5 smart ecommerce retargeting strategies to recover lost sales

Up to 97% of website visitors are never ready to place an order after their first visit to your online store. Another report by the Baymard Institute estimates 70.19% of ecommerce carts are abandoned. You must retarget both sets of visitors, otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table. 

But, while every ecommerce business owner knows they need to retarget their website visitors to drive more sales, the majority do not know the right incentives for doing so. That’s why most retargeting campaigns revolve around discounts and coupon codes. But take a moment to think about this.  

Just 2 of the top 10 reasons behind why shoppers abandon carts are related to the price, according to the same Baymard Institute. That means a retargeting strategy that relies on price cuts alone will miss many other sales recovery opportunities.

This article will look at five ecommerce retargeting strategies that go beyond price cuts. I will show real-life examples of how successful ecommerce brands address the different buyer objections and concerns in their remarketing strategies. 

What is ecommerce retargeting?

Ecommerce retargeting is a marketing strategy where an ecommerce business reaches out to potential customers who’ve interacted with the brand in some way. These prospective customers may have interacted with the brand by clicking an ad that led them to the ecommerce website. They might also be coming from organic campaigns on search engines and social media platforms. 

While some potential customers will only browse through product categories or product pages, some might go a step further to add items to the cart, but fail to complete the checkout process. 

Most ecommerce retargeting campaigns target potential buyers who interacted with the brand but did not make a purchase. This is where browse abandonment and cart abandonment recovery campaigns come into play. 

However, retargeting campaigns target potential buyers alone. Some campaigns can also target previous buyers with new offers. For example, you may find a store retargeting customers who have made a purchase in the past but have not engaged with the brand recently. This is where another strategy called remarketing comes into play.

Ecommerce remarketing is similar to retargeting, except this time you’re targeting people who’ve already bought something from your store. This is where you will find campaigns such as win-back emails, replenishment reminders, and upsell and cross-sell offers.  

Essentially, the difference between ecommerce retargeting and ecommerce remarketing is that retargeting campaigns help you acquire new customers, whereas ecommerce remarketing campaigns support your customer retention efforts. Ecommerce remarketing helps you unlock more value from existing customers so you can boost your customer lifetime value (LTV).

Importance of an effective eCommerce retargeting strategy

Ecommerce retargeting must be part of your ecommerce customer acquisition strategy. Here are two reasons why.

It helps you close lost sales

As I mentioned above, only a fraction of website visitors are ready to buy when they visit a site for the first time. At the same time, the average cart abandonment rate stands at 70.19%, meaning that more than a third of the people who add items to their cart in your store will leave without completing their orders. 

In both cases, you’ve received potential customers who have expressed some sort of interest in your products. Some of these customers have higher buying intent (those who go as far as adding items to their cart), while others are still shopping around, but have not quite made the decision to purchase. 

Ecommerce retargeting helps you recover sales from both scenarios. A great retargeting campaign targeting cart abandoners will help you remind prospects about the items they’ve left in their cart. These campaigns also help you address common objections that may have stopped customers from completing their orders in the first place. 

For example, create retargeting ads featuring social proof and UGC to show a prospect that other customers approve of the product. Your retargeting ad creative can also mention your money-back guarantee and return policy in case the customer was hesitant because of an unclear return policy. 

That’s what Nectar Sleep does with this Facebook ad.

For customers who abandoned their carts after encountering unexpected charges during checkout, a retargeting ad with a coupon code can help them cross the finish line.

What about the potential customers who only browsed categories and have not yet made a buying decision? An effective retargeting strategy segments your website visitors to know what actions they took while on your website. This data is used to run personalized retargeting ads featuring dynamic creatives that show items from the product category the customer has shown interest in. 

You can also retarget these customers with lead-nurturing ads. For example, you can use a quiz funnel to engage them and collect their email address. A content download is another common top and middle-of-the-funnel retargeting strategy. 

These campaigns keep your brand top of mind, so customers can think about your online store when they’re finally ready to make a purchase. 

