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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
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:
To create a Google Dynamic Remarketing ad campaign, follow these steps:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
The way you segment your audience will inform how you strategize your campaign, so work on establishing this early on.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.