Email-Based Retargeting is the best way to identify anonymous traffic on your website, connect those visitors to a robust profile (including postal address), nurture them through Email Marketing (or Direct Mail), and convert them to paying customers.

What makes Email-Based Retargeting different from traditional Email Marketing is that Email-Based Retargeting gives you email addresses of people you DO NOT have an opt-in for, making it a revolutionary list-growth and conversion concept.

It’s the best way to increase your list growth speed, by up to 10x.

Email-Based Retargeting allows you to identify and capture up to 35% of your anonymous website visitors, then email them in a 100% CAN-SPAM compliant way.

Instead of paying Facebook and Google over and over again for the same click, Email-Based Retargeting allows you to capture a visitor’s full profile one time, and market to them forever (or until they opt out).

Why is Email-Based Retargeting such an innovative idea?

It bridges the existing, massive gap between Identification/Tracking technologies and Data Enrichment technologies.

Before Retention.com invented Email-Based Retargeting, you could use technology like Clearbit Reveal or LeadFeeder to identify companies — not specific people — visiting your website.

There is a clear use case for enterprise sales, but for most of us, knowing the companies that visited our websites is mostly useless.

The other technology that existed in the pre–Email-Based Retargeting world was Data Enrichment technology, like Clearbit Enrich or Full Contact. You can provide those businesses with a list of email addresses, and the products provide profiles on the people behind them.

There was a huge gap between website ID technology and enrichment technology before it was closed by Email-Based Retargeting.

Email Marketing used to be a bottom-of-the-funnel exercise only.

After the website visitor showed a high level of intent and opted in to receive email marketing (usually after substantial trust was built through content or word of mouth), you nurtured that lead further down the sales funnel and eventually converted that prospect into a buyer.

Retention.com's Email-Based Retargeting is an invention that has moved Email Marketing further up the funnel.

Email-Based Retargeting leads visit your website, and we can tell you which page they landed on.

However, since they didn’t opt in, they are much higher up the funnel than the emails you’ve been marketing to for the past 10 years. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity.

You can’t simply treat an Email-Based Retargeting lead like you would a normal subscriber, or someone who has already purchased.

You must nurture them more, and due to this simple fact, these leads will take longer to convert than those who have opted in.

This longer conversion period is clearly a downside of Email-Based Retargeting.

However, the biggest positive point that outshines any downside is that Email-Based Retargeting captures up to 35% of LOST traffic to your site so that you CAN start warming them up to eventually become buyers.

With respect to the sales funnel, Email-Based Retargeting is at the same level as display or Facebook retargeting. If you can make those leads convert, you’ll have a field day with Email-Based Retargeting.

Just don’t treat it like the rest of your email list.

If your #1 goal this year is to get your list to grow faster, Email-Based Retargeting is the #1 thing you should be using, above all else.

Email-Based Retargeting provides you with contact records of people who are on your website, that you can email in a CAN-SPAM compliant way, to extend your reach and build your brand.

Email-Based Retargeting can increase your list growth speed by up to 10x.

There is no other channel will grow your list in such a rapid, targeted, and cost-effective manner.

Email-Based Retargeting is a proven method to increase list growth speed, re-capture bounced traffic, and nurture leads into paying customers.

Implementing Email-Based Retargeting doesn’t mean you have to throw everything out and start from scratch. It’s an easy-to-use technology that will complement your existing marketing strategy. It’s simple to implement, and once you’ve set up all of your automated communications that will nurture the leads coming in from your website, you won’t need to touch it again.

We’ve boiled it down to a simple Retention.com/Email-Based Retargeting framework.

Step 1. Identify anonymous visitors

Place our Retention.com Email-Based Retargeting script on your website and test at installation whether or not it’s connected properly.

We also provide a suppression script, which will exclude anyone who lands on that page from the list of records we send you. We send the records once per day.

You’ll know what URL each lead landed on and what time they landed. We do not currently follow their journey throughout your site; just the first page they hit.

