Overview
Online remarketing, at its simplest, means placing a cookie or pixel in a website visitor’s browser so that when they leave your site before completing a sale, your text, image and/or email follows them on the web in order to encourage them to buy. Clients will abandon their purchase intent for diverse reasons. Remarketing is a great way to re-engage and recapture lucrative leads that would otherwise be lost for good.
While every business with an Internet presence needs a remarketing strategy, your remarketing efforts are more likely to be successful if you apply the following best practices.
Segmentation
The more you can segment your remarketing campaign, the better you can fine-tune your message for each segment’s taste and thus increase your conversions.
For instance, someone who briefly viewed your website’s homepage should be treated differently from a visitor who spent 30 minutes exploring your product pages. The two are both visitors to your site but aren’t at the same phase of the sales funnel. In that case, you can build remarketing ads emphasizing price reduction for the lingering visitor while crafting awareness-centered ads for your looker visitors.
Abandoned Carts
Abandoned carts are one of the first places you should look at when planning your remarketing strategy. A visitor who abandons a shopping cart was at the very last stage of making a purchase. They were already persuaded about the viability of your product and need just a little more nudging to make the leap.
Abandoned carts include everyone from those who dropped off as soon as they clicked through to your cart page to those who were on the checkout window but failed to complete the process.
Past Customers and Big Spenders
Repeat customers are much easier to convert than a new visitor to your web site and therefore have a lower cost-per-click (CPC). They have already bought from you and have experienced firsthand the quality of your product. By remarketing to your past customers, you can boost your sales substantially.
As you do so, you can pay special attention to your big spenders by showing them new product lines, products that are similar or related to their previous purchase or a custom campaign that bundles together multiple products as part of a big spender promotion.
Product Reviews
As anyone who has been in the ecommerce space for a while will attest, product reviews are a powerful tool for conversion. After personal experience, a review is the next best thing for a user evaluating the suitability of a product. The more independent (or at least perceived as independent) the review, the better.
You can select the best reviews about your product there are out there and use them as artwork and copy in your remarketing campaigns.
Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
We already alluded to this in a previous section. But cross-selling and up-selling are important enough to be a best practice in their own right. If someone bought a product from you, you can leverage the power of remarketing to get them to either upgrade or spark their interest in a complementary item.
Cross-selling and up-selling works best when it’s tiered. For example, you’d launch a remarketing campaign aimed at shoppers then transition any who do not convert into a new campaign that offers a lower discount.
Seasonal
There are visitors who engaged with your website at a particular time of the month or year because you had a sale (e.g. during a major holiday) or because buying your product was most appropriate at that particular time (e.g. wedding products for peak wedding season, gardening tools for spring or warm attire for the winter).
You can reconnect with these visitors by planning your remarketing campaign for that exact time of the month or year. So, if you had a sale during last Thanks giving for one or more products, you may want to schedule your ads in a way that remarkets to the same audience since they had already expressed an interest.
Overcome Buyer Skepticism
Only a tiny minority of people who visit your website will eventually convert and buy your product. The good news (and a principle offline advertisers learned decades ago) is that many people who do eventually buy from you will only do so after encountering your brand several times. It comes down to that innate human trait of skepticism and a need to know that one is making the right decision. It’s this principle that the best practices of online remarketing ride on.