It has a higher conversion rate 

Ecommerce retargeting ads see higher click-through and conversion rates than regular marketing campaigns. 

Research shows that retargeting ads get an average CTR of 0.7% compared to just 0.07% for regular display ads. Moreover, site visitors retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert when they land on a retailer’s website. 

This makes sense because retargeting campaigns go after users who are already familiar with your brand. Plus, you’re sure of what they’re interested in because you have data on their activities on your site. That puts you in a better position to target them with more relevant and customized ads that are more likely to convert. 

Ecommerce retargeting tips 

It’s clear that every ecommerce store needs a retargeting strategy. You’ll see much higher conversion rates and sales with these campaigns than you would from cold traffic. But how do you create a successful retargeting campaign? Follow these five best practices.

1. Use sequential retargeting ads

Sequential advertising is an effective paid ads campaign strategy where you target potential customers with a series of ads that build upon each other. The series features various ad creatives that are distributed and delivered over several days.

This paid advertising strategy delivers several advantages. First, it ensures your potential buyers are not exposed to the same ad repeatedly. This is really important because ad fatigue reduces the effectiveness of your campaigns. 

Secondly, sequential advertising can help you nurture the leads in the same way you would with a sales funnel. Your initial ad creatives can focus on aggravating the pain point and building trust with the leads. The final ads can shift gears to tell users about potential solutions to their problems, i.e., pitching your products. 

That strategy can be especially effective when you’re retargeting customers who are still in the early stages of the customer journey. For the folks who have already shown high buying intent through actions like adding items to cart or wishlist, a more direct series of ads featuring social proof and discounts will help you close the sale much faster. 

So, how do you set up a successful sequential advertising campaign?

First, install the tracking pixel to help you retarget customers across Google ads and social media. Next, you need to segment your website visitors to target them more effectively. A good starting point is having separate segments for visitors who only browsed through product pages or categories and those who added items to their cart. 

I’ll discuss audience segmentation further below. 

Once you have your audience set, you’ll need to think about the path you want potential customers to take. Each segment will have a different path because they’re at different stages of the customer journey. Targeting someone who abandoned their cart with a resource download will not work.

Here are two potential paths for the two segments I mentioned above, i.e., product browsers and cart abandoners. 

Product Browsers: Reminder of the product they viewed > Differentiator that sets your product apart > Social proof to build trust > Time-limited offer to encourage conversions

Cart abandoners: Simple cart reminder > Cart reminder addressing objections (returns, fast shipping, BNPL option) > Cart reminder with social proof > Cart reminder with a time-sensitive discount

Use dynamic retargeting ad creatives to ensure the same products a customer viewed are pulled and used in your campaigns. Ad frequency is another thing to consider. You don’t want to expose one potential customer to the same ad too many times within a very short period of time. This causes ad fatigue and reduces the effectiveness of your campaigns. 

Aim for 2 to 3 impressions max per day per user.

Additionally, since you’ll be showing different creatives, it’s crucial for your ad design to maintain a consistent branding style. This boosts recognition and recall. 

Finally, keep track of key metrics, such as conversion rate per sequence and return on ad spend (ROAS), to understand which sequences and creatives resonate with your target market.

2. Create an email retargeting strategy

Email is an incredibly effective channel you can use to retarget potential customers. The beauty of email marketing is that it allows you to have a one-on-one interaction with each customer. 

Email automation tools like GetResponse track customer behavior on your online store and then personalize each email based on the products the customer viewed or the items they left in the cart.

That said, you can only use email to reach customers who are already on your email list. If a potential customer visits and abandons your site without leaving their email address, you won’t be able to reach them through this channel.

As such, you must invest in a lead capture system. This is where lead-capturing pop-up campaigns like timed and exit-intent pop-ups come in handy. A timed pop-up is designed to be deployed after a customer has spent a certain amount of time in your store. An exit-intent pop-up, on the other hand, tries to capture the visitor’s email address when it notices them navigating away from your site. 

