Remarketing is marketing to people you have already marketed to. In practice it means sending emails or messages to contacts you know, because they bought from you, signed up for your list, downloaded a freebie or left items in a cart. You own the relationship and the channel, so each message costs almost nothing to send.

It concerns every seller with a customer list, which is every seller after the first order. A creator with 800 buyers of a $29 course, a brand with 12,000 newsletter subscribers and a small store with 3,000 past customers are all sitting on the cheapest traffic they will ever get. Remarketing is how you use it. Retargeting ads do a similar job with paid media and anonymous visitors; the section below explains the difference.

What is remarketing?

Remarketing is any communication aimed at an identified contact, based on something that contact did or did not do. The trigger can be a purchase, a sign-up, a cart left behind, an unopened email, a product page viewed while logged in, or simply time passing since the last order. The channel is usually email, sometimes SMS or WhatsApp, occasionally a physical postcard.

The word causes confusion because Google named its ad product "remarketing" in 2010, so many articles use remarketing and retargeting as synonyms. The useful distinction is about who you talk to and what you pay:

  • Retargeting ads reach anonymous visitors identified by a pixel or cookie. You pay the ad platform per impression or click. The audience shrinks as consent rates fall and cookies expire.
  • Remarketing reaches known contacts identified by an email address or phone number. You pay for the sending tool, not per message. The audience only shrinks when people unsubscribe.

What remarketing is not: it is not the weekly newsletter sent to everyone. A newsletter is broadcast. Remarketing is triggered, targeted and timed by the contact's own behaviour. It is also not spam: it goes only to people who gave you their address and can leave with one click, and the opt-in has to be real.

Related terms: email marketing is the wider discipline, cart abandonment is the most common trigger, lead nurturing is remarketing to contacts who have not bought yet, and customer lifetime value is the number remarketing exists to raise.

Why it matters

Acquiring a new customer costs money every time. Bringing a known contact back costs a few cents. Consider a store with 3,000 past customers, a $55 average order and a 25% reorder rate per year without any effort. That is 750 repeat orders and $41,250 a year in repeat revenue.

Now add three remarketing flows: a post-purchase series, a 60-day "we miss you" email and a cart recovery sequence. Suppose they lift the reorder rate from 25% to 38%. That is 1,140 repeat orders instead of 750, or $21,450 in extra revenue. The email tool costs $40 a month, so $480 a year. The return is roughly 44 dollars for every dollar spent. No ad campaign comes close, because no ad campaign starts with people who already trust you.

There is a second effect. Every order that comes from remarketing is an order you did not have to buy from Meta or Google. Stores that grow their list and their flows see their blended acquisition cost fall year after year, which is the difference between a business that survives a rise in ad prices and one that does not.

How it works

A remarketing programme is a set of automated flows plus occasional manual campaigns. Each flow has a trigger, a delay, a message and an exit condition.

  • Collect the address with consent. Checkout, a sign-up form, a lead magnet or a pop-up. Store the date and source of consent.
  • Define the trigger. Order placed, cart abandoned for 1 hour, no purchase in 60 days, product viewed by a logged-in customer, subscription about to lapse.
  • Segment. First-time buyers and repeat buyers get different messages. A customer who bought a course does not need the course pitch again; she needs the follow-up.
  • Write the sequence. Two to four messages spaced over days, each with one job. Cart recovery: reminder at 1 hour, help at 24 hours, incentive at 72 hours if margins allow.
  • Set exit rules. Anyone who buys leaves the sequence immediately. Anyone who unsubscribes leaves everything.
  • Measure per flow. Open rate, click rate, orders and revenue per email sent. Attribute orders with a unique discount code or a tracked link.

Timing matters as much as content. The first cart reminder within the hour catches people who were interrupted. The 60-day win-back catches people who forgot you exist. A message sent too early feels pushy, too late feels random.

