It has become a familiar experience for internet users to be followed around the internet by a shoe, a watch or, perhaps less conventionally, a fem-suit.
Retargeting, for the most part, has become part of the online experience, and it’s now set to become even more prevalent with news this week that AdRoll would be extending its retargeting capabilities to email through a new service called SendRoll.
SendRoll employs AdRoll’s retargeting engine and automatically triggers emails with personalised content or product recommendations at critical moments in the customer’s journey.
This is the first time AdRoll is extending its business beyond standard online ads, and SendRoll business lead Brendan Weitz sees this as an important step.
Weitz says that the return on investment for email is $38 for every dollar invested, and he believes the channel presents a major opportunity for the ad tech company.
Since launching the service in the US market, AdRoll has seen strong results with email re-targeting campaigns generating open rates of 50-60 percent and click-through rates between 10 and 20 percent (which are about five times the average).
“People spend a lot of time engaged with their inboxes, over seven hours per day, especially on mobile devices where over 50 percent of email is opened,” Weiz says.
This is certainly a valid point, but it’s also worth questioning whether users already receive enough emails. Over the last few years, email has emerged as the primary means of business communication and email clutter has become a major concern.
As far back as 2012, the chief executive of Atos, a French IT services company, vowed to ban internal email. And there is also a growing school of thought that sending emails to staff after work hours is damaging to productivity.
These issues set aside, it also happens to be pretty annoying to receive copious emails on an hourly basis.
Asked whether we aren’t perhaps already receiving too much email, Weiz responds that it depends on relevance.
“Too much email is simply when messages are not personalised or useful, albeit too frequent,” he says. “We’ve taken a proactive approach here to combat with SendRoll allowing customers to control frequency, recency, and only allowing for highly targeted messaging to users based on on-site activity. As a result of this, we’ve seen very low unsubscribe rates on SendRoll emails, around 0.11 percent, on average [in the US].”
The onus of ensuring relevance, however, will depend largely on the creative that brands produce for consumers—and this is something that’s beyond the control of AdRoll.
That said, it would certainly be in the best interest of brands to ensure that they offer something creative or interesting when entering the inboxes of their targeted consumers.
Because as Weiz explains: “If a subscriber opts out they will no longer receive communications from the advertiser.”