These pop-ups help you capture email addresses you can use to retarget potential customers. And the best part is that email is much cheaper and cuts the middleman, i.e., third-party advertising platforms. This allows you to have a direct relationship with your customers.

That’s why you see most online stores go to the extent of using welcome discounts as incentives just so they can capture email addresses.

The best way to use email for retargeting and remarketing is to automate the campaigns. GetResponse Max allows you to build email workflows to retarget potential customers based on the specific actions they take. You can use premade retargeting templates for campaigns like cart abandonment, as shown below. 

The platform also provides a visual workflow builder you can use to build a custom workflow based on your own specific rules and conditions. 

Besides retargeting customers who are yet to convert, you can use email for remarketing campaigns to bring lapsed customers back to the fold. For example, an automated winback email campaign can track customers who have not engaged with your audience for a specific number of days. 

Here’s what that workflow could look like. 

My recommendation is to combine paid advertising via Google Display Network and social media ads with email retargeting campaigns. Don’t just rely on the increasingly expensive paid channels. Be intentional about capturing a website visitor’s email address before they abandon your site. Then, run an effective email marketing strategy that will help you win that sale and build long-term brand loyalty. 

3. Use advanced segmentation

One of the quickest ways to waste your ad spend is to adopt a spray-and-pray approach. Different customers come to your store with different needs. This is especially the case for ecommerce stores with diverse product lines. 

Different customers also have different concerns and objections. One customer may not be worried about shipping charges. They’re most interested in knowing the product actually works. 

Perhaps they’ve had bad experiences in the past where they bought items to address the same pain points, but the products didn’t work. They don’t want to spend money on another product that would fail once again. 

All this to say that you can’t use one blanket strategy across all your retargeting campaigns. Unfortunately, that’s one of the most common mistakes ecommerce marketers make. They create retargeting campaigns that revolve around discounts, assuming all customers failed to convert because of price-related concerns.

To enhance the overall effectiveness of your retargeting campaigns, analyze your customer behaviors and use those insights to place them in relevant segments. 

The first segmentation strategy you may want to experiment with is based on buying intent. Your ad dollars are better spent on customers who are closest to making a purchase. This helps you maintain your cash flow. 

Therefore, use behavioral signals to identify hot prospects who are ready to make a purchase, warm leads who are close to making a buying decision, and cold leads that still require some lead nurturing efforts to convert. 

Use the following signals to determine buying intent:

• Product pages viewed
• Time spent on your site
• Items added to cart (or wish list)

Target hot leads with a fast purchase path to close the sale while the lead is still interested. 

Predicted LTV is another segmentation strategy you can use to get maximum value from your retargeting ad spend. This strategy involves analyzing your products to identify the items with the highest profit margins. You can then segment potential customers based on whether they browsed or tried to buy high-margin or low-margin products. 

This clever strategy helps you prioritize customers who are likely to generate the most revenue for your ecommerce business. It also allows you to know what incentives to use for what set of customers. Here is what I mean.

It’ll make sense to raise your customer acquisition cost (CAC) slightly by adding more compelling incentives like discounts to convert prospects looking at high-margin products. You can’t do the same for prospects looking at low-margin products, where free shipping might be the best you can do to stay profitable.  

4. Retarget previous buyers

Customer retention is extremely important for a successful ecommerce business. Your ability to keep existing customers will help you scale much faster. It can also help you attract new customers at a lower price. This is achieved through customer referral programs, which are easier to run when you have a happy customer base.

Retargeting previous buyers helps you optimize the LTV of each customer. This helps lower your customer acquisition costs over time and increase your profit margins. 

You can use both paid advertising and email marketing to retarget your previous buyers. For example, a post-purchase email campaign upselling buyers to a subscription service can help you secure repeat purchases from customers. 

