At the heart of a great shopping cart abandonment program lies the recovery email. The email enables you to reconnect with a potential customer, put your brand and messaging in front of them, and ideally it allows you to capture a conversion you may not have gotten otherwise.

When it comes down to it, email works and it works well. With recent changes in technology, and the fact that 77% of us actually want to get marketing messages through email, it’s really no surprise. Here are a few email trends worth noting:

Emergence of Smartphones

These days everyone is always connected. Smartphones have been outselling PCs for a year now and cell phone companies are selling very few phones that don’t offer data (although Verizon is still trying to sell this flip phone for $80…ok).

The fact is, people are more accessible by email today than they’ve ever been. Check out some of these stats from Email Monday:

• 7.71% of users will open email on a mobile device once or more per month
• 70 million US consumers accessed email through a mobile device, with
• 43.5 million doing so on a near-daily basis. Comscore– “Mediametrix”  (November 2010)
• 38.5% of mobile internet time is spent using mobile email. Nielsen – “Mobile Media View Internet” (May 2010)

If this many people are reading emails on their smartphones, you’d better make sure you’re optimizing your emails for mobile.

Online Shopping Prominence

According to Internet Retailer, “Online shoppers in the United States will spend $327 billion in 2016, up 45% from $226 billion this year and 62% from $202 billion in 2011, according to a projection released today by Forrester Research Inc”. That’s an astounding number.

More people are buying things online and in turn getting more and more emails in their inbox. Add to that, services like Groupon who send emails everyday and the dreaded business email doesn’t seem so ominous.

One thing to note; you don’t want to overload users, leaving them with ‘email fatigue’.

Social Media

With 900 million Facebook users and 465 million Twitter accounts worldwide, people are signing up and using social media across the globe, leaving marketers with new channels to reach consumers.

The great thing is that email and social seem to go hand in hand. According to eConsultancy regarding a recent survey, “The stats…suggest that brands’ behaviour and responsiveness on social sites can have a positive effect on future interaction with emails.”

What does that mean? If a customer interacts with your brand on Twitter or Facebook, they are much more likely to engage with an email from you at a later date. Great news!

The reverse side of this is social sharing buttons can increase click-through rates for emails by 115%.

Better Targeting & Testing Capabilities

There’s a great quote from Word of Mouth guru Andy Sernovitz that says, “Traditional marketing has companies to speak to many to reach one. Today we speak to one to reach many.”

In almost all aspects of marketing, email included, we’re now able to better identify the people that we need to reach. We can test things like subject lines, headlines, calls to action, overall messaging, and actually see what our customers respond best to.

We can also use tools like RapLeaf to get demographic data from our email lists, find out who our Facebook friends and Twitter followers are and we can really know who we are targeting.

This leads to better emails and more importantly, emails that people (the right people) want to read.

Email is still an extremely effective marketing channel and with new technology and better capabilities, we only see it becoming more relevant.

There’s a lot of new technology out there right now around marketing to people who’ve already come in contact with your brand. Whether they visited your site, saw an ad someplace else, clicked on a PPC ad, or in the case of Rejoiner, they actually filled something out, you now have the capability to market to them again.

The great thing about these tools is they give you as marketers the ability to target users already interested in your product or service. You can hit customers already in the buying cycle and since these tools are typically pretty inexpensive, you can create some incredible ROI.

Remarketing vs Retargeting

There are two main terms you hear when talking about this technology; Remarketing and Retargeting. Since they pretty much sound the same, we thought we’d explore the differences between the two and give you some insights into the various tools.

Retargeting

Retargeting is most often used to describe online ad placements and display ads. A user comes to your site, a cookie’s set and you can now target ads to them on other sites they visit, hence the term retargeting. What makes retargeting so appealing is that it’s done through third party networks like AdBrite and the Google display network, giving you the opportunity to reach users on millions of sites. Kind of crazy.

Interested in running a retargeting campaign? There are a couple of tools worth checking out including AdRoll, Retargeter and Google Adwords even offers retargeting through PPC.

The thing to remember, while retargeting is awesome, you don’t want to creep out your customers or annoy them so make sure you set it up properly. You should give people the ability to opt out and please don’t show an ad to some one who has already converted.

Remarketing

While you may hear retargeting tools referred to as remarketing tools (ahem, Google), “remarketing” is typically used when email is involved. We see this term a lot around  shopping cart and form abandonment, upsells (think those very personalized Amazon emails you get after you’ve bought a product) and lifecycle marketing emails.

Interested in remarketing? Well, you’ve come to right place…we know this great product…ok, just kidding. Another awesome tool for remarketing comes from the guys at Spring Metrics. Though it doesn’t involve email, their Smart Offers product is a powerful tool for any retailer. They describe it as a way to deliver relevant and targeted promotions to website visitors. The product allows you to tailor customized offers based on visitors’ behaviors and browsing history. You can segment your traffic based on different variables, and deliver customized promotions based on your visitor’s browsing profile. Pretty cool.

Regardless of what you decide to do with your “re” efforts, make sure that you do it right, you test test test and most importantly, you don’t piss people off. It’s very easy to annoy potential customers and create a negative experience they’ll associate with your brand forever. Be sure to check out the Rejoiner blog for tips and best practices.