Did you know only 3% of e-commerce customers purchase on their first visit?
Think about the last time you looked at a product on Amazon but decided not to buy it.
You probably saw that product pop up when you were scrolling through Instagram or Facebook right?
That’s remarketing.
You may think that showing people the same ad over and over again would turn them off, but it turns out that remarketing increases conversion rates over time.
In this article, we’ll go over how you can use remarketing in your business.
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing is a marketing strategy that markets to an audience that has already taken an action. This action can be buying a product, clicking on an ad, being exposed to an ad, or even just visiting a web page.
It has the power to “nudge” your undecided customer to purchase. It can make a big difference in convincing someone to follow through with their purchase. It’s also a powerful strategy for re-engaging past customers.
Remarketing works by placing a snippet of code on specific web pages. This is usually called a “pixel”. Once the page is loaded, the pixel “fires” and the customer is now tagged in the system as “this person visited this specific web page”.
We’ll go over a few tips on how to successfully run a remarketing campaign.
Have a Clear Goal
As with any marketing campaign, what do you want to accomplish? Remarketing helps people re-engage with your brand, so what does success in re-engagement look like to you?
For example, Amazon’s goal is to get you to buy a product after you’ve spent a specific amount of time on the product page, or if you’ve added it to your cart and didn’t purchase it.
It’s important to map out and specifically plan what exactly the customer journey will look like when it comes to setting up a remarketing campaign.
What does a successful campaign look like to you? What are your key performance indicators(KPI’s) that will mark this campaign as a success?
Set Up All Your Tracking Tags In The Right Places
If you are just starting out with remarketing or planning to do it in the future, it’s worth it to set up your tracking tag ASAP so you can start collecting data on your customers right now.
The first place you could put your retargeting pixel would be on the pages that load after a customer has purchased something.
So for example, say you sell candles and you wanted to show complementary products like a candle holder to this recent buyers.
You’d want to place that snippet of code on your “thanks for ordering” page, which will tag anyone who visits there as a purchaser of your product. Then, you can create ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. that only market your candleholders to those who’ve already bought a candle.
You can also get extremely granular and tag them based on which exact products they’ve purchased.
You’ll want to ensure that you have the right tracking tags on web pages that are most important to achieving the goals you defined above.
Segment Your Audience
Segmenting your audience by what actions they’ve taken can provide valuable data on your customer behavior. This way you’ll be able to utilize remarketing in completely different and powerful ways, depending on the buying stage in which your customer is in.
For example, if your goal is e-mail collection, you can remarket signing up for a free guide to people who visit more than 3-4 of your blog posts but haven’t signed up yet.
You’ll want to use multiple pixels for multiple goals, and create separate campaigns for each goal to keep things nice and organized.
One common way to run a digital remarketing campaign is to first run a Google Adwords campaign targeting people who are searching for your type of product/solution.
Then you can run an accompanying remarketing campaign to those people who visit your site and take specific actions. You can use social ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest.
Continuously Test
A successful remarketing campaign is one that doesn’t stop testing. This means testing different ad creative, targeting, and offers to your remarketing audience.
When testing remarketing ads, your offer is considered the most important aspect. Testing different offers can make a world’s difference. You’ll want to stick with changing only one variable and keep others the same.
An example of enticing someone to reconsider purchasing would be to run a remarketing ad that offers a 10% discount for the product that they added to their cart but didn’t purchase it. If the numbers make sense financially, you can test out other price-specific offers.
It’s important to give enough time to let your campaigns run so you can achieve a baseline of performance that you can test against and incrementally improve.
You’ll also want to have a big enough sample size to find any statistically significant data. You may be surprised at what the data tells you.
Supercharge your Campaigns with Remarketing
Remarketing is a powerful complement to your overall digital marketing strategy.
It can help you re-engage potential, new, and even old customers with your brand and your products. If you’re re-engaging with existing customers, it will be that much easier to convince them to purchase or invest in your brand.
If you’re interested in learning how digital marketing can help your business, you can read more articles here.
