Retargeting with follow-up messages to increase conversions

We’ve probably all seen successful retargeting work. You know, when Instagram shows you an ad for dog food after you’ve been searching for the best for Fido. Next thing you know, you’re locked into a subscription for handmade, organic dog food arriving once a week. 

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a great way to keep your brand top of mind using visual reminders of products that your target audience may not have responded to—yet. Retargeting is a key part of any successful marketing strategy because it creates another chance to engage customers and push them closer to conversion. Often when we think of retargeting, we think social or display advertisements—but why not retarget with email? According to Salecycle, normal email marketing messages average a 21% open rate, whereas remarketing messages average closer to 57%. Additionally, clicked remarketing emails average a 30% conversion rate, compared to an overall average conversion rate of less than 5%.

When customers don’t engage with your messages, try reengaging them with a remarketing campaign instead of waiting for the next scheduled send. This may sound complicated to orchestrate, but with Cordial it’s much easier than you might think. Whether your campaign is a one-time batch message, a recurring automation, or a series of Podium orchestrations, you can schedule a retargeting campaign for contacts who don’t engage with your main campaign after a specified period of time. 

To build your first retargeting campaign in Cordial, you just need to add a few new steps to your campaign creation process:

Start by creating the initial campaign message as you normally would. Give your message a name and a meaningful tag (e.g. “wintersale”) so you can distinguish the segment when creating your retargeting campaign. Select your audience segment and send the message, or schedule it for later. 

This is where your new workflow comes in. To create a retargeting campaign, create a second message. Make sure to change up the subject line, and consider adding a time-based or personalized promotion to encourage engagement. Specify the audience segment as the recipients of “wintersale” who did not open the message. Once you set the audience, you can schedule your message. It’s as easy as that! Keep in mind that the retargeting message should be delayed at least 24 hours following the main campaign send date, giving your contacts an adequate window of time to open the main campaign message before seeing another message with similar content.

If you want to take your retargeting efforts a step further, consider creating audience segments for users who opened but did not click, and users who clicked by did not convert. This hyper-specific retargeting will enable you to include a unique call to action for each group, increasing your chances of moving a user down the funnel and closer to conversion. If customers aren’t engaging in your email channel, you can use the same audiences to connect and retarget them across any channel, including social, push, and SMS.

If you’d like to learn more about retargeting an audience segment, check out our knowledge base. If you would like to see how Cordial can help your company increase revenue and engagement, schedule a demo with our team of experts.