What is Digital Remarketing and When to Consider Using It?

Remarketing is a cousin of another digital marketing strategy, retargeting. The terms are often used interchangeably but they are distinct—although the lines between them are blurring. Both strategies provide valuable consumer touchpoints and both are means to increase conversions, sales, and customer base.

Remarketing historically has been done via email to re-engage a specific prospect or customer. It is implemented to reach the buyers further down in the brand’s sales funnel.

Retargeting pushes prospects further down the path to purchase with paid media. It generally focuses on serving digital ads to a more general customer bucket or profile. The audience is more top-of-the-funnel.

However, email is no longer in its own marketing silo, separate from paid media. Therefore, remarketing today often includes serving paid ads to individuals who visited your website or engaged with your social media content. In another multichannel marketing iteration, digital platforms enable marketers to use their email lists to target consumers on those platforms. For example, Facebook has a feature to create custom audiences based on a company’s website visitors.

Therefore, because the two digital strategies (remarketing and retargeting) work together to support a marketing plan and deliver strong ROI, we discuss remarketing here as a blend between the two.

How remarketing works

A brand’s website is the vital hub of its digital marketing—and strong website traffic provides many opportunities for brands to create remarketing campaigns.

Consumers are engaging with a brand’s website for various reasons—to learn about a product or service, to compare pricing with your competitors, view a tutorial video, download an ebook, and more. That’s why so many remarketing campaigns are based on that website activity.

Getting that all-important first-party consumer data is key for developing a remarketing campaign. That consumer information is captured and tracked in several ways online, when someone:

• Clicks on an online display ad
• Visits a web page – and then gets digital ads served to them based on that page’s content (although the online tracking made possible by website cookies will change how retargeting is implemented when the cookie-less future becomes reality)
• Downloads a form or a guide
• Completes a lead generation form
• Engages with social media or website content

Those users become part of an audience to which the brand remarkets its products or services (either as someone who didn’t complete the sale or transaction, or someone who made a purchase). For example, if your company sent an email to a subscriber about a renewal or a reminder about your brand’s products they’ve bought, that’s remarketing in its purest form.