What Is Remarketing?
Remarketing is the term for showing targeted ads to previous visitors of your site who didn’t make a purchase or take a desired action. Nearly all a site’s first-time visitors end up leaving without taking action, but remarketing is one way to reduce the impact by pulling earlier visitors back in. Potential customers who head back to websites as a result of remarketing are 70% more likely to make a purchase, sign up for an email list, or do whatever else you’re hoping for. Another benefit is cost efficiency. Retargeting is usually a lot less expensive than converting someone unfamiliar with your offerings. The repetitive nature of remarketing also creates more exposure, helping small businesses stand out to audiences that might otherwise think of huge corporations first. Over time, familiarity also helps audiences to recognize your business as a trustworthy option. Remarketing is especially helpful for enticing hesitant customers, people who are close to making a purchase if you can get past their last shred of hesitation.
Smart Strategies
Remarketing allows for a wealth of effective conversion strategies. Audience segmentation, the separation of your audience into subgroups based on factors ranging from demographics to hobbies, is a big one. In the case of retargeting, you segment the audience of people who’ve visited and left your site without conversion. Here are just a few ways to segment an audience:
- Behaviour such as product page visits, browsing time, and items in the shopping cart
- Visitor Personas
- Geographic Location
- Demographics like age, gender, educational level, etc.
- Interests, hobbies, and goals
Retargeting Ads That Work
Though retargeting is highly effective when done well, you can’t jump into it blindly, so consider following some remarketing tips. You need to consider how soon and how often to retarget. It’s especially important to make sure you retarget people on both desktop and mobile for full effect. Retargeting ads often do best when they focus on common objections such as lack of trust, lack of information, or cost. Retargeting by advertising limited-time sales and discounts, free shipping, or bonus offers can nudge price-conscious shoppers to move forward. Regarding trust, social proof is invaluable. So is educational content, which establishes your business’s expertise while providing more information for highly analytical audience members. Make sure your ads are visually consistent with your website when it comes to stylistic features like colors and fonts to create stronger brand recognition. Ads must function well and look great on mobile. Make the value proposition clear, and use energetic language to encourage audience members to take action. Before you get started, though, you need to understand the importance of data in any ad campaign.
Measuring Campaign Success
The best remarketing strategies are built on a foundation of data. Before moving forward, you need to establish a baseline—how many people already visit your site, make purchases, and so on—so that you know whether your retargeting campaign is working. You won’t have all the data you need before you begin; much of it can only be collected once you’ve already put out some ads. That’s why it’s best to start small so you can reassess and change faulty efforts before wasting tons of money. A/B testing is a fairly simple example. With that kind of test, you compare different parts of ads—headlines, offers, CTAs, images, and more—to see which ones get the best response. Effective A/B testing works best when you test one aspect of an ad at a time. It’s hard to figure out which thing made the difference if you test more than one difference simultaneously. Remember that you need to measure data about sales and leads. Clicks aren’t enough. Acquiring and analyzing a bunch of data does have a learning curve, especially since more advanced methods sometimes require specialized software with high price tags. A trustworthy digital marketing agency can handle it all, taking a load off any business owner’s shoulders.
