Finding the Right Retargeting Avenue
A customer places items in their cart, pauses, and walks away. Another visits your site, browses for several minutes, then closes the window. These moments often look like endings, but they are really openings. Retargeting is about reaching people who already showed interest and guiding them back toward action. The question is which channel offers the strongest return in each situation.
Retargeting Ads
Paid media retargeting has long been a staple because of its reach. Google, Meta, and LinkedIn make it possible to reconnect with people who visited your site, abandoned a cart, or browsed a product. These impressions can re-spark interest when curiosity is still alive.
Newer formats have widened the possibilities. Connected TV allows a brand to place a full story in front of a warm audience in the middle of their streaming habits. Direct mail triggered by online behavior gives the digital world a tangible presence, often arriving on a doorstep within days of a site visit. Both approaches carry higher costs, but they can be justified when the product or service has a long decision cycle or high lifetime value.
The challenge is that ads alone rarely carry the relationship forward indefinitely. Creative fatigue sets in, audiences grow numb to repeated messages, and costs rise when campaigns are left unchecked. That is where email and SMS can reinforce the effort.
Email retargeting works best when the brand has more to say than a single offer. A well-structured drip campaign can deliver product education, testimonials, or exclusive content that deepens trust over time. A customer who has shared their address has opened the door for conversation, and segmentation ensures that the right story reaches the right person.
Still, inboxes are not a neutral arena. Platforms like Gmail automatically cluster promotional messages into categories, where they are grouped with dozens of other marketing emails. Even well-timed campaigns can end up buried in the Promotions tab. Many people also struggle with basic inbox management. Unread counts climb into the hundreds or thousands, leaving even relevant messages unopened.
This clutter makes it harder for email to break through quickly. A strong subject line helps, as does delivering content that feels useful rather than repetitive. But it is important to recognize that consumers often glance at their inbox only a few times a day. Meanwhile, the phone in their hand is demanding attention every few minutes. That shift in behavior is what elevates the importance of SMS.
SMS
Text messaging offers immediacy that few channels can match. A promotional email might wait hours to be opened, but a text is usually seen within minutes. This makes SMS an ideal tool for urgent communication, whether it is a time-sensitive discount, a low-inventory alert, or a shipping update.
The constant presence of the phone cuts both ways. People are tuned into it at all hours, which means a timely message can drive quick results. At the same time, the intimacy of the channel leaves no margin for error. An irrelevant or poorly timed text feels more like an interruption than an invitation. Consumers will opt out quickly if brands abuse the privilege.
Because of this, SMS should be deployed carefully. A limited cadence preserves attention, and messages need to be worth the interruption. Educational content or broader storytelling belongs in the inbox, but when the goal is to spark immediate action, SMS has few rivals.
The Influence on Your Website
The channel mix you choose shapes how you design your website. If email nurturing is a priority, your forms should make address capture simple and appealing without overwhelming the visitor with too many fields. If SMS is part of the plan, the decision to request a phone number needs to be handled with care, since it requires a higher level of trust.
Beyond fueling email and SMS campaigns, first-party data collection now plays a central role in ad retargeting as well. As tags and pixels lose precision in the wake of privacy regulations and browser restrictions, the data a brand gathers directly has become the foundation for building reliable audiences. Clean records of site visits, purchases, and sign-ups give advertisers the ability to continue serving relevant messages even as third-party tracking fades.
This makes the structure of your site more important than ever. Clean tagging, intuitive navigation, and a frictionless checkout not only sharpen your paid audiences but also improve the quality of your CRM database. In this sense, retargeting is not confined to what happens after someone leaves. It begins the moment they arrive, in how you collect and manage the information they are willing to share.
Blending the Mix
No single retargeting avenue is best in every scenario. Ads offer scale and visibility, email builds depth and trust, and SMS creates urgency. The strongest strategies weave these channels together so that each one reinforces the others.
This layered approach reflects the reality of the modern customer journey. It is rarely a one-step process, and it almost never follows a straight line. People move back and forth between devices, platforms, and touchpoints, gathering information at their own pace before deciding to commit. Retargeting works when it respects that rhythm, placing the right message in front of the right person at the right moment.
When executed this way, retargeting does not feel like chasing. It feels like a natural continuation of the conversation a customer already started.