When it comes to marketing, I’ve long interchanged the words “Retargeting” and “Remarketing”, considering them similar enough to essentially be the same thing. They’re indeed quite similar, but different enough that it’s worth being precise.
Both of them are ways to reach back out to potential leads for your product, but you go about them in very different ways.
Rob Riggs at Code Conspirators wrote a great post that digs deep into both practices, and it works out about like this:
Remarketing: Using email and other tools to reach out to people that you’ve had some contact with (former customer, left items in cart).
This is when you’ll get an email with updates to a product, or a reminder to come finish checking out your shopping cart. These companies have your contact info and use it to nudge you toward the sale.
Retargeting: Using cookies to “follow” people around the internet to remind them that you exist.
This is more common, largely because it’s easier for companies to use. You’ll search the internet for something like “Dell laptop”, and suddenly you see ads for Dell laptops on every site that you visit.
From the perspective of a user, both can be somewhat annoying, but I also consider both practices to be ethical. While I tend to dislike seeing that “Dell laptop” following me around (particularly after I’ve since bought another laptop already), those are ads spaces that I’m going to see anyhow, so it doesn’t really matter what’s in them.
Depending on what your business is, either technique (or both!) could help move things forward, so I encourage you to dig into Rob’s article to better understand them and make the best of use of them that you can with your business.
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