The Journey's the Destination

Some people view your emails, a proportion click the links, a number of those look round your site and a subset of the rest buy your product. Each time the recipient is telling you something more about their interests. Retargeting is a way of using this information for subsequent communication.
 
Any email database will have some degree of segmentation based on declared preferences – for instance at registration e.g. an interest in Iceland.
 
This information can be supplemented with observed behaviour – which emails they viewed, which links they clicked, what pages on your site the viewed and what they bought (looked at weekend breaks but didn’t purchase?).
 
This information can then be used to determine the nature and content of follow up messages to retarget customers (weekend breaks in Iceland?).
 
The possibilities are endless, and the deeper you track behaviour, the more engaged you can make the conversation – offering dozens of unique offers to different customers (a weekend break at the Ice Hotel in Reykjavik? With an option for car hire?). It can all happen in real time, with systems which flow content dynamically into templates for follow up emails and ad servers which select banners dynamically based on your criteria.

Subsequent communications can reflect prospect’s interests, based on which pages they viewed while on your site the first time. Another option is to follow prospects who abandon a shopping cart with a particular product in it - when they see the retargeted message, it can be geared directly at the product that they almost bought.
 
The underlying technology is driven by cookies and embedded pixels logging opens and views placed in emails, on ads and on the around the client’s website
 
Specifics of how consumers buy a particular product can also get in the way, it works best for products with a longer buying cycle which people might research, but not work so well for products with a shorter buying cycle.
 
For retargeting to really work, the approach needs to encompass all of your digital communications in an integrated way, using the same methodology and tools to track and control email, banner, search, affiliate and website traffic.
 
Retargeting also requires bigger campaigns to generate a critical mass of traffic –as leads are better qualified over time, the volumes reduce – it can use a lot of coverage on ad networks and so it may not work with smaller clients.