Use your purchase data to determine the perfect time to retarget existing customers. Let’s assume your store sells consumables like pet food or vitamins. Your purchase data will tell you the general purchase cycle. You can go deeper and analyze the cycle of individual customers, i.e., how often they place an order. 

Use this data to run personalized retargeting ads or deploy automated emails to remind customers about reordering their items. 

What if you don’t sell consumables? You can still retarget your past customers with complementary products or tell them about the new versions of the item they bought in the past.

5. A/B test your retargeting campaigns

A/B testing is the best way to ensure your offers, ad creatives, audience paths, and other elements of your retargeting campaigns produce maximum ROI.

Start by testing your offers to see what resonates the most with your target audience. For example, you can split test a percentage discount vs a dollar amount off. Another incentive worth testing is free shipping.

Ad format is another element you want to test. Test lifestyle content ad vs dynamic product ad vs video testimonials to see which ones generate the highest conversion rates for your specific target market. 

The type of product you include in your retargeting reminders can also influence your ability to bring buyers back to your site and have them place an order. Do all your reminders focus on just the one product the prospect viewed, or are you also showing other variations of that product? 

Let’s say a customer viewed a particular model of running shoes. Do you target that customer with dynamic ads focusing on the exact pair of running shoes, or do you also show them a different model of running shoes?

This is known as SKU depth. You can test single vs cluster SKU. While a single SKU focuses on just the item the customer bought, a cluster SKU can introduce the buyer to higher value product alternatives and complementary products. This can increase your average order value (AOV).

As you run these SKU depth tests, keep an eye on metrics like the conversion rate, time-to-convert, add-to-cart rate, and ROAS.  

4 brilliant ecommerce retargeting examples to inspire your next campaign 

Here are some examples of exciting ecommerce retargeting advertising 

Example 1. Sequential advertising from Emily Ley

Check out this sequential ad by Emily Ley that is distributed across the Meta/Facebook business platforms.

The brand was promoting a planner. The user is first retargeted on Facebook with a helpful guide titled “3 tips for work + life balance.” This is an educational content guide. It helps ease the customer’s pain point and introduces them to the brand. 

The next ad is on Instagram. This time, the brand is giving the user a 25% discount on the product. Finally, the last ad uses social proof to eliminate any lingering doubts the potential customer might still have. 

Example 2. Browse abandonment email retargeting from OluKai

This is one of my favorite email retargeting campaigns. 

OluKai clearly keeps track of the items its email subscribers view. In this case, they retarget the user with a pair of shoes they browsed. But they don’t stop there. They also introduce the user to other similar products they may want to look at. 

The email copy is also super interesting. They point out to the customer that these items sell fast, so they really need to go back and place their order while they still can. Then you have details on return policies, guarantee, and free shipping towards the bottom of the email. 

Example 3: Abandoned cart email reminder by Casper 

Casper’s incredible ecommerce email marketing strategy includes this fun and compelling abandoned cart recovery email.

The playful headline, “Come back to bed,” reminds the customer about the items they left in their carts. Also, they’ve included a customer testimonial of the product in case the buyer was having second thoughts about its quality. 

Example 4. Customer winback email 

Here is a simple winback email example.

The brand provides a coupon code to incentivize the customer to place their first order. They also welcome the customer to provide feedback by replying directly to the email.

In closing

Ecommerce retargeting is the best way to maximize the ROI of your customer acquisition efforts. Remember, the majority of potential customers coming to your ecommerce site will not convert during their first trip. A retargeting strategy allows you to reach these customers once again with more personalized product recommendations and offers.

The best practice is to reconnect with customers across multiple channels. Paid campaigns on search engines, display ads, and social media ads are vital. Still, complement these marketing efforts with an equally effective strategy on your owned channels, i.e., email, SMS, and push notifications. 

Check out GetResponse Max in case you want a platform that can automate your retargeting and remarketing campaigns across paid ads channels and email campaigns. Ecommerce stores like Eveline Cosmetics and Pako Lorente use this solution to automate product recommendations, email campaigns, and other marketing strategies.