ONLY ABOUT 2% of website visitors convert on the first visit to a website.
Once there was no way of getting them back but now, thanks to what’s known as ‘remarketing’, you can entice at least some of them back.
Remarketing (or retargeting as it is also known) is a way of following up with visitors who didn’t take the desired action (convert) the first time they visited your site.
When they visit other websites, they will be shown ads that relate to the pages or products or services they’ve looked at on your website.
Companies that have used remarketing campaigns have seen a dramatic jump in response rates—up to 600%, report the co-authors of ‘The One Guide to Remarketing’, Dylan Touhey and James Mulvey.
Retargeting keeps track of people who visit your site and displays your retargeting ads to them when they visit other sites online.
With remarketing, a JavaScript tag is placed in the footer of one or more of your website pages. It creates a list of visitors by placing retargeting cookies in their browser.
With that list, retargeting vendors like Google, Criteo, AdRoll, or Retargeter can show retargeting ads to your prospective customers as they visit other sites.
You can also retarget people on Facebook to send them to your website.
Why retargeting works?
You can achieve more conversions with retargeting because the ads help to keep your brand in the minds of your prospects. Your brand gets recognition and traction with each appearance of the retargeting ad.
The high click-through rates and increased conversions that are typical with retargeting campaigns underscore the value of good branding and repeated exposure.
When you use remarketing, you can get:
- More conversions by targeting people who’ve abandoned shopping carts
- Lower CPA due to targeting a precise pool of prospects
- Increased brand awareness in a relatively brief time without investing a large budget
You can use the information to convert visitors who left your website by creating new ads that appeal to them at whatever stage of the buying process they’re at.
You can use remarketing to:
- Recapture the interest of people who’ve left your website without taking any action.
- Target people with the keywords or search terms they used to find your site
- Attract people at different stages of the buying process
- Remind prospective customers about your brand as they research competitors
Kinds of remarketing
There are different forms of remarketing including:
- Site retargeting. Your banner ads are shown to anyone who’s visited your website.
- Search retargeting. Your banner ads are shown to anyone who’s searched for a specific phrase on ‘your’ search engine (that is, the search engine you’re advertising on). This way, you’re targeting people who don’t know about your business and who haven’t seen your website.
- CRM retargeting. Your banner ads are shown to people who are in your database. You give the retargeting network the email list, and it shows those people banner ads.
- Email retargeting. Your banner ads are shown to anyone who has opened an email from you. You do this by placing your retargeting code inside the emails you send out. This allows you to target specific segments of your email list, as well as increase the audience and reach of your retargeting campaign.
- Audience retargeting. Your banner ads are shown to a specific audience such as women over 50 or even by job positions.
How to leverage remarketing
To be successful, you need to conduct customer research so you can target your prospective customers effectively. Your research should identify your prospective customers’ wants and motivations.
But it’s not just about converting prospective customers. You can use remarketing to target your existing customers. You can segment them into a campaign that promotes products or services related to what they’ve bought from you in the past.
Focus on specific audience segments. For instance, if your objective is to improve your conversion rates, then focus on your visitors and engaged people. These are people who have come to your site but have not taken that next step so you can start showing them banners that reveal the benefits of buying your product or service (things like bonuses, discounts or add-ons, etc.) that they can get.
Create a checklist. It should cover everything you need to do to create your strategy.
Make sure your banner features a strong CTA and sends users to a landing page. If your banner doesn’t feature a strong CTA and doesn’t send people to a landing page which makes the conversion process easy and simple, you’ll just waste your campaign investment.
Don’t retarget everyone. All site visitors are not created equal.
To improve your conversion rate, test every element of your remarketing ads including the CTAs, landing pages, ad formats, images, graphics, copy, and offers.