Shift4Shop eCommerce Blog

The Beginner’s Guide to Remarketing

Written by Jessica Grioua | Mar 4, 2020 4:00:00 PM

Once you’ve built your online store, you naturally start to focus on building web traffic towards it. But what happens when users within that web traffic browse your store and leave without making a purchase? Through a remarketing campaign, you can build a strategy that regains those lost leads while nurturing your existing ones through dynamic, personalized advertising. Let’s go through what you need to know to start a remarketing campaign of your own.

 

What is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a strategy used by marketers to engage customers (or potential customers) who have previously interacted with, and expressed interest in, a website while browsing. These users may have already bought from your online store or simply visited without making a purchase. Through data collected as these visitors browsed your website, you can build a personalized and dynamic advertising campaign that targets these lost leads and convert them into paying customers.

Typically, remarketing tools will use data like email addresses or cookies stored on computers to keep track of customers that need to be targeted. This data can help you to understand which pages were visited, how long users stayed on those pages, and which specific products they looked at. By not only understanding this information, but also how close these users came to purchasing your product, you can build an effective remarketing campaign.

Remarketing vs Retargeting

The terms “remarketing” and “retargeting” are often used interchangeably. Remarketing is the general practice of marketing to the same prospect multiple times. Retargeting campaigns, however, are a subset of remarketing that only target users who’ve visited your site without buying. Within remarketing, there’s also efforts to re-capture customers who have already bought from your business but need to be encouraged to keep coming back.

 

Why Should You Build Remarketing Campaigns?

Remarketing campaigns offer unique benefits to businesses that a typical marketing campaign may not. Let’s go through the tangible benefits you may find by running your own remarketing campaign:

1. Boost Conversion Rate & ROI

One of the biggest reasons for launching a remarketing campaign is gaining back lost sales. When a customer shows interest in buying your products, but didn’t end up converting, a remarketing campaign can bring them back to your store to convert. Personalized and dynamic abandoned cart emails are one of the best ways to accomplish this, boasting a high conversion rate and click through rate. By decreasing lost sales, you’re in turn boosting ROI, or return on investment, by capturing those lost leads. In fact, according to EmailMonday, email has an average ROI of $38 for each $1 spent; that’s an advantage you don’t want to skip out on.

2. Improve Brand Recognition

By repeatedly connecting with customers in a highly branded way, remarketing ads and emails reinforce brand recall that helps customers to remember your store the next time they need to buy your product. An effective way to encourage brand recognition in customers is by consistently using your brand logo, colors and overall aesthetic in any emails or messaging. This not only helps customers remember your brand, but it also helps them to trust your business.

3. Build Lasting Customer Relationships

It’s no doubt that customers endlessly appreciate personalization when it comes to the often cold and automated world of eCommerce. By injecting personalization into your marketing efforts and connecting directly with customer’s specific needs, you’ll encourage brand loyalty and build customer trust. On top of personalization, customers also like to always be aware of what’s going on with their order. By sending regular personalized transactional emails that give them the information they need, customers will feel more comfortable receiving cross-sells and upsells within them.

 

Best Remarketing Tools & Platforms

Without the proper data and tools, creating and managing a remarketing campaign can be difficult, or nearly impossible. To get you started, here’s some of the best tools you should be using in your remarketing efforts (and how to use them).

 

Google

As the largest search engine in the world, Google is also one of the most powerful tools for remarketing and retargeting. Their complex network of ad placement gives marketers a variety of choices when it comes to building a remarketing campaign. Using the Google Display Network, you can serve targeted ads to lost visitors on other websites, search engine result pages, and even YouTube videos. Additionally, Google’s Dynamic Remarketing features will show past visitors more than a generic ad asking them to come back; visitors will see ads that contain the actual products that they viewed while on your site, making for a more personalized experience.

To create a Display Remarketing campaign with Google Ads, follow these steps:

  1. Link your website to your Google Ads account. To do this, you’ll need to place a given tracking code on your website so that Google Ads has access to your site’s traffic data.
  2. Create a new campaign. Here, you’ll choose your campaign goal and set your parameters. Name your campaign, decide on location and language settings, and determine your bid strategy and budget.
  3. Select your audience. This is where you’ll choose Remarketing as your campaign’s audience type, as well as the specific audiences you want to reach with your campaign.

To create a Google Dynamic Remarketing ad campaign, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new campaign in Google Ads. Start a standard display campaign and choose its name, bid strategy and budget.
  2. Select your audience. Like the Display Remarketing campaign, you’ll need to choose Remarketing as your campaign’s audience and select a specific audience you want to target. You can select from Google Ad’s recommended optimized list for this.
  3. Link your Google Merchant Center Account. By uploading your product feed to Google Merchant Center, you’ll be able to serve ads based on specific products in your online store.
  4. Add dynamic remarketing tags to your site pages. These tags should be added to the specific products you want to be included in your campaign. Once a user visits a tagged page, that user is added to remarketing lists and is associated with unique IDs of the feed items they’ve viewed.
  5. Create your responsive ads. Within the Ad Gallery, you’ll create the ads that are going to be used in this campaign. These ads will include product images, titles, subtitles, prices, summaries and your store logo.

