How It Works

Find out how our solution helps you turn browsers into buyers.

Integrations

From Shopify to Klaviyo, explore over 80 integrations.

Support

Access guides, troubleshooting, and expert assistance.

About Us

Hear our origin story and meet our team.

Partnership

Become an official Retention.com Partner.

Affiliate Program

Learn more about our Affiliate Program.

Careers

Explore career opportunities with Retention.com.

Events

See upcoming events we’re hosting or attending.

Referrals

Got a referral? Let us know here.
Retention.com for B2B is here! Try it out today

An Untapped Marketing Channel - Email Based Retargeting

October 31, 2019
privacy-red-circle

The Two Whys of Email-Based Retargeting - Why We Created A New Category

“How do you get to be the leader? Be the first-est with the most-est.”

Jack Trout, Positioning 

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” 

Simon Sinek’s TED Talk

When explaining why we’re creating the Email-Based Retargeting category, there are two different whys to address:

  1. The Simon Sinek Why. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” In this case that means, aside from marketing advantages, why we’re doing what we’re doing with Retention.com and Email-Based Retargeting in the first place.
  2. The Category Why. Why do the great marketers of our past think it’s accretive to revenue and enterprise value to create a category when creating and launching a product?

The Simon Sinek Why

We’re Democratizing Identification Monetization 

If you know what Retention.com actually does (we identify anonymous web traffic and give you their email and postal address), the first question you probably have is, “Is that legal?” 

(The answer is yes, in the USA. Not anywhere else.)

Shortly thereafter you probably thought, “I’m emailing someone who was on my site but didn’t give me their info. Isn’t that too invasive?”

To answer this question, I would like to draw your attention to the data that Google collects about you every minute of every day.

We live in a world where invasiveness is so extreme that it’s difficult to get your head around it.

Here’s what Google can access and monetize*:

  • Your camera and microphone, at any point
  • Every photo or video you’ve ever taken; processed with AI
  • Every physical place you’ve ever been and will ever go
  • Every search you’ve ever run and/or deleted
  • An advertising profile about you
  • Every app or extension you’ve ever used, when and how often you use them, and who you communicate on them with
  • Your entire YouTube history
  • Your bookmarks
  • Your emails
  • Your contacts
  • Your entire Google Drive
  • Photos you’ve taken on your phone
  • Businesses you’ve purchased from
  • Music you listen to
  • Your calendar
  • Your Hangout sessions
  • Websites you’ve created
  • Phones you have owned
  • Pages you’ve shared
  • Phone calls you’ve made
  • Messages left for you
  • How many steps you take in a day

It’s hard to internalize just how invasive this is, but as a society, we seem to be fine with it. And that’s not even including Facebook or any other social media site that collects data about you.

Legally emailing someone to monetize a visit to your website isn’t nearly as invasive as monetizing even one of the bullet points listed above, let alone all of them at once, 24/7/365.

Not only that, Google and Facebook are monetizing visits to your website with the exact same technology we’re using to track visitors.

They’re making you pay over and over again for the same display and search retargeting clicks.

It’s time for you and your business to take advantage of that exact same identification technology, and monetize those visits for yourself. 

It’s time for you to start doing Email-Based Retargeting.

Now we’ll address the other why.

The Category Why

If you can create a category, do it

The best book on creating a category and why you should do so if you can is Positioning, by Al Reis and Jack Trout.

They write: “The easiest way into someone’s mind is to be first.” 

They defend their statement by asking if you know who the second person was to step foot on the moon or fly across the Atlantic, or what the second highest mountain in the world is. 

Point taken. 

What’s the easiest way to be first? 

To introduce a completely new thing, or way of doing something, and to introduce your product or service as the first product or service to do that thing.

Seth Godin addresses category creation in a slightly different way, but in my opinion, it’s just semantics. 

As Seth hypothesizes in The Dip, it’s imperative to be the “best in the world” at something. 

Creating a narrative that you’re the best in the world at something is simply creating a narrow category for your company or product to dominate.

Why did we think Retention.com deserved its own category?

It’s new, it’s different, and no one has ever heard of it

Anthony Kennada, the founder of Gainsight, a category creator in the Customer Success space, made a checklist for deciding if your industry is right for category creation in his book called... you guessed it! Category Creation.

In his words, if you answer yes to all or even a few of these items on this checklist, category creation is right for you. 

  1. Little or no competitors in your space: check
  2. Low search volume/cheaper ad inventory: check
  3. No press or media coverage: check
  4. A marginalized buyer no company is paying attention to: this doesn’t really apply to us
  5. Small but passionate niche of people who get it: check
  6. Larger population of people who don’t get it (right away): check

Despite Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) becoming increasingly commoditized, Retention.com actually does something completely new and different that no one has ever heard of.

