What is remarketing for ecommerce? (definition + examples)

When a buyer comes to your site but, ultimately, doesn’t smash the purchase button, usually there isn’t some big, melodramatic reason for them failing to give you their money. No matter how much my petty only-child tendencies try to convince me that it’s deeply personal (I know, I’m a drama queen), there are often other, much more logical reasons for their cart abandonment:

• They got distracted.
• They’re trying to be “responsible.”
• They’re waiting until pay day.
• They suddenly decided they needed a second opinion from a friend.

Or maybe the realized whatever it was that felt urgent in the moment — that $148 serum, that cozy weighted blanket, that 94-in-one countertop oven, or that sweet pair of kicks — isn’t something they need quite as badly now that they’ve had a little time to think.

That is the fickle and fleeting nature of ecommerce. 

When we’re at the office, wearing our marketing hats, we like to imagine that a customer’s journey from thought bubble of inspiration to purchase is completely linear: “I have a need. Oh, there it is! Online! Right here, waiting for me! Go ahead and take my money.”

But when we’re off the clock, operating as private consumers ourselves out in the real world, we know that’s not true. When we’re making a buying decision, we stall, wobble, pause, circle, compare, open tabs, build the online shopping carts of our dreams, talk ourselves out of what we want, then come back again, bargain with ourselves… and on and on and on. 

Your buyers are doing the same same thing right now.

Your buyers almost buy. Then they don’t. They come back. They retreat. 

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So, if your marketing strategy only works when somebody makes a clean, immediate decision, you’re asking too much of the internet and too much of human nature. Your buyers have money to spend, sure. But they’re also beholden to the same whims, moods, and pressures that we all are. Which means most of their purchases aren’t going to look like a neat, straight line to you with no detours.

Enter stage left: remarketing.

Remarketing gives you another shot.

More importantly, it gives you a smarter shot.

Remarketing is when you market to people who have already interacted with your brand in some way. They visited your site, viewed a product, added something to cart, clicked an ad, opened an email, bought once before, or otherwise raised their hand. Instead of treating them like a stranger every time, you follow up based on what they already did.

That’s the basic definition. But like a lot of “basic definitions” in marketing, it doesn’t really get to the good part.

Yes, you could think of remarketing as just showing people the same product again and hoping repetition does the job. But it’s one of the most useful ways to recover lost momentum, squeeze more value out of your acquisition efforts, and stop making every conversion start from zero. Done well, remarketing feels relevant, timely, and helpful.

Done badly, on the other hand, it feels like a brand lurking around the corner whispering, “Psst! Hey. Hey. Still thinking about that lamp?”

And no one wants to be that brand.

What is remarketing really?

Remarketing is the practice of targeting people who have already interacted with your brand and trying to move them toward the next action.

That action might be a purchase, a completed checkout, a return visit, or a repeat order. It might also be getting someone back to a product page they were clearly considering before life, doubt, or a shipping fee got in the way.

The important part is that the marketing is triggered or shaped by prior behavior.

That’s what separates remarketing from prospecting:

• Prospecting is about finding new people. That’s new customer acquistion.
• Remarketing is about following up with the people you already managed to attract.

I like to point out this particular distinction for one reason: attracting the first click is usually the expensive part. If you paid to get someone there through Google, Meta, affiliates, influencers, SEO, or anything else, and then you do a weak job of staying in the conversation after they leave, you’re making customer acquisition harder than it needs to be.

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Sure, you’re paying to generate interest, but then you’re also doing a mediocre job of recovering it. That’s why remarketing is one of the clearest ways to make your broader marketing investment work harder.

Why remarketing is such a big win for ecommerce (when done right)

Remarketing can be so powerful in ecommerce, because the nature of the purchasing decision of your buyer is defined by one word:

“Almost.”

Almost ready.

Almost convinced.

Almost there.

But often… not quite.

Drop-off in attention, interest, and urgency are features, not bugs of the buying process for your customers — and you likely already know that. 

Remarketing gives you a chance to stay in the game after that first moment passes. Instead of assuming the sale is dead because the first visit didn’t convert, you keep talking to the people who showed some signal of interest.

That does two important things for an ecommerce brand:

• First, it helps you recover revenue that would otherwise leak out of the system.
• Second, it lowers the pressure on acquisition, because you’re getting more value out of the attention you already paid to generate.

That’s a big deal in any market, but especially in one where acquisition costs are rarely getting cheaper and every dollar of spend is under more scrutiny.

How remarketing actually works (and how most marketers get it wrong)

A lot of marketers hear “remarketing” and immediately picture the classic retargeted display ad: somebody looked at a pair of sneakers once, and now those sneakers follow them around the internet like they’ve developed feelings.

Yes, that’s remarketing.

No, that’s not all remarketing is.