 

Facebook

With unfiltered access to an unprecedented number of users, Facebook is a powerful tool for remarketing and retargeting efforts. Using Facebook’s email remarketing tool, called Facebook for Business, you can create a custom audience using your own list of email leads, which you can post targeted ads for automatically.

With Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads, the social media giant gives merchants the ability to retarget users that have browsed your site, app, or even social media store without buying. Facebook’s retargeting tools aren’t just limited to Facebook either; you’ll be able to serve ads on Instagram and Facebook Messenger as well.

To start a remarketing & retargeting campaign with Facebook, follow these steps:

  1. Upload your customer list to Facebook. Using Facebook for Business, you can upload your list of email leads and match them with Facebook accounts.
  2. Add a Facebook pixel to your site. This is a small piece of code that’s used to track visitors on your website; if you wan to track app activity, add the Facebook SDK to your app.
  3. Create a Custom Audience. Using your customer list or Facebook pixel/SDK data, choose who you want to be targeting.
  4. Upload your product feed. If you’re creating dynamic ads, you’ll need to have your products uploaded to be used for those ads.
  5. Create a dynamic ad. Choose between a single image or carousel style ad and enter in all necessary text copy and images to create your Facebook Dynamic Ad.
  6. Select a Retargeting audience and options. You can choose from “viewed or added to cart but not purchased,” “added to cart but not purchased,” “upsell products,” “cross-sell products,” or a custom combination.
  7. Decide how long your retargeting should apply. This is where you specify how long you want your campaign to follow visitors and how far back your data should look.
  8. Use Facebook measurement to track your campaign. This will show you which ads are getting more engagement from your audience.

 

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing service that comes with extensive, built-in remarketing tools that you can use to build campaigns. These features allow you to send targeted emails to customers as well as post retargeting ads on social media platforms, such as Facebook.

You’ll have access to several remarketing features with Mailchimp, such as fully automated product retargeting emails. This tool sends out an email to remind site visitors about an item that they viewed on your site but didn’t purchase. You can also enable customer re-engagement automation to send emails after a specified amount of time post-purchase to remind them of your business and build brand awareness.

To start a remarketing campaign with Mailchimp, follow these steps:

  1. Connect your online store. To connect Shift4Shop, enable the Mailchimp module in your Shift4Shop Online Store Manager. This will synch your customers, products, carts and orders with Mailchimp.
  2. Create your automation. At this point, you’ll start by creating an automation email for eCommerce and choosing to retarget site visitors for your store.
  3. For product retargeting, set delay and product type. Here, you’ll choose which products to track (newest products or best sellers) and when to send your emails (or how long to wait before sending an email).
  4. For customer re-engagement, specify your automation. The automation includes 3 emails, but you can add, remove or change them as needed. At default, the delay duration are 120 days, 240 days and 360 days since the last purchase.
  5. Design your email. Select your desired email template and begin editing it to fit your specific campaign needs.
  6. Start sending. Activate your email campaign by confirming your settings and clicking “Start Sending” or “Start Workflow” (depending on which campaign you’re doing).

 

AdRoll

Adroll is an all-on-one marketing software that can be used to build remarketing campaigns across multiple channels, including web, social media, emails and even mobile devices. Powered by over 500 ad exchanges from websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google, Adroll is a good choice to build your remarketing campaign.

You can use Adroll to create video and display ads that will target customers who visited your store but didn’t buy. Using dynamic ads and Adroll’s proprietary AI, visitors will see personalized dynamic ads that will encourage customers to convert. With Adroll’s multichannel marketing system, cross-channel engagement is easy to manage, making your remarketing campaigns fully cohesive and simple to track.

To start a remarketing campaign using Adroll, follow these steps:

  1. Connect your eCommerce platform. If you’re using Shift4Shop, then you’ll want to add your Adroll pixel to your store’s global footer. Make sure that your pixel is active before launching your campaign.
  2. Add your Google Analytics account. You’ll need this information when creating and monitoring your campaign.
  3. Choose your campaign plan. Determine which channels you want to serve ads on throughout this campaign. For remarketing campaigns, your campaign goal should be to recover cart abandoners and re-engage past purchasers.
  4. Set your campaign budget. This is when you’ll choose your average daily budget that you want to spend on ad impressions. Your advertising cost will depend on target audience size, variety of ad sizes and bid amount space.
  5. Set your campaign schedule. Choose how long you want your campaign to run for, and when you want it to end. You can also set it to have no end date and run continuously.
  6. Optimize your strategy. Your metrics of success to watch out for will be your spend, impressions, clicks, CTR (click-through-rate), CPM (cost per impression), CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per action), VTC (view through conversion), CTC (click to conversion) and ROAS (return on advertising spend).
  7. Connect your Facebook and Instagram accounts. If you intend on using Facebook’s retargeting ads, this is especially important.
  8. Choose your remarketing ads. At this point, you’ll be either creating or uploading the ads you want to use in your campaign. Adroll also offers free ads created for you by them.

