Boomerang

How Havas Helia Uses Email to Retarget and Convert Customers

Online shopping has taken the world by storm. It’s easy, gives you lots of options, and best of all, you can do it from the comfort of your home — and in your favorite PJs.

But how often do you find yourself adding something (or several somethings) to your virtual cart, only to leave without making the purchase?

The answer is probably “pretty often.” In fact, the average rate for online cart abandonment in the U.S. is around 72% (Serrano, 2019). And if you’re a business or service, that can make a pretty big dent on sales, especially if you don’t have an effective retargeting strategy in place to go after customers who either forgot to complete the sale or planned to purchase later.

What is retargeting?

Retargeting is, at its most basic, using first-party cookies — the digital tracking kind, not the delicious kind–to reach out to users who have previously visited your site.

Here’s an example: you’re shopping online and leave something in your cart before closing out. Then, when you click over to Facebook, SURPRISE! There’s an ad for something you just were looking at. Or maybe you leave something in your cart on a site where you’ve already entered your email — the next day, there’s a “Left something behind?” or “Forget something?” email in your inbox.

Email retargeting is a great–and effective–way to boost sales.

With retargeting, you gain an opportunity to increase revenue by turning cart abandoners into converting customers. In fact, there is a 10% recovery rate for an abandoned cart when a retargeting strategy is applied.

Havas Helia makes retargeting easy and stress-free with Boomerang, our in-house process for helping you turn cart-abandoners into purchasing customers. It’s cost-efficient, produces fast turnaround, and leverages our decades of marketing experience to get you the results you want. This program builds automated email retargeting campaigns that detect when a potential customer leaves something in their cart or browses and leaves without making a purchase, then uses this information to start sending retargeting emails.

Here’s how it works:

Identify the reason for cart abandonment

When developing a retargeting strategy and campaign, it’s extremely important to consider the various reasons a potential customer would abandon their cart. Some common reasons may include:

• They’re just browsing.
• They’re researching product options.
• They stumbled upon your website — possibly through a targeted banner ad — and are interested in your products, but use the cart as more of a “wish list” so they can research cheaper options.
• They’re about to convert but receive an unexpected shipping cost.
• The website isn’t mobile-friendly or has user experience issues.

Develop a retargeting campaign based on the reason for abandonment.

You’ll most likely end up needing a few different campaigns for retargeting with unique wording, timing, or visual layout tailored to each reason for cart abandonment.

This will involve:

• Configuring event processing timing and data elements to capture
• Placing a snippet of code throughout the website to track customer events
• Designing campaign emails
• Setting triggers that will automatically deploy the right email when an event occurs that matches the cart abandonment reason.

Put the campaign in motion

This is where those cookies come into play. As soon as your potential customer inputs their email into any form on your website, a bit of code assigns a cookie. This cookie helps track the customer by knowing who they are when they return and, by tracking at which stage a potential customer exits the website, allowing you to learn the reason for cart abandonment. Once the user exits the site, their event data (actions the user takes on the site) will sync with any ESP (email service provider) — and Boomerang kicks into gear. Based on the reason for cart abandonment, an automated email campaign will be created and start emailing the customer to remind them of what they were interested in buying.

How long a Boomerang campaign takes:

• Discovery: 1–3 days
• Development: 1–4 week(s)
• QA and User Acceptance Testing: 1 week
• Deployment/Live Push: 1 day

Ready to join us in leaving no cart behind? Contact us at hello@havashelia.com.