Remarketing can show up through display ads, paid social ads, abandoned cart emails, browse abandonment flows, SMS reminders, replenishment messages, cross-sell campaigns, post-purchase follow-ups, win-back emails, loyalty messaging, and even search strategies built around past visitors or customer lists. The channel can change.

The principle stays the same: your brand is no longer talking to a cold audience.

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You already know something about this person. You know they visited. You know what they viewed. You know whether they added to cart. You know whether they bought once before. You know whether they dropped off at checkout or bounced after looking at one product for three full minutes.

That information should change the message.

And this is where remarketing gets either smarter or much, much dumber.

A smart remarketing strategy uses behavior as context. A dumb one just repeats itself. It says the same thing, in the same tone, over and over, as if the only problem was that the customer failed to notice the first twelve times. That’s persistence, I’ll give you that. 

Persistence, by itself, is not persuasive.

Remarketing vs retargeting: what’s the difference?

This is one of those marketing terms people use interchangeably until someone decides to get fussy about it in a meeting.

Technically, retargeting is often used to describe paid ads shown to people who previously interacted with your brand. Remarketing can be used more broadly to cover all follow-up marketing based on prior behavior, including email, SMS, and other channels.

It’s kind of like how all poodles (retargeting with paid ads) are considered dogs (remarketing). But not all dogs are poodles.

So, it’s easy to see why we often blur the two together. Whether you call it remarketing or retargeting, the core move is the same: you are following up with people who already showed interest, and you’re doing so with a holistic toolbox of strategies. 

The most common types of remarketing for ecommerce brands

The simplest and most common form is product-view remarketing. Someone looked at a product or category, didn’t buy, and you follow up with ads or messages tied to that interest. This can work well, especially when the product itself carries enough appeal to make a second look meaningful.

Then you have cart abandonment remarketing, which is a little more charged because the shopper got closer to buying. They didn’t just browse, they started a process. That means your follow-up can be more direct, because the intent signal is stronger. At the same time, it also means your copy needs to be less lazy. If someone got all the way to cart and still left, “just a reminder!” probably is not enough.

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Browse abandonment is its own useful category too. This is when someone viewed products or categories but never added anything to cart. That often calls for a slightly different angle. Maybe they need proof. Maybe they need more desire. Maybe they need help narrowing the choice. Maybe they are comparing you to competitors.

Whatever it is, it’s usually a different problem from checkout abandonment.

Post-purchase remarketing is another big one, and it gets overlooked more than it should. Once someone has bought, the next task may be replenishment, cross-sell, upsell, or second-purchase acceleration. For a lot of brands, that’s where the economics get a lot healthier. Yet plenty of teams still put all their energy into first-order conversion and treat retention like a nice bonus if it happens to show up.

Then there’s win-back remarketing, which is exactly what it sounds like. Someone bought before or engaged before, then went quiet. Now the goal is to bring them back without sounding desperate, irrelevant, or weirdly aggressive.

Different types of remarketing solve different problems, which is exactly why your approaches for each can’t look or sound the same. You’ve got to meet your buyers where they are in their journey, not where you hope they are.

A few real ecommerce remarketing examples

Let’s say you sell premium cookware

A shopper clicks an ad, lands on a product page for a ceramic pan set, reads the description, checks the reviews, maybe even clicks into the care instructions, then leaves without adding it to cart. That person is interested, but not sold.

So, what do you do?

• A lazy remarketing strategy would just keep showing them the pan set in display ads and hope repetition gets the job done.
• A better remarketing strategy would assume they may need more confidence.

So instead of just repeating the product image, you could follow up with reviews, messaging around durability, an explainer on why the coating performs differently, or a short email that handles the very normal “this is more money than I planned to spend on a pan” hesitation.

Now let’s take a fashion brand

A shopper views the same dress twice, adds it to cart, then disappears. That’s not the same situation as before. The friction is probably closer to the finish line now. Maybe they’re struggling with the price, or even though the dress costs a pretty penny, the $8.99 you’re charging for shipping puts them off. Or they might be worried about the size. 

It could be a lot of things.

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So your follow-up should deal with those issues. Show the dress, yes. But maybe also mention easy returns, customer photos, fit notes, or delivery timing. The customer does not need you to explain the entire brand to them. They need help getting over the last hump.

Finally, imagine a skincare brand

A customer bought a serum six weeks ago, but they haven’t returned. And you know that serum is only a 30-day supply.

Obviously, we’re not in the land of cart abandonment anymore. We’ve entered into post-purchase remarketing. The right move might be a replenishment message, a bundle suggestion, or education around how the product works over time. The goal is not to “remind” them in some generic sense. The goal is to reconnect at the right moment with the right next step.

That is what good remarketing looks like. It responds to the stage, the behavior, and the likely hesitation instead of treating every follow-up like the same blunt instrument.

How to do remarketing well (our top tips)

In remarketing, context is everything. 