Benchmarks and examples

Figures you can expect from a healthy list of a small store or creator:

  • Open rate: 35% to 55% for triggered flows, 20% to 30% for broadcast campaigns.
  • Click rate: 4% to 10% for triggered flows, 1.5% to 3% for broadcasts.
  • Cart recovery: 5% to 12% of abandoned carts recovered by a three-email sequence.
  • Win-back: 3% to 8% of dormant customers reactivated by a two-email series.
  • Revenue per recipient: $0.50 to $3 for triggered flows, versus $0.05 to $0.20 for a broadcast newsletter.
  • Share of revenue: stores with mature flows get 25% to 40% of their online revenue from email, half of it from automations.

Three situations:

A creator sells a $79 photography preset pack. Buyers get a 5-email onboarding series over two weeks that teaches them to use the presets and, in email 5, offers the $149 advanced pack. 11% of buyers upgrade within 30 days.

A jewellery brand notices that 40% of its customers reorder around gifting dates. It sends a remarketing email 3 weeks before Valentine's Day and Mother's Day only to past buyers, with early access. Those two emails produce 9% of annual revenue.

A small food store sells a 30-day supply of coffee. A replenishment email on day 25 with a one-click reorder link recovers 22% of customers who would otherwise have drifted to a supermarket.

Common mistakes

  • Treating the whole list the same. Sending the win-back offer to a customer who ordered last week costs you margin and trust.
  • Discounting by default. A 15% code in every message trains customers to wait for it. Try the reminder without an incentive first, then add one only in the last email.
  • No exit conditions. A customer who buys after email 1 and still receives emails 2 and 3 concludes that you are not paying attention.
  • Sending without real consent. Adding every checkout email to a marketing list without an opt-in is illegal in the EU and gets your domain flagged.
  • Measuring opens instead of revenue. Apple's mail privacy inflates open rates. Judge flows by clicks, orders and revenue per email sent.

Best practices

  • Start with three flows. Welcome series, cart recovery, post-purchase. They cover 80% of the value for a small store and take one afternoon to set up.
  • Segment on behaviour, not on demographics. What people bought, how often and how recently predicts what they will do next far better than age or city.
  • One message, one job. A cart reminder shows the cart and a button. A post-purchase email explains how to use the product. Do not stack five offers in one email.
  • Use a code per flow. WELCOME10 in the welcome series, BACK15 in the win-back. Codes give you clean attribution even when tracking links fail.
  • Test the incentive ladder. Email 1 no code, email 2 free shipping, email 3 a percentage. Many stores find email 1 alone recovers half the carts.
  • Clean the list quarterly. Remove contacts who have not opened or clicked in 6 months, or run a re-permission campaign. Deliverability depends on it.
  • Combine with retargeting. Add your customer list as an exclusion in ad campaigns so you do not pay to reach people you can email for free, and as a lookalike seed to find similar people.

In Roctify

Roctify includes email marketing, forms and an email inbox on the Creator plan and up, so the contacts collected at checkout, on your storefront or through your link-in-bio page live in the same place as your orders. Because customers and orders sit in one shared catalog, you know who bought what, when and through which channel, which is the data remarketing runs on. Discount codes let you give each flow its own code and read the results in your reports; audience analytics and exports on the Pro plan show visitors, orders and revenue per channel. Every message links to product pages with a built-in checkout and 0% transaction fees, so a recovered customer can reorder in a few taps.

FAQ

What is the difference between remarketing and retargeting?

Remarketing talks to known contacts through channels you own, mostly email and messaging, and costs almost nothing per message. Retargeting shows paid ads to anonymous visitors identified by a pixel and costs money per impression or click. Google calls its ad product "remarketing", which is why the words get mixed up. Use both: retargeting to bring back visitors who never gave you an address, remarketing for everyone who did.

How many emails should a remarketing sequence have?

Two to four. Cart recovery works well with three emails over 72 hours. A welcome series usually has three to five over two weeks. A win-back needs two: one to reconnect, one with an offer. Beyond four messages the returns fall and unsubscribes rise, so add a fourth only if the data shows the third still converts.

Yes, provided the contact gave consent or is an existing customer receiving messages about similar products, and can unsubscribe in one click from every message. Record when and where each contact opted in, honour every unsubscribe within a day, and never add addresses you scraped or bought. The rules are simple to follow and the penalty for ignoring them is losing your sending reputation, which takes months to rebuild.