Retargeting vs. Remarketing: How Amazon and Sephora Keep You Buying

Two Words People Confuse Every Day

Retargeting versus remarketing. Are they interchangeable? Is one more important than the other? Let me clear this up, because getting this right changes how you spend every marketing dollar.

Retargeting means you are going after prospects. Prospects are not people who have bought your products yet. They are people who have a touchpoint on the journey of buying your products or services. They saw something. They clicked something. They visited your site. And because of that, they are going to be easier to convert than somebody who has never heard about your brand.

Remarketing is different. Remarketing is getting your customers to buy from you again. Upselling, cross-selling, down-selling, getting them back into a purchase, getting them into subscriptions. Both are very, very important. And there are great case studies of big brands that exploded by mastering one or the other.

Amazon Is the King of Retargeting

Here is how retargeting works. Somebody visits your website. On that website there are pixels, or cookies. Basically, code that gets put on the site and captures the data of that visitor coming into your store. And you, as the marketer, because it is your property, have permission to use that data to follow those people around.

Want to guess a brand that does this better than anybody else in the world? Amazon. Amazon is the king of retargeting. Some lady sees a purse on amazon.com and says, you know what, I am not going to buy this right now. Then she opens up Facebook or Instagram, and suddenly the same purse starts following her around. To her, that purse feels like destiny. It was meant to be. She must buy it.

It does not feel that way to you and me. We look at it and say, wow, these marketers are after me. They are ruthless. But that is exactly the point. Good marketers use retargeting dynamically, meaning it happens automatically. You can set all of this up in tools like Meta Business Suite and TikTok Ads Manager. You saw the purse, then Amazon sends you an email that feels personal. Then an abandoned cart message. Then Google display ads. Then social media ads. It feels like magic. It is not magic. It is a great team of marketers putting that product in front of you over and over again.

Marketing Is Not an Overnight Thing

Understand this: marketing is not an overnight thing. You have to be willing to put that same purse over and over and over again on people's eyes so they can actually internalize the message and buy the product.

And fortunately for you and for me, most brand owners and most marketers do not have the patience. They give up before they actually get that person to buy. So while they quit, you keep going. A social media ad. A personalized email. An abandoned cart message. Google ads. A TikTok or Facebook or Instagram ad. An organic post. A text message. Seven touchpoints, sometimes more. You go after that person many, many times.

When money is limited, you get inventive. You get creative about how to put that message in front of that person until they internalize it. That is retargeting.

The 80/20 That Feeds Your Company

Now remarketing. Whenever somebody buys your product, that person is many, many times more likely, 12 times more likely, to buy from you again than somebody who has never bought from you. In the game of marketing, service to your existing audience is one of the most important things you can pay attention to.

In my agency, 80 percent of our revenue comes in every single month from existing customers. So where does my priority go? To taking care of those people. If I do not take care of them, I lose the people who are putting food on the plates of all our employees. And then how do I grow? With the other 20 percent. That is where the content comes in, the webinars, the seminars, videos like this one, attracting new qualified people.

Same thing in a product business. Most products out there are consumables, things people buy over and over again. A brand like my company Natural Slim, a nine-figure international brand, gets 50 percent of all its money from repeat customers. The other 50 percent comes from new ones. That repeat half does not happen by accident. I have to figure out consistently how to make those people buy more from us, get new services, get more value. That is remarketing.

The Remarketing Toolbox

Cross-selling: you take one product and introduce another. One supplement, then a complementary one. If you come to me for Amazon services, I can also build you a Shopify e-commerce site. Upselling: create bigger opportunities so the account grows. Loyalty programs: reward your customers so they generate more revenue. Downselling: when somebody declines an offer, make another offer at a lower value that maybe they will accept.

Win-backs are one of the most important things you can ever do. If it has been three to six months and a customer has not come back, run a campaign specifically designed to win them back, with aggressive discounts, aggressive offers, real reasons to return. Remember, it is 10, 12, 15 times easier to get a customer to open up their wallet a second time than to get a customer to open it for the first time.

And abandoned carts apply on both sides. A prospect who abandons a cart gets retargeted. An existing customer who abandons a cart gets remarketed. Either way, you keep pushing that purchase forward.

Sephora Built an Empire on Remarketing

You might have heard of a company called Sephora. Very big in the United States, growing internationally, focused on makeup. They do really well in that industry, and here is why: they push hard on their existing customer base.

They send emails based on your purchases to promote other products. They run amazing loyalty programs. They run win-back campaigns, especially when you have not bought anything in 90 days or more, and they go after you aggressively to get you back in their store. They chase abandoned carts with incentives, heavy promotions to get you to complete the purchase you left behind.

All of it is one effort: get existing customers to keep buying. Sephora is heavily built on remarketing. Amazon is the king of retargeting. You do not have to choose between them. Learn both, run both, and never give up on a buyer before they have internalized your message.