ReTargeter, an ad startup focused on, yes, retargeting, has launched a new way for advertisers to reach their customers.
Founder and CEO Arjun Dev Arora said the startup’s new CRM Retargeting service has aims similar to the Custom Audience Ads that Facebook introduced a few months ago, except that ReTargeter’s solution works on display advertising across the web. Businesses can upload email or physical mailing addresses. ReTargeter tries to match up those addresses with people in a database, then find those users online, divide them into anonymized audience segments, track them via cookies, and deliver targeted ads to that segment.
This approach can help businesses reach people who provided their contact info but haven’t made a purchase in a while, and can also help integrate online advertising with email and direct mail campaigns, Arora said.
As one example of how an advertiser might use the new product, he said that an airline might have a list of 10 million email addresses, of whom 5 million are enrolled in the frequent-flier program and 5 million are not. So it could turn the 5 million non-frequent fliers into an audience segment and target ads asking them to enroll.
Here’s another example, from a real campaign that ReTargeter ran for BustedTees. The T-shirt company targeted ads at customers in its email database who had not made a purchase, visited the website, or opened an email from the company in a given period of time. The one-month campaign saw 447,180 impressions, leading to a total of 195 conversions with an average order value of $40, giving BustedTees a 390 percent return on investment. Compared to a control group, people who saw the ads were four times more likely to convert.
ReTargeter says the product currently has a match rate of 30 to 40 percent, meaning that it can correctly match an address with an online profile 30 to 40 percent of the time.