One of the benefits of digital marketing over offline marketing, is the use of remarketing campaigns. Remarketing can be loosely explained as identifying who are people who have been to your website using tags or pixels, and then serving relevant personalised advertisements to them. In the offline world its probably almost impossible to conduct remarketing. I mean, if someone enters your shop, browse a few products then walks out. Would you be able to identify the person and reach out to him / her again? Probably not.
To get you started on the remarketing journey, here’s a 4 basic steps you should adhere to when running a remarketing campaign.
1) Segment Audience To ReMarket
Taking an E-Commerce website as an example, you’ll probably want to differentiate a serious buyer from a someone who’s just browsing, or maybe what product categories were visited by each user. Amazon being one of the largest of e-commerce platforms out there does insane segmentation of their customers.
Here’s how I would probably segment the visitors, assuming all the pages are tagged:
Window Shoppers
– Visitors who spends over 3-minutes on the website, and browse over 5-pages
Potential Customers
– Visitors who loaded the “check out” page, but didn’t complete the purchase
Actual Customers
– Visitors who purchased items from your website
In addition to each segment, you may also want to know which product / categories were being browsed / considered / purchased. However depending on your site build and tagging knowledge this process could be a little complex.
2) Personalised Ad Copy
Now that you’ve segmented the visitors to your site, you’ll want to reach out to them in the most effective manner. A lot of advertisers just spam the same ads for remarketing campaigns. And though you’ll see improvements in conversions compared to prospecting campaigns, you probably aren’t reaching the full potential.
Here’s a remarketing ad that Expedia ran on Facebook. Basically, I was searching for hotels in Whistler, Canada and Aava Whistler Hotel was one of the hotels I was browsing on Expedia. Now let’s examine the ad below
“Planning a trip to Whistler?”, “Rooms are still available at Aava Whistler Hotel”, “Come back and compare hotels on Expedia..” These are examples of personalised messaging. Because Expedia is fully aware of my activities on their website they are able to push a relevant advertisement to me. And that’s not all, did you note the message “Time is ticking…”? This is a great way to add a sense of urgency to the ad.
3) Differentiated Offer
Having a differentiated offer could be the most effective way to convert a remarketed customer. In a scenario where the customer is interested in the product but lacks the push to complete the purchase, we’ll show him / her a remarketing banner urging him / her to come back and get 20% off the transaction.
Here’s an example of remarketing with a differentiated offer. From the ad banner above we can safely assume BIRCHBOX already knows that the customer has items in the shopping cart and the price of the items add up to over $35. What BIRCHBOX then does is to offer a discount when the customer makes the purchase. This should help persuade the customer to complete the purchase
4) Customised Landing Page
Remarketing doesn’t really just stop at ad banners. The landing page plays a part in the conversion process as well. Think about it, you’ve spent so much effort identifying visitors who’s been to your website and then crafting personalised messages and offers. Wouldn’t it be a waste if these people land on a public homepage without any form of personalisations?
Here’s an example showing the relevancy between ad banner and the landing page
What are other remarketing strategies that you use? We’d love to hear from you