Retention.com for B2B is here! Try it out today
Retention.com identifies up to 35% of your website’s anonymous traffic via a code snippet that’s placed on your website.
There are two parts to Email-Based Retargeting:
When a live body that we’ve previously cookied shows up on your website, we take the hashed email address in the cookie and see if it matches any hashed email addresses in our database. Hashed is a fancy word for saying the email has been encoded for privacy.
If it does, we give you the entire, unencrypted contact record. Email, first, last, postal record, and landing page.
Yes! The magic of Email-Based Retargeting is that the identification piece brings what would otherwise be worthless, untargeted data to life.
How?
If an email address is in a cookie in someone’s browser, and that person hits your website, there is a live body that is still connected with that email address.
Those live bodies open emails. We know because we have several hundred customers using the technology. They are getting strong open rates with low complaints and unsubscribes.
The Javascript code snippet is added, by you or your webmaster, to the webpage where you want to collect emails. These email addresses belong to real people who have opted in via third party websites for email marketing offers. For examples of these offers, click here. When one of these contacts visits your website, our script matches them to a database of more than 500 million contacts and we give you those records daily, in a downloadable CSV file.
The email addresses that we identify are personal, not business, email addresses. You will get First Name, Last Name, Email address, postal address (address, city, state, zip), first seen date (opt in date), last seen date (when they hit your website), the landing page URL they hit, and the landing page domain.
Yes, Retention.com is both legal and CAN-SPAM compliant. For more information, click here.
Even though the prospect left your website without subscribing, we recommend you send them a welcome series of three to five emails. Then, once that’s done, add them to your regular mailing program.
Lead with as much value as possible, and keep in mind it’s a different journey from someone who has raised their hand and subscribed to your newsletter.
We provide you with the landing page of the contact record, and through our “complex integrations,” you have the ability to send records from a given landing page to a given list in your ESP and trigger automations accordingly.
It’s critically important to send to these contacts as soon as possible.
The only complaint problems we have ever observed have been from our customers who have accumulated contacts over several weeks, waited to send to them, and sent a normal newsletter, all at once.
For more about how to have success with Email-Based Retargeting, click here.
Retention.com works for most e-commerce businesses, but it’s important that appropriate expectations are in place going into the test, and that the test is executed properly for success.
Here are 5 things to keep in mind when you are testing Retention.com for your brand.
Under our current setup, we’ve generally seen people achieve $20 to $40 CAC with Email-Based Retargeting.
While that’s not a Christmas Miracle (I’m writing this in December), it’s another high-quality source of traffic that you can monetize at a comparable price to your other channels.
Unlike the rest of your e-commerce email marketing list, Retention.com’s email addresses didn’t purchase from you or raise their hand to be contacted. They are further up the funnel than your current list members are, so you’ll need to warm them up before they will buy.
The rules of marketing and sales funnels apply.
Once you’ve installed Retention.com, take your first day’s volume and multiply it by 20. That should give you an approximate monthly estimate for your lead count.
This will help you determine which plan is best for your brand. Put yourself on that plan and run the test.
From what we’ve observed so far, sending to these recipients as quickly as possible is the goal. Most e-comm brands add their Retention.com leads into an existing welcome series, which seems to work just fine.
The only problems we’ve seen are when people wait to email these contacts — over a week or so — then blast them with a normal newsletter.
Based on our years running an ESP (Robly), we believe that the current state of email is shifting. For the most part, if someone hits a website and then receives an email from that business, it’s not weird, infuriating, or altogether unexpected — as long as the brand is recognized by the person.
What is infuriating is when you receive email from a brand that you do not recognize whatsoever.
Email them quickly. Then once the welcome flow has finished, drop them into your regular emailing program.
We give you the landing page they hit, so you can get as sophisticated as you want in terms of targeting. We don’t think that’s necessary though. Just hit them quickly, with something.
We don’t have a real-time collection feature yet, but in 2020 we will be able to deliver you the records immediately as they come in.
Since we don’t have the feature yet, we can’t tell you how much it will benefit your e-commerce business. But with marketing and advertising in general, the sooner you can contact someone who’s visited your website or reached out in some way, the better. So intuitively, real-time collection will be beneficial, so you should plan to do it.
We’ll also be lowering the price of a lead to a starting cost of 15¢ (vs 25¢ now) if you don’t need a postal record.
That will lower CAC, and should make Email-Based Retargeting more efficient for you.
The last thing you need to make sure you do is label the Retention.com addresses inside your ESP.
You’ll be able to look back over 60 days and see whether Email-Based Retargeting was profitable for you or not.
Feel free to email me any time about your test at adam[at]retention[dot]com.
We launched a month ago, so we’re still in learning mode. Any intel from you really helps.
