The vast majority of visitors to your website won’t convert. And if you read the latest-and-greatest information on why, you’ll meet with the standard advice like:
- Your website isn’t setup properly for mobile
- The checkout process is slow or flawed
- Your website is difficult to navigate
- There aren’t visible discounts or special offers
- Your website speed and load time are painfully slow
So of course as marketers, we have to find ways to combat these issues.
So we move to another website company who talks a good talk. Or maybe we upgrade to a better checkout system, one that is easier to control. Offering a coupon and special discounts is easy, so we throw up a page filled with them online.
Yep, it’s all easy to fix.
But what happens when you move to a new online marketing company and things still don’t work? What if you make changes to your site and you still don’t convert? That’s when it’s time to get into the nitty gritty details of conversion.
In most cases, a visitor visits your site and isn’t quite ready to take action. But what if you could get these visitors to return to your site so you could present the offer again?
That’s retargeting.
What Is Retargeting
When a user visits a website, opens up a promotional email, uses a search engine, or almost any other action online, they are expressing their interest in a particular subject matter. They are hunting for answers to their questions. They are looking for a little advice. Or maybe even for a little change in their life.
Many of these users don’t buy a product or service on a first visit because they are “still looking.” Before retargeting, these prospects were often lost forever.
But with retargeting, you can bring those interested parties back again. Retargeting is when an advertiser targets users who have completed a previous action. This usually involves placing a cookie on the user’s browser to signal ad exchanges that the user is part of the retargeting audience.
The Benefits Of Retargeting
The benefit of retargeting is having the opportunity to present your business to a potential customer again. Retargeting can be used for brand awareness, to draw back prospects into your sales funnel, or to market your products and services to previous buyers.
Retargeting campaigns can reach users on thousands of different websites and apps. If you’ve ever searched for something on Amazon, for instance, only to have that product “follow” you around as you move to different sites, that’s retargeting in place.
To gain the most benefit from retargeting, it’s important to build your ideal audience. Because retargeting can work on many levels, the greater your list-building techniques are, the more you divide your lists into specific types of prospects and buyers, the more you understand about what your customers desire, the better retargeting will work.
Retargeting Techniques
Retargeting works with either Google AdWords or Facebook Ad campaigns. The key is in discovering how to service consumers better and deliver more results with every retargeting ad you offer. To do that, you should look at things like:
Engagement
This comes from knowing your analytics. By using Google Analytics with your Ad campaigns, you can begin to see a wide range of factors on which to build your retargeting ads. Things like:
- Page depth
- Number of visits
- Landing pages
- Session duration
These can all impact how you further engage your potential audience. For example, if you discover that if a person spends five minutes and clicks three times within your site, they might be more likely to buy. This allows you to create a custom segment and only target these people.
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Form Completion Status
You can track the people who start filling out a form and never complete it. They may have had something else in mind or were interrupted in the process. Yet you know they had enough desire to start the process. Retargeting can give them another push to complete the process.
Free Trials
How many people signed up for something, used it for a short time period, and never came back? Maybe they were distracted in the process, or decided the timing wasn’t right for what they needed. A gentle nudge may be all that is necessary to breathe new life into the action.
After a few days of inactivity, you can retarget them as well as send out a series of emails reminding them of what you have to offer.
Past Users
How many users have you had throughout your history? If you’ve been in business for a while, this number can be huge. You can get these people back using retargeting. And since you already have their emails, you can get started quickly.
Remind them of what you do best. Remind them of why they used you in the first place. Things like features and benefits can have a huge impact. Show a few case studies to share results. You can even reward them with new offers – who doesn’t like savings when you are already familiar with a company? Stay in touch – stay engaged.
Content
A lot of people online are out hunting for answers. They want content, and they want lots of it. They want to hide behind “anonymity” for as long as possible. They won’t give you their email … yet.
Retargeting gives you the opportunity to reach out to these people in an “anonymous” way. Instead, you use retargeting to provide varying levels of content to build the trust over time. That way when they hand over their email address, they are ready to move on.
You can retarget and send them to different places: to different articles, to different landing pages, to whitepapers and free reports. And only when they are comfortable will they have to release their email. But until they do, there you are.
Retargeting – What’s Next
Retargeting may sound exciting. It may sound like a perfect way to gain awareness quickly. But retargeting also can be a little “creepy” if not done in the right way.
That’s where we come into play.
We understand the retargeting process. We carefully consider your audience size, what you have to offer, and what your audience will handle. We help you clean your lists and reach out to them in the best ways possible.
Retargeting is an opportunity – if you use it in the right way.
Are you ready to add retargeting to your marketing arsenal?