 

PerfectAudience

Focusing on retargeting, PerfectAudience is a marketing solution that combines retargeting from the web, Facebook, Twitter, HubSpot, eCommerce platforms, mobile devices and more. PerfectAudience’s platform, after being set up, can automatically create multi-product dynamic ads for use in your retargeting campaign. You can also use the Dynamic Product Ad Builder, in combination with Google Shopping Feed, to create product ads perfect for remarketing.

To start a retargeting campaign using PerfectAudience, follow these steps:

  1. Install your site tracking tag. PerfectAudience recommends that you install their tracking tag, which is a small piece of code, onto every page of your website.
  2. Create segmented audiences. At this point, you’ll segment your audience based on a variety of chosen factors, including pages visited, actions, or search queries.
  3. Build your ads. Using PerfectAudience’s Dynamic Product Ad Builder, you can create and customize product ads for your retargeting campaign.
  4. Launch your campaign. In “Launch New Campaign,” you’ll be able to name your campaign, specify it’s bid type and budget, determine its schedule and frequency, and much more.
  5. Monitor your results. Once your campaign is launched, you can track your ROI and results in PerfectAudience’s metrics dashboard.

 

How to Set Up a Remarketing Campaign That Works

If you want to set up an effective remarketing campaign that truly brings people back to your business, then you need to plan it out thoroughly and cohesively. Everything needs to be purposeful, from the pages you’re tagging and the audience you’re targeting to what ads you’re serving and when they’re going out. When you create your remarketing campaign, follow these steps for success:

Identify Your Tagged Pages

Before you even begin to set up your remarketing campaign, you first need to choose which pages on your site need to be tagged and monitored for it. These should include high value pages, like your best seller category or specific products with high profit margins. When setting up your campaign, these pages will be tagged and monitored so that users who visit them without purchasing will be remarketed to later.

Segment Your Audience

In a typical marketing campaign, you’d be segmenting your audience based on demographics, behaviors and buyer personas. While this is still important for remarketing, you’re also segmenting audiences based on more specific behaviors in relation to their previous interactions with your business. Make sure that your audience segmentation aligns with your clear campaign goal:

  • Are you trying to save abandoned carts?
  • Will you be targeting general web traffic or lost leads?
  • Do you want to connect with customers post-purchase?

The way you segment your audience will inform how you strategize your campaign, so work on establishing this early on.

Perfect Your Timing

Think about how long you want to follow site visitors with your remarketing ads. If you follow visitors for too long, they may get annoyed and overwhelmed by the constant barrage of advertisements. But, if you follow visitors for a time period too short, you may not have exposed your ads to them long enough to stick. Test out different durations and see which works best for your target audience and business.

Offer Discounts & Coupons

Your remarketing efforts won’t always work on repeated exposure alone – you’ll also need to incentivize visitors to return to your store and finalize their purchases. By including incentives like discounts and coupons in your remarketing emails and retargeting ads, you’ll be encouraging visitors to come back and take advantage of that exclusive deal. To up the effectiveness of your discount, make it for a limited time; visitors will feel a higher sense of urgency if they know that this exclusive deal will run out soon.

Target Broad Keywords

If you’re focusing on search retargeting, then you need to take a different approach than you would with a typical PPC campaign. Since you’re working with established remarketing data, your ads will already be served to the right people – this means that you don’t need to target specific keywords and queries. Chances are that the broad keyword a previous site visitor is searching does relate to your industry, so target more broad keywords to boost your chance of showing up on a user’s SERP (search engine result page.)

Monitor Your Campaign

Remarketing campaigns aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it type of strategy; you need to constantly be monitoring the performance and effectiveness of your ads so that you can add, remove or change what is and isn’t working. If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change your campaign and stop wasting money on ads that aren’t converting.

 

Avoid These Remarketing Mistakes

Unfortunately, it’s not hard to make mistakes when running a remarketing campaign. Due to the personalized nature of such a strategy, it’s important to pay extra attention to what customers want from your brand and how they’re responding to your marketing messages.

First, remember that timing is everything; if your ads are badly timed, then customers won’t be happy. Since customers who visited your site and left without buying are most likely reluctant, don’t barrage them with ads about your products and store immediately after they leave. Your ad frequency and content need to be inviting and tailored to the customer’s behavior – this is where understanding your buyer persona comes in handy.

Second, a reluctant customer hates over-exposure as much as they hate intimidating ad frequency. If you’re serving customers with as many ads as you possibly can, to the point where almost every site and ad space is about your business and products, they can get overwhelmed fast. This only serves to build a negative impression of your brand, so try not to create ads that come on too strong.

 

Takeaway

It’s no secret that remarketing and retargeting are powerful digital marketing strategies for eCommerce. By using the right tool for your business needs and building an effective campaign, you’ll soon see in your metrics that visitors will be converting to customers and existing customers will be turning into brand loyalists. In an era where consumers are constantly looking for personalized treatment, remarketing campaigns are one of the best ways to convert in a personal, but still automated, way.