Bringing visitors to your website is only half of the battle, getting them to return is where the real struggle happens. Often, customers can be bombarded with other content, distractions, and endless options, which opens the door for potential customers to click away before taking action. That’s where remarketing steps in.
Remarketing isn’t just about chasing lost traffic; it’s about re-igniting interest, rebuilding connection, and guiding visitors back with perfectly timed reminders. Think about those emails that say, “You left something in your cart”. That’s remarketing in action. Subtle, helpful, and almost suspiciously good at remembering what you were interested in, without feeling pushy. Remarketing is the strategy brands use to turn missed opportunities into second chances.
But Who Does It Target?
Well, once upon a time, website remarketing was seen primarily as a strategy just for customers, while retargeting was reserved for prospects. However, the two overlap and remarketing should be used for both potential and existing customers.
On average, prospective customers typically average between 7–8 interactions before making a purchase, so remarketing helps to guide these prospects towards a conversion. Simultaneously, remarketing helps retention of customers by driving renewals, upsells and loyalty amongst existing customers.
How Does Remarketing Work?
Remarketing works by identifying and re-engaging users based on their past behaviours, by using first-party data to track those behaviours, segment users into relevant groups, and deliver their personalised messages designed to move them further along their customer journey.
First-party data is collected by your own channels and sources. This includes:
- Email addresses: this can be taken from newsletter sign-ups, account creations or purchases you have made and input your email.
- Website behaviour: this includes pages you have viewed, how much time spent on the website, cart activity, or things you have downloaded from the website.
- App usage data: in-app actions, feature usage, and engagement levels.
- Form submissions: this can be from demo requests, surveys or gated content downloads.
- Loyalty or rewards programme data: points earned, redemption patterns, or membership tier.
While each data point is powerful on its own, together they create a full view of the customer journey, enabling smarter audience segmentation so that you can create marketing lists that are built and used to deliver more personalised and effective campaigns.
Types of Remarketing by Audience Types
Remarketing works best when you’re tailoring your messages to where someone is in their customer journey. Here are some ways that you can remarket your website by individual audience types (with some of our top secrets):
General Website Visitors
They may have read a blog, visited the homepage or browsed categories, and while they haven’t shown any clear product interest, they’ve started the early-funnel stage. You should use a standard remarketing approach that shows the same ad to your whole audience with low-pressure messaging focusing on brand awareness and education, and avoid any hard sells.
Returning Searches Familiar With Your Brand
This cohort of users has visited your site before and is now searching for your products or services again. To reengage with them, tailor your search ads with messaging that skips introductions and focuses on offers, pricing or comparisons. This type of messaging skips all the small talk, since they already know your brand, you’re simply helping them drive further down the customer funnel.
Social Media Engagers
Social media offers a great way to post all about your brand through photos, videos, ads and information. All follows, likes, shares, comments and video views are tracked through a social pixel. If someone follows your profile, or interacts with it, it means they’re already familiar with your brand, but haven’t taken part in any top-funnel behaviour, so you need to use gentle, non-intrusive messaging for this warm(ish) converting audience.
You should try and retarget the user on the same platform where engagement occurred to maintain relevance or context. Try rotating your ad creativity every 1–2 weeks to avoid it feeling repetitive.
CRM Contacts
Following on from social media engagers, you can take your email or customer lists (as long as people have consented to it) and upload them to platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, or Reddit Ads. These platforms match the contact info you provide, like emails or phone numbers, to the social accounts those people use.
This creates what’s called a custom audience, which lets you show ads specifically to people who already know your brand. It’s a smart way to reach past customers or leads on the apps they’re already using, even if they haven’t visited your website in a while.
Email-Based Remarketing
Email remarketing is when you retarget prospects or customers through email. Since these users have already shared their email address with you, they’re warmer leads (they’re often people who’ve shown interest in your products or are already customers). This makes email remarketing especially powerful because you can personalise your messaging far more than you can with general display ads.
Common ways to use email remarketing include abandoned cart reminders, browser-based recommendations, re-engagement emails for inactive subscribers, price-drop or back-in-stock alerts, loyalty or lifecycle messages, and upsell or cross-sell suggestions after a purchase. Together, these strategies helps bring users back to your site with timely, relevant messages tailored to their actions and interests.
Ready to Turn Lost Traffic into Real Conversions?
Let’s build a remarketing strategy that brings your visitors back and gets them to take action. Contact us today, and one of our friendly team members will be able to guide you to turn your potential customers into real ones.