Winning Back Leads as Customers with Email Retargeting

The customer journey is a trip that often doesn't go as planned: when shopping online, a full three out of four customers abandon their purchase before checkout, leaving a half-full cart behind in the shop, as a study by the Baymard Institute shows.

The picture looks similar for application flows and contact forms. Whatever prompts customers to abandon an application partway through or leave products sitting in a digital shopping cart — in short, to abandon the purchase — one thing remains true: they were interested in the offer on the website, and that interest can be reignited through retargeting: reaching out specifically to users after they've left a website.

This work is typically handled by third-party cookies: small snippets of code that make it possible to track individual users across different, unrelated websites. When potential customers leave a website without converting, they're then shown ads for that website on other platforms.

Retargeting

… is considered a particularly effective method for winning back customers. Corresponding ads succeed 76 percent more often than regular display ads. As a result, plenty of marketers are getting nervous as the end of third-party cookies looms: starting in 2023, Google will no longer allow third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. Safari and Firefox have already blocked them for some time.

The good news: there are alternatives to cookie-based retargeting methods that rely entirely on a company's own data assets. One example is list-based targeting, where companies use the email addresses of registered customers to run ads on one or more retargeting platforms. If customers sign up for a newsletter, create an account, or access gated content and consent to their email address being used for advertising purposes, they can later be reached with tailored ads via Google, Facebook, or similar platforms.

Another cookie-free strategy for winning back customers is retargeting via email, more precisely referred to as remarketing (Bolt). Here, customers who abandoned the customer journey partway through receive messages in their inbox: reminders of their full shopping carts, complementary product suggestions, or services that follow up on a registration on a portal.

Advantages of Email Remarketing

Unlike retargeting, customers feel less aggressively tracked — according to a study by AgilOne, more than half of all respondents view emails offering products they've previously viewed in a positive light (Baut). This high level of acceptance is also due to the high degree of personalization achievable through email: addressing customers by name and offering specific cross-sell or upsell deals and discounts is only possible in this form via email.

… what's needed is ownership of the email addresses, customer consent to receive emails, and ideally additional customer data for personalized outreach. It's therefore essential to collect customers' email addresses as early as possible — before asking for further contact details such as postal address or marital status. There are many ways to work email collection into different customer journeys as early as possible: insurers, for example, could ask only for customers' email addresses instead of long contact forms, lowering the barrier to sign-up. Energy providers could offer tariff recommendations only after registration via email address. Comparison portals could tie search results to entering an email address.

Email addresses gathered this way can also be enriched with data from CRM, transaction, and call center systems — provided you know how to integrate and process them correctly. Artificial intelligence can provide valuable support for these tasks.

Automated Retargeting with Acceleraid

Acceleraid's software solutions make it possible, for example, for companies to bring together data from various sources and check its quality — including whether the necessary opt-ins are in place for sending marketing emails. AI-based, personalized targeting then uses a continuously learning algorithm to segment audiences precisely and deploy automated email campaigns. This gives companies a solid, well-organized, privacy-compliant foundation for their marketing efforts, combined with an efficient campaign tool — all in one. So the journey doesn't end, and customers are always happy to set off again.