Retargeting is actually a very simple concept: marketing your products or services to consumers who have already visited your site but who left without buying anything. It is an umbrella term encompassing several tactics, including site, email, and SEO retargeting, all of which contribute to more site traffic, conversions, revenue, and brand awareness. Let’s dive into this exciting component of the online marketing world to learn what makes retargeting so beneficial.
That Whole Cart Abandonment Problem
Abandoned shopping carts are a problem that has existed about as long as e-commerce stores themselves. Consumers abandon their online shopping bags for a variety of reasons ranging from those as simple as a distraction from a friend or family member to more complex issues such as frustrating site malfunctions. Cart abandonment rates are highest among travel sites and lowest among online fashion stores, something that makes perfect sense since buying a flight across the Atlantic is a much bigger commitment than purchasing a fall scarf. Yet the cart abandonment for Q1 2018 has decreased by 1.4% since Q4 2017, a number very possibly connected to efficient and effective retargeting strategies.
Using Email To Lower Cart Abandonment Numbers
Email has proven an excellent avenue for encouraging consumers who abandoned their e-commerce shopping carts to click “buy.” Why? Because these consumers have already expressed interest in the site’s products or services and probably will not mind a follow-up email, especially if they subscribe to the site’s email newsletter or similar offering. If cart abandonment is a continual problem for your site, use these tactics from Salescycle to get buyers to complete their purchases:
- Place the call-to-action (CTA) high up in the email so consumers automatically start thinking about finishing what they started.
- Split the image/text ratio into 60-40% sections, respectively. You don’t want to inundate your consumers with text when you are trying to score more sales.
- Use animated GIFs or similar fun and or festive images to make your consumers laugh, smile, and buy, buy, buy.
A Separate Retargeting Budget?
With all the benefits retargeting provides, it may be in your best interest to create a separate portion of your online marketing budget specifically for this practice. Only about 9% currently portion part of their budget for retargeting, so why not add your company to that statistic and become a remarketing trailblazer? Customers who view retargeted advertisements are 70%–that’s right, 70%–more likely to make those coveted conversions on your website. Pair that statistic with the fact that 30% of customers have a positive if not “very positive” reaction to retargeted ads compared to 11% who don’t, and you’ve got a winning formula for success.
Additionally, the average click-through rate for retargeted ads is 10 times what it is for their display ad counterparts. That’s pretty impressive.
Retargeting On Various Sites
Did you know three out of five U.S. consumers notice ads for products they looked at on other sites such as yours? That’s something you should take full advantage of. If you sell organic skin cream, for example, and your retargeted pops up on any other site the consumer considering said creams look at, you are providing an excellent “friendly reminder.” And since retargeted ads can increase branded search exposure by a staggering 1,001%, you could be losing important customers when you skip retargeting.
Engagement & More Engagement
In today’s marketing world, it’s not enough to have fantastic products that better the lives of the consumers who purchase them. Brands have to engage with their audience on a regular basis to capture consumer interest and hold onto it with incentives such as freebies, discounts, sales, and loyalty program perks. Engaging on a more personal level through blog and social media content also keeps customers loyal because they feel the brands they love truly love them back. Retargeting allows you to reconnect with your target audience in a way that matters to them, as these audience members did have the good sense to visit your site in the first place. The more you engage, whether through email retargeting or another means, the more you show your target market just how much you care.
Retargeting Through Google: Something You Cannot Afford To Skip
Google makes it possible to retarget with relative ease. And since the search engine is arguably the One Engine to Rule Them All, you cannot afford to skimp on Google retargeting efforts. It differs from standard display campaigns because you are using Google Ads to choose from existing audience definitions, create new definitions, and import assorted segments among other things. Google AdWords makes it possible to save your audience so you can use it to effectively create remarketing/retargeting campaigns. Help your Google retargeting efforts with the following tips:
- Add your selected audience to at least one of your Ad Groups.
- Review your Analytics data to create remarketing lists.
- Use the admin setting in Analytics to enable retargeting–there is no need to make further code changes.
- Create remarketing lists based on a wide variety of website and Analytics rules such as the number of visitors to a website page or the visitors of a page with a specific tag.
Wrapping Up
Retargeting is particularly essential if your e-commerce site features longer sales cycles, as it prevents consumers from forgetting about products that launched several weeks or months ago. Remember, there are innumerable ways to retarget with Google so you can extract as much from your campaign efforts as possible.
Take advantage of everything retargeting has to offer and see if your numbers don’t increase the way you want them to. Reach out to would-be customers and turn them into loyal members of your brand community. It doesn’t take a lot of extra effort or even that much more money…and the results are well worth it.
At Softline Solutions, retargeting is something we do every day. Give us a shout at your earliest convenience to learn what we will do for your next retargeting campaign so you can enjoy more conversions, revenue, and loyal customers.
