We live in an age of short attention spans and instant gratification. Be honest, how many of you scrolled to the bottom of this post to see how long it was before you decided to commit to reading it?
It’s okay to admit it, we all do it. That’s exactly why recency is so crucial when it comes to remarketing to your website traffic. In marketing parlance, a “hotline” refers to a segment of prospects who have been active or made a purchase within the last 30 days. So you can imagine how much “hotter” a hotline consisting of website visitors from a day ago – even an hour ago – would be. Think “surface of the sun” type of hot, and you’d be pretty close.
The quicker you are able to retarget those website visitors with personalized email and direct mail after they’ve made a visit to your website, the greater your chances are of converting them into a paying customer.
Just how great are they? Well, in a recent preliminary use study conducted for Remarketable, one company found that emailing anonymous website visitors who came to the site within the last 7 days produced an open rate that was 6 times greater than the open rate of visitors who came to the website within the last three weeks.
But wait…there’s more! The click-through rate on emails sent to visitors who came to the site within the last 7 days was 9 times higher than the click-through rate for visitors who came to the website prior to that.
If all of this seems like common sense, that’s because it is! Or at least it should be.
After all, how many times have you visited a website, browsed around for a little – maybe even added an item or two to your shopping cart – and then got distracted by something else going on? Maybe you had every intention of coming back later to complete your purchase, but you just plain forgot.
It happens all the time, which is why it’s so important to have the ability to retarget those unknown website visitors as quickly as possible with an offer or discount via email or direct mail.
Being able to reach out to those potential customers – who you know have already shown interest in your brand – both quickly and effectively, could mean the difference between them buying from you or from a competitor.