• by Josh Pierry , November 3, 2010

As retailers continue to increase online sales through shopping carts, the term "remarketing" has come into play as a way to increase sales. One of the confusing aspects of remarketing is the number of ways that a customer can be remarketed to."

Banner remarketing is one of the simplest ways to remarket to lost visitors. The basic model is, when  visitors come to your Web site, they are tagged with a remarketing cookie. If the visitor does not make a purchase, then that visitor will be shown ads for your site while browsing anywhere else on the web. 

The good aspect of banner remarketing is that you can potentially retarget all of the people who went to your site and the performance from banner remarketing is pretty good. It should also be noted that banner remarketing allows you to target visitors to your website, as well as customers.  For example, if a person goes to your home page and just sees one page, you can still retarget them. This allows you to potentially retarget all of the visitors who come to your site.

The bad news about banner remarketing is it can be tough to find those people out on the Web again.  Typically you need to have at least a few hundred people per day coming to your site and you need to have access to as many of the banner networks as possible to make it work.  While you could piece together a banner remarketing campaign on your own, it is definitely easier to use an aggregator.

Email Remarketing, aka "Shopping Cart Abandonment"  

Email remarketing is one of the ways e-commerce sites can help recapture lost sales. The basic flow is, visitors go to an eCommerce site, they add an item to their shopping cart and start checking out, but never finish. Once customers leave or abandon the shopping cart, an email is sent to them reminding them they still have items in their shopping cart and it may or may not include a discount to prompt the user to make a purchase.

The good aspect of email remarketing is that it is targeted -- and on average 46% percent of users who receive an email remarketing message end up making a purchase. When looking at the numbers, it is easy to see how email remarketing should be a key part and practice for any eCommerce organization.  Using sample stats below you can see how quickly sales can increase using email remarketing.

Hypothetical Email Remarketing Statistics

Daily Conversions: 10
Contactable Abandoned Carts: 5-13*
Additional Sales: 2-6**

Under this situation, the gross daily sales on a shopping cart doing 10 sales a day could increase 20% -60%.

The bad news about email marketing traditionally has been the implementation and costs. Typically implementation involved a custom software solution that could take months to implement and reoccurring costs of thousands per month. Historically, this meant that only enterprises could take advantage of email remarketing. However, a shift is occurring and now solutions are being offered at the SMB level - making these tools available to small business owners with a variety of needs and helping them to maximize online sales and improve their bottom line.

*Based on shopping cart conversion rates of 50% - 25%, and contactable abandon carts at 50%

**Based on a 44% purchase rate of abandoned contactable shopping carts