Sergio Alvarez is a performance marketing expert, digital attribution leader and CEO and founder of Ai Media Group.
Some visitors click on your homepage but leave after only a few moments. Others might scroll through your brand information more carefully and perhaps even add a few items to their shopping cart, yet leave without making a purchase. These trends can be frustrating to a marketing manager keeping a close eye on their metrics, but there is a way to nudge those specific consumers toward conversion.
Retargeting, or remarketing, is the creation of marketing and advertising campaigns designed to hook prior visitors who leave without converting. It often consists of pay-per-click (PPC) ads, but retargeting can also involve email campaigns and similar measures.
No matter what the avenue, retargeting your campaigns can serve as a complementary strategy that creates more influential touchpoints along the buyer’s journey. This can help keep consumers engaged with your brand and encourage them to revisit the site when they’re ready to make a purchase. Based on my own experiences working in digital marketing, here are some best practices to keep in mind.
1. Catch bees with honey, but flies with vinegar.
When designing a retargeting campaign—or any other type of marketing campaign, for that matter—it’s always helpful to segment your audience. You don’t want to show certain marketing messages to the wrong audience, as they will be irrelevant and a waste of ad spend. (For example, don’t show an ad for clothing to a site visitor who checked out the product pages for home decor.)
Segmenting ensures that each consumer is shown retargeted ads that are most likely to be both helpful and relevant for them. There are numerous ways to segment your audience. You can segment based on factors such as:
• Demographics.
• Number of site visits.
• Length of site visits.
• Pages navigated.
• Cart status.
• Products of interest.
• Geographic location.
You can develop ads for these segments based on what you know about the audience. When doing so, keep in mind that some segments may already know more about your brand than others. Assume that leads who have only briefly visited your homepage will need more brand info than leads who spent plenty of time on multiple pages.
Also, consider exactly which pages a particular audience visited. If an audience visited a landing page, you’ll want to gear the campaign toward the product or service that the landing page focused on. If a segment visited an FAQ page, you could design a remarketing email drip campaign that offers educational/informative tips, tutorials, additional FAQs and similar content.
Note that you can also use retargeting campaigns for consumers who did make a purchase in order to encourage them to become repeat customers. For example, you might offer a coupon code on a product that complements the one they already purchased.
2. Keep it simple.
While segmenting is important, you don’t want to become so wrapped up in targeting each segment with the most relevant brand info that you forget one of the golden rules in marketing: Keep it simple. Consumers generally don’t appreciate large blocks of text. Use concise, action-oriented language in your messaging, and remember to focus on how your product will solve their problem.
3. Watch the clock.
Not all stages in the sales cycle are of equal length. Often, it’s necessary to launch retargeting campaigns with a sense of urgency. You may need to nudge your leads with multiple touchpoints within a short period of time. This is especially true if the desired purchase is seasonal in nature (e.g., holiday gifts or décor) or if it’s associated with a one-time event (e.g., an entertainment event or professional seminar). If you are marketing a one-time event, don’t forget to terminate the campaign when it makes sense to do so.
Even if you aren’t marketing seasonal or otherwise time-sensitive products, evidence shows that sending retargeted ads to leads soon after they leave your website is more effective than waiting a week or two. A study of over 230,000 consumers by marketing professors at the Stanford Graduate School of Business determined that retargeted ads are much more effective when shown during the first week. In fact, half of the impact of retargeting occurs within the first two days.
4. Avoid brand fatigue.
Because retargeting campaigns may have a greater sense of urgency compared to other marketing campaigns, you’ll want to ensure that your leads see your marketing messages often enough to drive them toward conversion. Yet you don’t want to completely inundate them with your brand. Setting smart limits on ad recurrence can help prevent brand fatigue. Several times per week is usually reasonable.
5. No need for déjà vu.
While some consumers might appreciate retargeted ads that remind them to purchase something they need, they don’t generally appreciate seeing ads for products they’ve already bought. After conversion, these customers should be placed in a new segment. This segment can be shown ads for products that are similar or complementary to their prior purchase.
6. Track your data and use A/B testing.
Successful marketing campaigns tend to rely heavily on data analytics. You need to know who your leads are in order to convince them that your products can solve their problems.
In order to understand your prospects—and, even more importantly, to understand which brand touchpoints resonate with them—I recommend tracking the buyer’s journey holistically. Having a complete view of the buyer’s journey can help you identify the exact point at which the lead either became a customer or became disengaged from the brand altogether. Pay attention to any messaging problems and effective messaging points, as identifying these areas can allow you to make adjustments accordingly to reduce ad spend while boosting conversion rates.
As you implement these best practices, remember that marketing is never set in stone. You’ll need to continually tweak your retargeting campaigns as you acquire new information. The process might seem exhaustive, but the results are often worth it; as shown in the aforementioned study on retargeting, these ads can boost the likelihood of a return visit by nearly 15%.
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