SaleCycle’s Mark Smallman discusses some of the remarketing company’s least favoured strategies:

24 Hour Batch Send

With the likes of Amazon, eBay and AO.com now able to offer same-day delivery and Argos having blazed a trail with Click & Collect nearly half a decade ago, it seems incredible to us that some brands still do not respond to cart abandonment in real-time.

Statistics show that up to 50% of abandonment emails convert within the first 24 hours of someone leaving the site – which means you are potentially missing out on half of your revenues by not remarketing within this window.

Send your emails in real-time, testing whether they should 30 minutes after the shopper abandons or an hour. Look into sending a second email 24 or 48 hours after to encourage customers back to the site.

Discount Codes

They seem like such a great idea. If you provide someone with a 10% discount code or offer them a free gift, the customer will be more likely to return and purchase, right?

Actually…that is wrong. More and more, the customer is instead being trained to wait for the discount code. To purposely abandon their basket in the hope that you will show them a pop-up or send them an email incentivising them to return. Research shows that rather than provide an increment over non-incentivised campaigns, this merely eats into your margins.

We do not like them and actively encourage brands to avoid using them. You would not grab everyone trying to leave a high street shop and offer them 10% off if they buy right then and there. Have faith in your brand and your products.

Non-responsive content

This is email marketing 101. Mobile now accounts for over 50% of email opens. Think about that for a second. More than half of the content you are sending to your customers is being opened on a small screen.

In spite of this, we all receive emails every day that fail to respond to the size of the screen they are being opened on. Conversion rates on mobile are already a quarter of what they are on desktop – you effectively reduce this to 0 by not providing a mobile-optimised experience. Yet still we see people make this mistake time and time again.

A failure to personalise

Personalisation was the industry buzzword of 2013, with every software business beginning to offer some degree of “personalisation”. The level of this varied wildly from advanced segmentation technology, to a full-on personalisation of the shopping journey.

You may not have access to the thousands of algorithms needed to fully personalise the customers’ experience, but there is no excuse for not nailing the “basics”. Ensure that your remarketing content shows the customer items and content that is totally relevant to them – the items they abandoned, for example.

We have lost count of the amount of times we have thrown our hands in the air in frustration at SaleCycle Towers because someone has received an email that does not mention their name, or what they abandoned and simply asks them to come back and reclaim their basket. It does not take long to integrate some simple codes to pull in complete basket content or to address the customer by their first name. Get creative – some of our favourite work involved changing the look and feel of an email to match the gender of a fashion shopper, or reflect the destination of a traveller.

Being Boring

Let us assume you have got the other four points in this piece nailed, and that you are close to mastering remarketing to your customers. What is next?

Well, far too many businesses would sit back on their laurels and not try to push themselves to do better. Start looking at what else you could incorporate into your remarketing efforts.

There are so many other ways to keep pushing your remarketing campaign, such as integrating with SMS providers to target people on mobile; experimenting with Review Content to increase click-throughs; using Gamification to increase engagement; and even one-touch payments to attempt to remove the click from the process entirely.

The industry is moving quickly and the winners will always be those who can keep ahead of the curve.