How to retarget your on line shoppers into customers

Just one hit and you can turn a browsing on line shopper into a customer. Marketing is not just about having a website or Facebook page. Ensuring that your customer experience is top notch and aligned with your advertising is great, but there is also some basic marketing you need to look into. 'Online Retargeting', for example, can reach people searching for businesses like yours. Perhaps people have seen your website and nearly purchased or made a reservation. Imagine if you could find people with online behaviours that match the ideal profile of a high value customer for your business. It will definitely pay to invest in some strategic marketing tools alongside the wonderful shopping or service experience you've created for your business.

Retargeting is a great internet based way to keep your prospects engaged and interact with shoppers who already show an interest in your business. Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a form of online advertising that can help you keep your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave your website. Your online advertising is then targeted to these shoppers based on their previous Interactions. For most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. Retargeting is a tool designed to help your business reach the 98% of users who don’t convert right away.

How Retargeting works

All that's required is to place a JavaScript tag in the footer of your website. Its a small, unobtrusive piece of code. The code is unnoticeable to your site visitors and won’t affect your site’s performance. Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when you browse the Web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve ads, ensuring that your ads are served only to people who have previously visited your site. You may have noticed when you look at travel websites the cookies go to work and later you see ads for airlines and hotels that you were browsing earlier.

List based retargeting

This is another method that enables you to do it yourself using, as an example, Facebook or Twitter. It works after you already have someone's contact information in your database. You can also use lists of your existing contacts for certain types of retargeting ads. The way it works is you upload a list of the email addresses to a retargeting campaign and the platform will identify users on that network who have those addresses and serve retargeting ads just to them.

Retargeting benefits

Retargeting generates greater online sales by highlighting your brand and bringing "window shoppers" back when they're ready to buy. Every time your customer sees your retargeting ads, your brand gains traction and more recognition. The high click-through rates and increased conversions that are typical with retargeting campaigns underscore the value of good branding and repeated exposure.

Retargeting best practice

Retargeting is most effective if you segment your visitors and tailor your retargeting ads, or not retarget them at all (for those shoppers who already converted into customers) The best performing retargeting creative has a clear call-to-action and promotes an offer. Different products warrant different retargeting time windows. For example, people shopping for travel should be retargeted immediately; people shopping for luxury goods should be retargeted later.

Getting started

Now that you have the background of how retargeting works and the different types of audiences you can segment by, you can focus on the goals you should aim for. The main types of retargeting campaigns you should consider running are those for awareness and those for conversion. You want to make prospects aware of your business, so impressions and engagement are acceptable metrics to track. Awareness campaigns are frequently used as precursors to sales conversions. Conversion goals are just that -- you want to get people to click on your ad and take a next step. There are many third-party platforms to do web and social retargeting, such as PerfectAudience, AdRoll, Retargeter, Bizo, and many more. You can also do your own retargeting through specific platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Retargeting is so effective because it focuses your advertising spend on people who are already familiar with your brand and have recently demonstrated interest. That’s why most marketers who use it see a higher Return On Investment than from most other digital channels. There are many aspects of a retargeting campaign that must be worked out before you make the ad copy and creative. Be sure to give enough time to make your lists, set goals and types of campaigns, determine the platforms your ads will run on, and tie the whole conversion path together. The Business Minder operates as a consulting business analyst and management consultant in SE Asia with clients in Singapore, Bali, Indonesia and Malaysia.