Let’s rescue abandoned carts! A retargeting scenario and best practices [2024]

If you don’t have retargeting in place, you lose many potential customers every month – it’s a fact. On the other hand, when you implement retargeting, you can increase the number of orders and customers and for just a fraction of what you need to pay for a new customer. In this post, we want to show you how to make the most of retargeting in your online store so that you can build a more stable online business. Let’s have a look at the retargeting best practices. And later on, we also have a template retargeting scenario you can use!

According to Statista, the shopping cart abandonment rate is above 75%, depending on the region and shopping category.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/546885/cart-abandonment-rate-region/

In practice, this means that the vast majority of your customers will not buy anything during their first visit to your store. Hence, the need for retargeting. With this relatively straightforward marketing technique, you can stay in touch with people who visited your store but never purchased anything. 

Almost all online advertising channels have their own retargeting (or remarketing) systems, so if, e.g., you use Google Ads to promote your business on Google, you can use their retargeting feature. The same is true with Facebook, Instagram, etc. But naturally, these systems only track users who came to your store using their ads. If you have a user who visited your website through a referral, Google Ads’ system will not recognize them and, as a result – won’t retarget them.

That’s why retargeting should also be a part of your website – because you want to retarget ALL users who didn’t buy anything regardless of where they came from. That’s what we can help you with here at iPresso, more about that in a moment.

First off, let’s have a look at what best practices will help you make the most of retargeting in 2024 and beyond.

The 10 retargeting best practices

 There are ten best practices you need to adhere to if you want to retarget your customers effectively (and lawfully!):

• Customer segmentation: Retargeting must be personalized. Your audience should be divided into segments based on different factors, such as their behavior or the products they saw. If one customer was checking out shoes in your store, your retargeting strategy should also include shoes – to stay relevant to your customer.
• Appropriate frequency: Remarketing is a delicate game. You don’t want to bombard your customers with hundreds of ads that show up the second they leave the store. In the ideal scenario, you should remind yourself for the first time within an hour after the last visit to your store, then a day later, and then a few days later. Don’t be an aggressive salesman who doesn’t understand the word “no” – no one likes them.
• Not just carts: Of course, online stores are especially interested in tracking abandoned carts, but that’s not the only thing you can track. You can also try to rescue abandoned processes, such as sign-up forms or contact forms. It’s a nice way to stand out from the competition that only cares about sales.
• Personalized messaging: Segmentation is one thing, but you also need to pay attention to your messaging. An encouraging, personalized message will be more effective than a generic one. You can also think about including some small incentive, e.g., free delivery for the abandoned order. Keep in mind that acquiring a customer is worth more than making a few bucks on delivery.
• Cross-device retargeting: Today, people visit your store using different devices. They can check out your offer on their smartphone but actually place an order on the computer. That’s why cross-device retargeting is so important – you want to “follow” your customers with your offer. On our platform, you have many different communication channels to choose from, which makes your remarketing efforts more efficient:

• Exclude buyers and converters: For obvious reasons, you don’t want to keep retargeting people who have already purchased something. Imagine such a scenario: We’re still at our shoes example. You have a customer who viewed several shoes in your store but didn’t buy anything. You fire up your retargeting tool, and they start seeing remarketing messages. After seeing such a message, your customer decided to place an order, but remarketing keeps going. To what end? You will only irritate your customers. It’s not reasonable to assume they want to buy five or more pairs of shoes, right? Ensure your retargeting stops as soon as someone places an order or doesn’t respond to your communication attempts.
• Test different messages: You will not necessarily get remarketing right on the first attempt. Testing different approaches and messages is crucial to the effectiveness of your strategy. Don’t feel discouraged when your efforts are not as fruitful as you hoped. Some people will not buy from you no matter what. Many experts believe remarketing allows you to rescue around 10% of abandoned carts or processes. That may not seem like much, but 10% is still better than 0, right?
• Monitor performance: As a follow-up to the previous point, it’s crucial to measure the performance of your remarketing campaigns. If you see that your strategy doesn’t work at all, you know you need to change something about it. But you won’t know this without analytics, so make sure you have them in place.
• Automate retargeting: If you want to use remarketing, you simply need automation. Doing it manually is close to impossible not to mention the fact it would be extremely time-consuming. Retargeting is something that needs to be embedded into your website and happen on auto-pilot, 24/7.
• Compliance with privacy regulations: Lastly, you need to ensure compliance with relevant privacy regulations, such as GDPR in Europe. Before you start retargeting, you need to obtain user consent and provide transparent information about personal data usage (you can use your privacy policy and terms of service to do so).

Template: Retargeting scenario for your store

Now, let’s have a look at how your retargeting scenario should look. Of course, it’s just a template; you need to adjust it to your store, but it gives you a nice foundation:

1. A visitor opens your store’s website.
2. A push notifications pop-up is shown.
3. User gives their consent.
4. They browse two product categories.
5. They browse products in one of those categories.
6. They click the “buy now” button on one product tab.
7. They start the check-out process but abandon it halfway through.
8. The remarketing feature starts.
9. You send the first reminder – a push notification within an hour. To make it more effective, you add free delivery to encourage customers to buy.
10. The next day, you send the second reminder, via email this time. You add a selection of similar products that are currently discounted.
11. After a few days, there is one more reminder with the link to the abandoned process.
12. The retargeting feature stops.
13. Such a process is relatively simple and not too pushy. And that’s the kind of balance you need when conducting remarketing!

Use retargeting with iPresso

At iPresso, we have our own remarketing feature that works not just with products but all the other processes in your store (e.g., contact forms), which is great for service-based companies. With our tool, you can design unique reaction scenarios that utilize various communication channels.

If you’d like to see our tool in action, just sign up for a free trial! We’re happy to provide you with 30-day free access to see how our platform can work in your store. 

Start here!