Step 2. Integrate with your Email Marketing software

We integrate with all major Email Marketing software programs, with more vendors coming on board every day to provide Email-Based Retargeting to their customers. We also integrate with Zapier, so if you use a vendor that we don’t have an integration for yet, you can connect Retention.com with more than 1,400 applications.

You can choose which list to add email addresses to, then, if your Email Marketing application’s segmenting is robust enough, you can segment and target by landing page.

If your Email Marketing application isn’t robust enough, we’d recommend you switch to Robly Email Marketing, Retention.com's parent company, and leading innovator in the email space.

We will also make sure that we don’t charge you for any emails that are on your existing list in your Email Marketing app. To do this, we’ll upload your list into Retention.com as a suppression list to prevent duplicates.

Step 3. Receive robust Email-Based Retargeting profiles every day

The beauty of Email-Based Retargeting is that we give you email addresses that 1) you don’t already have and 2) that you’re allowed to send bulk email to. How? We have over 300mm emails that have opted-in to receive promotions from our partner network. As long as you provide an opt out link, it’s 100% CAN-SPAM compliant.

Retention.com Email-Based Retargeting doesn’t work outside the USA, so GDPR isn’t relevant.

We don’t just send you emails. We send you full profiles, including postal addresses, opt-in date, and landing page URL.

Don’t just send emails — send postcards to people on your highest-intent pages!

Step 4. Segment Email-Based Retargeting leads by landing page

Once you’ve got Retention.com up and running, you’ll have the URL of every Email-Based Retargeting lead that hits your website as a data field in the records we send to your Email Marketing application.

Then, you’ll be able to segment by that field in your Email Marketing app and trigger hyper-targeted drip campaigns based on where they landed on your website.

As we mentioned before, our technology will only show you the first page they land on. You are able to suppress certain pages, though, to prevent those email addresses from being collected.

For example, you’d want to suppress post-checkout confirmation or thank you pages, because people have already provided an email address by the time they land on these pages.

Your ability to target with Email-Based Retargeting is limited only by your own imagination!

Step 5. Nurture EBR leads with automated email

As we mentioned earlier, Email-Based Retargeting changes Email Marketing completely by moving it further up the funnel than it ever was before. As such, if you’re looking to convert these leads into paying customers, you’ll need to treat them differently than the rest of your list.

We recommend automated email drips, with lots of value provided early on.

Here’s a series that we’ve seen get results:

Keep it short, and try to get a response out of the lead. Asking questions is a great way to get responses!

Many Email-Based Retargeting users’ only goal is to grow their email list faster to improve their branding and reach, rather than direct response. If your goal is to improve reach, we still recommend you do a short introduction to your Email-Based Retargeting leads using only Email 1 and 2.

Step 6. Convert Email-Based Retargeting leads

There are two typical conversion goals for marketers using Email-Based Retargeting.

Conversion to an opt-in

If the marketer is extremely sophisticated and already has digital channels set up that are producing, she may set a conversion goal of getting the opt-in from the Email-Based Retargeting lead, then take that opted-in lead through her digital sales funnel.

The math is as follows:

If the marketer can pay $.25 on average for a Retention.com Email-Based Retargeting lead, and knows an opted-in email address is worth $2.50, she knows that she can comfortably spend up to $2.00 per EBR lead trying to get the opt in to her funnel.

The higher the value of an opt-in, the more you can spend to move the lead to an opt in.

Conversion to a sale

The other type of conversion goal we see (mainly with ecommerce companies) is conversion to sale.

This typically involves a short warmup series to inform the Email-Based Retargeting lead who you are and how you are different. Then, the lead is added to a daily or frequent newsletter or promotional email.

As we mentioned earlier, Email-Based Retargeting leads are much higher in the funnel than normal opt-in email addresses, so it’s going to take them longer to be comfortable enough to buy than a normal, opt in lead.

PulseTV, an e-commerce company, says that they typically wait six weeks to evaluate any Email-Based Retargeting emails that they market to.

When they evaluate the ROI after six weeks, they see the emails are worth around $1.75 each, which at around $.25 cost from Retention.com, is a 7x ROI.