As marketers, we often define potential buyers in general ways:
- All females between 40 and 60
- Drivers who commute to and from work
- Families with two or more children
That’s a basic approach to marketing, but we know it goes deeper than that. The more detailed you can be with your client demographics, the better your chance of reaching them and completing the sale.
Often, we have prospects come in and shop around. They click through pages, place items in a shopping cart, and then abandon everything, walking away from the sale. That’s where remarketing and retargeting come in.
Both remarketing and retargeting are used to convert previous visitors to your website into sales. Yet even though they have the same goal, each strategy has different nuances to bring earlier visitors to action.
What Is Retargeting?
Let’s start with retargeting. Possibly the term most referred to, retargeting most often refers to display ads or online ad placement that targets visitors who have interacted with your site in specific ways without finalizing the purchase. You’ve probably noticed this in your own shopping patterns.
You look for a product, place it in a shopping cart, then move on and look for other things. You suddenly notice this item “following” you around, appearing on other sites as you search.
This is a classic retargeting campaign. It serves ads to prospective customers based on cookies. The people receiving these ads have already visited your site and taken specific actions, and they are familiar with who you are.
They are leads or contacts with a greater chance of converting into a sale.
What Is Remarketing?
With a clear picture of how retargeting works, it’s easier to understand remarketing. Think of retargeting as a subset of remarketing. Retargeting is just one way of creating a remarketing campaign.
Remarketing is a broad term that describes the overall process of reaching out to the same people repeatedly. Remarketing can include retargeting, social media, email marketing, and even direct connection through phone.
One of the top strategies is through email marketing. When prospects or customers connect with you, emails are used as follow-up to keep the connection process going in order to increase or complete the sale. It involves both existing customers and people who haven’t completed the sale.
Where To Start … Your Website
While remarketing and retargeting do share a common goal, it’s the overall process that slightly changes. Remarketing is about re-engaging with customers, offering add-on services, or reminding them to renew a membership. Retargeting is about moving a prospect to a customer, reminding them of previous actions they’ve taken on your site.
Remarketing starts at the website level itself. It places cookies on the device of a visitor you might wish to reconnect with. For example, if someone visits a products page but doesn’t complete the sale. When visitors land on one of these pages, they are automatically added to your remarketing list. This allows you to be specific in the way you approach them with your remarketing campaign.
As you build campaigns, you’ll use a remarketing pixel tag to track customer actions for a more personalized approach. Pixel tags are small snippets of code that complete the tracking process. They gather pertinent information about each visitor based on what they engage with on your site.
It’s these pixel tags that allow you to engage on Google, social media sites, or other platforms that accept ad campaigns. It’s important to note that this is for new visitors—when someone lands on a page, they will only be added to a remarketing list once.
Dig Deeper
Defining Your Online Customer Avatar
Effective Marketing Means Segmenting Your Target Market
Types of Remarketing
Remarketing campaigns come in different types. Most are centered around the platform you use for the remarketing campaign. They can include:
- Display remarketing: One of the most common campaigns, this allows you to display an ad on another site based on why they landed on yours. You use specific platforms such as Google or Bing.
- Email remarketing: This requires you to upload the email addresses of people who visit your site. Then every time they log in to a platform that requires email, such as Google or YouTube, it triggers a response.
- Search retargeting: This triggers network ads to people who have previously visited your site based on your remarketing list.
- Social retargeting: Each social media platform has its own approach to how they build a remarketing campaign.
It’s Time to Build a Retargeting Campaign
Chances are you’ve seen retargeting ads in action. You know how they work because you’ve had reminder ads appear in your own web searches. Retargeting campaigns can benefit any business. They keep your products or services in visitors’ minds as they continue surfing online.
For most businesses, that’s the number one reason why they start retargeting: they want to increase the chances of closing a sale. But it isn’t the only reason to build a retargeting campaign.
Build a Stronger, More-Customized List
Retargeting allows you to build a stronger list of people who already have an interest in what you do. A little nudge from you can push them to engage with you, even if it isn’t about buying the original item they searched for.
Increase Brand Loyalty
Customers have more options today than ever before. Retargeting keeps your brand front and center in their minds, increasing the chance that they’ll engage with you again in the future. Familiarization is one of the biggest hurdles of marketing, and retargeting can help you overcome it.
Better Insight
This isn’t just about sales. You can use the information you gather in a retargeting campaign to learn more about purchasing behavior. This can help you build more robust campaigns in the future.
Are Remarketing and Retargeting Campaigns in Your Future?
When done right, both remarketing and retargeting can be vital marketing strategies. When you’re ready to dive in deeper with your online connections, remarketing and retargeting can help you acquire additional leads, turn them into customers, and increase your bottom line.
What’s not to love about these digital strategies?
