We got our customers to start buying again, with E-mail remarketing. As can be imagined this more than just saved our business. It helped us recalibrate our marketing strategy, which made our business more profitable.
But, I am getting ahead of myself here. Let me start off by saying that we, as a business, have never been a big fan of email marketing; for me, personally, it is a waste of time and wasn’t a marketing tool that I was too impressed with. I didn’t want my marketing campaign to adopt ‘pesky’, which email marketing at times becomes; also I didn’t really get the returns I was hoping for.
But email remarketing is something else altogether.
It’s a tool that allows you to reengage your users, who were just about to buy your product or service, but backed out at the last minute. This is something that was happening to my business as well. So, let me tell you how remarketing turned round the fortunes of my business. It makes for a nice little story.
First things first; this is for the uninitiated…. You can only approach those people via email remarketing, who have shared their email ID on your site (registered), or those who have decided to be a part of your email list. So, you need to keep this in mind.
So, here goes. What I first did was a bit of analysis on why shoppers were abandoning my shopping cart. I really thought it was perfect, so had no reason to believe that my target shoppers thought otherwise.
But, boy was I wrong!!
Some shoppers were put off by the shipping costs, some were expecting discounts, others just weren’t that sure about buying the product in the first place, and there were still others who were just out looking to compare products. This is why they were not clicking on that ‘Buy’ button.
Although disappointing, I looked at the silver lining here….. The fact that they were abandoning my cart after spending some serious time on it, meant that they needed to be persuaded only a little bit more to come back and make their purchase. I did this by sending them emails, which specifically offered them what they wanted. So, if I thought that a large percentage of my shoppers wanted a discount, well I gave them that; if at any point of time I thought that some better product options had to be provided, my team added to our existing products portfolio to offer them better choice.
So just how do email remarking help my business?
Allowed me to send E-mails at the right Time
Say a shopper abandoned our cart sometime Tuesday evening; there is a very good chance that the shopper is going to open an email from my company, telling him about a discount offer on the product he had chosen. How good is that? But we send him this email almost immediately (before he forgets, he ever came to our site), maybe sometime on Wednesday morning, so that he is most likely to open it and go through it.
What this essentially means is that, email remarketing allowed us to send emails configured to reach the user when he/she is most likely to be affected by them. This did wonders for the conversion rate of my site, and led to improved profitability.
Multiple Opportunities
A shopper might not have abandoned a shopping cart just for one reason alone. At times, it is a collection of reasons that contribute towards shopping cart abandonment. As merchants, it’s difficult for us to freeze on that one reason that has led to the shopper’s decision to buy nothing from out site.
The process of email remarketing allows us to send multiple emails to the shopper, in a well defined sequence that addresses their every need. Yes, it’s an automated sequence; nevertheless it allows us to address a range of concerns.
Relevance is the Key
One of the biggest strengths of an email remarketing campaign is relevance. Marketers can send really relevant emails that have the shoppers need in mind. You don’t really have to wonder whether the right message is reaching the right people. If we send 100 emails to an equal number of shoppers, we know that a large percentage of these shoppers will go through the emails and are being persuaded to come back to the site and buy the products that they earlier didn’t purchase from the site.
We also added pictures of the products that they were going to buy, in the email (if we could match them with our database); this is something that we knew would make even a bigger impact.
If the right message is delivered to the right people, in the right manner at the right time, the results will definitely be what you want. We wanted out shoppers to come back, and that’s what we got.
This in essence is what email remarketing will do for your business, if you use it the way it is supposed to be used.
To Conclude
Before I conclude, there is a world of warning. You will need to conduct research to know whether email remarketing will be a good idea for your business or not. You don’t want to be investing tons of money into the proceedings and end up with low returns on your investment. So, be very careful. Also, you will need to carefully track the results of your campaign so that you can tweak it if it’s necessary. The idea is to keep fine tuning it for better results.
It was good for our business, but whether it’s going to work you or not, will depend on how well you have thought things through. All the best!
February 17, 2014
