcome emails (but just the first email), check this post out from Vero.
These emails are effectively cold traffic.
There is a good chance they knew they were on your webpage.
If they did, and you send them a welcome series quickly, there is a much better chance that they will recognize your company and brand than if you wait.
If they don’t recognize it, there is a good chance they’ll mark it as SPAM, which is bad for everybody.
Email-Based Retargeting (EBR) has effectively moved Email Marketing up the funnel.
Email used to be a channel to nurture subscribers who showed high intent by opting into a form, or by purchasing a product from you.
EBR leads are effectively cold traffic, so you can’t expect them to convert as quickly as the rest of your list. You need to give Email-Based Retargeting time to work. You need to build trust with the contacts.
There are two types of Email-Based Retargeting users.
For e-commerce, we recommend two things to ensure your success:
If you do these two things, you should see a lower customer acquisition cost than social media channels.
You will be able to grow your business without changing much other than adding more email addresses to your funnel.
This one is important, so we're repeating it.
These emails are cold traffic to your website, and they bounced for a reason.
It’s MUCH higher-up-the-funnel traffic than any emails currently in your database.
Give Email-Based Retargeting at least 60, if not 90 days before you evaluate if it’s economic for you.
Lead with as much value as you possibly can.
The burden is on you to build trust with these contacts, and since you can email them until they opt-out after paying for the contact once, there is no reason not to give tons of free value to try to build trust before you try to sell them anything.