At the same time, people are excited to hear about it. 

When they put the code on their website, it works. We send them email addresses they don’t have yet, of real people.

Those are the perfect ingredients for category creation, so we created Email-Based Retargeting.

4 Benefits of Category Creation

1. You get more market share

The most straightforward benefit of creating a category is that if you can continue to dominate that category, and not be dethroned by a “fast follower,” market share accrues to you.

The Harvard Business Review says companies that create categories enjoy 53 percent higher revenue growth and 74 percent higher market capitalization growth than their counterparts that “disrupt.”

2. If you develop the category properly, you can own a term in the mind of the market

In Positioning, the authors say that if you own a term in the mind of the market, the #2 brand that comes to mind will win half the market share, and #3 will be another half still. 

Today’s examples are actually even more profound than that. They’re completely monopolistic. 

Google for Search. Amazon for e-Commerce. Uber for Ride Sharing. Twitter for Tweeting. 

Examples that are closer to home for what we’re trying to do at Retention.com are HubSpot for Inbound Marketing, Drift for Conversational Marketing, ClickFunnels for Sales Funnels, and MailChimp for Email Marketing. 

What about if you’re entering a crowded, established category? 

You can still own a term (or phrase) in the mind of the market by resegmenting the market.

Some great examples of recent niche plays by companies that I follow who have done a great job at resegmenting a crowded space are Convertkit (Email Marketing for Professional Bloggers), and Klaviyo (Email Marketing for Ecommerce). 

The beautiful part of owning a term in the mind of the market (or not-so-beautiful, depending on which side of it you’re on) is you don’t necessarily have to be the company that invented the product to own the term. But if you do own the term, your prospects are likely to think you were the innovator.

3. Publicity is easier in a new category than in a mature, crowded space

Publicity is easier for a category creator because journalists are always looking for something new to share with their audience.  

The proof seems to be in the pudding for this one. As of now, we’ve been able to line up appearances on 10 podcasts in a week, a co-promotion with AppSumo, and several help-a-reporter-out placements. 

I’m convinced there’s no way we could have lined up those appearances with our product in the email marketing space, which has been around for 15 years with more than 150 vendors.

4. You can cultivate a community that evangelizes your brand for you

Cultivating a community of brand champions who agree that you’re solving a valuable problem will help validate your category and grow the industry. 

This community takes time to develop, and starts with appealing to the human side of early adopters. 

Gainsight Founder Anthony Kennada points out that if you can cultivate a group of early adopters via educational content on your blog, featuring successful customers on your website, and hosting live events and conferences featuring early adopters as speakers. “Their support can create a network effect that propels category awareness and thought leadership into the marketplace, sparking a flywheel that will compound and gain momentum as time goes on.”

What can go wrong: Beware the “fast follower”

Pioneers often die with arrows in their backs.

Creating a category is the easy part. Developing it and defending your leadership position over the years is the hard part. 

Google has 91 percent market share in Search. They most certainly did not create the Search category.

Mailchimp is a great example in Email Marketing. They have become synonymous with the term over the years through building a great company and brand with a freemium strategy. But Constant Contact was the pioneer.

An innovative “fast-follower” can take advantage of the effort and capital you have invested in creating a category. With an educated market, it’s much easier to move quickly and take market share with innovative “us vs. them” marketing.

How do you defend your leadership position? 

Jack Trout and Al Ries say that you do it through brand. Position your product to be the standard by which every new product is compared to.

“The essential ingredient in securing the leadership position is getting into the mind first,” they write. “The essential ingredient in keeping the position is reinforcing the original concept.” 

The example they use is Coca-Cola. “The Real Thing” is a strategy every leader can employ. It immediately forces the prospect to judge any competitor by the standard Coca-Cola has set.

What’s the reality of actually doing that in today’s world? 

There’s an infinite supply of everything, new vendors are popping up left and right with newer, better products, and there are more low-cost ways to get initial virality to get products off the ground.

I believe the answer is still brand, but the definition has changed. 

Today, securing positioning takes so much more than a great tagline. Your brand is the value provided to your market through content, the community you cultivate around your product, your ability to attract talent and stay innovative, and the connection you can create between the people behind your product and the people behind the logos you’re selling to. 

Like most worthwhile things in life, it’s a slow, day-in and day-out grind that you can’t really tell is working in the short run, but something beautiful will ensue over the long term.

*courtesy of Dylan Curran at The Guardian


Share this content with your friends!

Share on: