The customer journey is a journey that often does not go as planned by the tour guide: When shopping online, a full three out of four customers bail out before completing the purchase, leaving behind a half filled shopping cart, according to a study by the Baymard Institut.

The ratios are similar for application forms and contact forms. Whatever motivates customers to end an application process prematurely or to leave a shopping cart full of products in the digital space – in short, to abandon a purchase – they are always interested in what the website has to offer. Therefore, they can be won back again – through retargeting, the targeted addressing of users after they have left a website.

The work is usually done by cookies from third-party services: the small snippets of code allow for individual users to be tracked across different, independent pages. If potential customers leave a website without a href=”https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/lexikon/begriffe/conversion/”>converting, they subsequently receive ads for that website on other platforms as well.

Retargeting

… is considered a particularly efficient method of winning back customers. Corresponding ads lead to success 76 percent more often than regular display ads. Consequently, there is considerable concern amongst many marketers because the end of third-party cookies is looming: Starting in 2023, Google will no longer allow third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. The Safari and Firefox browsers have not been able to use them for some time now.

The good news is that there are alternatives to cookie-based retargeting methods that are based entirely on companies’ own databases. One example is list-based targeting, where companies use the email addresses of registered customers to advertise on one or more retargeting platforms. For example, when customers sign up for a newsletter, create an account, or access gated content and agree to have their email address used for advertising purposes, they can be targeted with ads at a later date via Google, Facebook, or similar platforms.

Another cookie-free strategy for winning back customers is retargeting via e-mail, which is also known more precisely as remarketing (Bolt). Customers who have ended the customer journey early receive messages in their email inboxes: reminders about their filled shopping carts, additional product suggestions, or services that follow registration on a portal.

BENEFITS OF EMAIL REMARKETING

In contrast to retargeting, customers feel less aggressively tracked – according to a study by AgilOne, more than half of all respondents perceive emails offering products they have viewed in the past as positive (Baut). This high acceptance is also due to the high degree of personalization that can be achieved through e-mails: Addressing customers by name and special cross-selling or upselling offers and discount promotions are only possible in this form via e-mail.

… is the possession of the email addresses, the consent of the customers to receive emails and ideally further customer data for personal addresses. It is therefore essential to ask for the customers’ email addresses as early as possible – before requesting further contact details such as postal address or marital status. There are many options for integrating email queries as early as possible in different customer journeys: for example, instead of long contact forms, insurers can initially only query customers’ email addresses. This lowers the hurdle for registration. Energy suppliers could provide rate recommendations only after registration via email address. Comparison portals could link search results to the entry of an e-mail address.

Email addresses obtained in this way can also be enriched with data from CRM, transaction and call center data – provided they know how to integrate and process it correctly. Artificial intelligence can provide important services in these tasks.

AUTOMATED RETARGETING WITH ADTELLIGENCE

Acceleraid’s software solutions enable companies, for instance, to combine data from different sources and check its quality. For example, whether corresponding opt-ins are available that are necessary for sending advertising emails. AI-based personalized targeting then uses a continuous learning algorithm to segment and deliver automated email campaigns. This gives companies a solid, well-sorted and privacy-compliant basis for marketing measures as well as an efficient campaign tool. This way, the journey never ends and customers are always happy to set off again.