So, you start with context and build everything from there.

For instance, if someone only visited your homepage for 12 seconds, you’re not rolling in a bunch of strong “I’m ready to buy right now!” intent signals. But if they viewed the same product three times, that’s much stronger. They’re circling. If they added to cart, got halfway through checkout, or bought before, that’s even stronger.

And each of those examples represent a buyer at a completely different stage of purchase; their mindsets are different, as are their reasons for leaving and what it will take to get them back. 

Your job now is to respond accordingly, and the more specific you can be in your follow-up, the better.

This is where segmentation can do some real heavy-lifting for you. But if you think I’m about to launch into some tired “personalization is key!” monologue, don’t worry: we both know this isn’t 2012 anymore. Generic personalization is table stakes.

You’ve got to use the context of their behavior to your advantage. Don’t just use their name, use the signals of their actions to tell you what they need to know to remove barriers to their buying. Tailor what you show to them, dial-in the messaging to speak directly to where they are. 

Particularly if you’re doing a follow-up sequence of multiple touchpoints:

• One touchpoint can restore convenience.
• Another can answer objections.
• Another can sharpen desire.
• Another can introduce urgency, if urgency is actually real.

But also, don’t be creepy. If someone hasn’t been on your site longer than 12 seconds, if you show up acting like Big Brother with surveillance footage of every click they made, they’re going to be freaked out. 

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This is also where a lot of ecommerce teams underestimate copy.

They assume the dynamic product block is doing all the work, so they phone in the words. This is a huge mistake, and no, I’m not just saying that because I’ve built my career as a content strategist and conversion copywriter.

Remarketing copy should know what kind of conversation it is re-entering:

• Someone who abandoned at cart needs different energy than someone who bought once six months ago and disappeared.
• Someone who viewed three products in one category may need comparison help.
• Someone who looked at the same product repeatedly may need reassurance or a stronger emotional case.

Creative also plays a big role here.

Showing the exact same visual every time is one of the fastest ways to make remarketing feel stale. Worse, when we’re exposed to the same images over and over again, we have a tendency to stop seeing them entirely.

Even if the product stays the same, the angle can change:

• Social proof
• Product use
• Outcomes
• Details
• Reviews
• Brand point of view

See what I mean? There’s more than one way to bring someone back into the conversation.

And then, of course, there is timing. Follow up too slowly and you lose the moment. Follow up too aggressively and you become that brand. Nobody wants to feel stalked into buying a candle.

And I say that as someone who loves candles. To a concerning degree.

Here’s how most brands screw up remarketing

Most bad remarketing comes down to one of a few predictable mistakes.

The first is treating all intent the same. Somebody who bounced after ten seconds is not the same as somebody who abandoned checkout, yet plenty of brands market to them as if they are.

The second is over-relying on repetition. They think the job is simply to put the product back in front of the customer often enough that surrender becomes inevitable. Sometimes repetition helps. Too often, it just creates fatigue.

The third is bad sequencing. This is when brands send nearly identical abandoned cart emails back to back to back to back (because of “efficiency”), run the same retargeting creative for too long, or fail to change the message as the situation changes. 

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The fourth is, once more with feeling, getting creepy. This is the risk with remarketing when teams get a little too excited about the data. There is a very real difference between “Still thinking it over?” and “We noticed you looked at the blue version of the medium cardigan at 4:14 a.m. last Thursday.”

Calm down.

Yes, you know they were online shopping in bed when they should have been sleeping, but you don’t need to tell them that.

And the fifth and final mistake is leaning on discounts too quickly. Yes, incentives can work. No, they should not be the default answer to every abandoned interaction. If you train your audience to leave in order to get an offer, congratulations, you have built a very stupid little system for yourself.

So, what is remarketing really?

Remarketing is a consistent, multidisciplinary strategy of not wasting buyer interest.

That is probably the cleanest way to put it.

Yes, it is a tactic. Yes, it can involve ads, emails, SMS, and all the usual tools. But underneath all of that, remarketing is really about treating prior attention as valuable and acting accordingly. It’s the process of recognizing that most people do not buy the first time, then building smarter follow-up around what they already showed you.

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The customer journey is rarely neat in ecommerce. We’re constantly tripping over buyer hesitation all the time. Abandonments everywhere. Leakage everywhere. Almost-conversions everywhere. You’ve got to stop pretending these are exceptions rather than the rule. When you do that, good remarketing will you recover some of that potential revenue without starting from zero every time.

At its best, remarketing feels timely, relevant, and persuasive. It makes the rest of your marketing investment work harder and gives customers a better chance to come back when they are ready. (It also helps you stop paying for interest only to let it drift off into the void.)

Done badly, however, remarketing is repetitive, generic, overeager, and vaguely embarrassing. Basically, me in middle school. 

And trust me, I wasn’t winning any ROAS awards in middle school.