Looking for small business advertising strategies that genuinely pay off? One of the hottest tactics that many marketers aren’t aware of is programmatic ads. Today though, we’re talking about blending email marketing and programmatic ads - the combination of both strategies can provide your business with a cost-effective solution to reach customers who are already interested in whatever you’re trying to sell.

 Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t, and we’ll show you how you can do it in the sections below.

 Programmatic Emails for Lapsed Customers

For the purposes of this article, we’ll be focusing on lapsed customers who you could benefit from retargeting. These are customers who have already shown an interest in your brand, most likely by having visited your website in the past.

So how do you retargeting these customers online with just their email addresses? In Programmatic advertising, we have the ability to cross-check email addresses with cookies. This means we can take email address lists and “sync” them with their login details to things like Google Chrome or Youtube to see if that email is linked to an account/cookie. From there we can create a targetable audience and begin re-engaging them.

You can set your campaign’s retargeting parameters as A) people who have already been to your website, B) people who have been to your competitors’ websites, C) people who have searched for products and services that are similar to yours, or D) all of the above!

The next step would be to find a programmatic agency that can connect you to the appropriate display spaces such as those found in an email newsletter. The rest, just like any other programmatic strategy, just happens on its own!

Important Considerations

Just like any other email retargeting strategy, you’d need to pay close attention to certain aspects of your campaign. These represent your steps toward ensuring success:

Make sure you define your audience and segment them appropriately.

For lapsed customers, you may divide your audience according to how long since they’ve shown interest in your products. This will let you design your ads that are fit to each segment’s needs, better ensuring your campaign’s success.

Design your ad creative based on what you learn.

The idea here is to diversify your message to maximize the chances of finally converting (or reconverting) your lapsed customers. Make sure to provide an incentive for them to come back and create your ad in a way the highlights that.

Spread your retargeting schedules for efficient spending.

You’ll be riding on other businesses’ emails, not yours. With the number of potential emails being sent numbering in the hundreds of thousands, you need to be careful so that you’re not spending too much. Besides, customers—especially lapsed ones—do not want to be bombarded with too many of your ads.

Note: Monitor results and optimize further.

This is probably the most crucial step as you need to be doing it constantly. Make sure you evaluate your campaign’s performance so that you can make it as effective as possible.

Conclusion

So, why is this strategy so great? Well, it boils down to the simple reason that it offers the advantages of programmatic advertising coupled with the power of email marketing without you having to send a single email.

Programmatic email retargeting lets you win back lapsed customers by taking your highest intent audience and re-engaging them in a medium outside of email, allowing you to be more personal in your messaging and less intrusive than being in their inbox. It basically gives you more cost-effective ways of targeting the right people and attracting them to your business.

Want to know more about what programmatic ads can do? We’re a programmatic agency in London and New York that specializes in small business digital marketing. Ask us how!