5 Steps to Successful Retargeting Campaigns

On most websites less than 2% of visitors will convert on their first visit. Retargeting (or remarketing) helps to encourage the remaining 98% to re-visit at a later date in order to drive more conversions. By using a simple JavaScript code you can follow visitors to your website all over the internet, serving targeted advertisements designed to recapture interest in your brand, products or services. The majority of marketers who include retargeting in their strategy see a higher ROI than through other digital channels as the advertising is focused on those individuals who have already demonstrated an interest in the brand or in a particular product. Here we explore five steps to a successful retargeting campaign.

Use Remarketing Frequency Caps

A successful retargeting campaign intrigues the consumer and reminds them of your brand or product but does not saturate them with marketing wherever they look. Overexposure creates at best banner blindness, where internet browsers simply no longer register what they are seeing and at worst actively negative associations with your brand or product. Subtly integrating strategic retargeting keeps your brand or product at the forefront of the mind without the adverts becoming invisible or irritating. A balanced retargeting campaign will show viewers your advertisements less than once per day or around twenty times per month.

Integrate a Burn Pixel

Just as with overexposure to advertisements, customers will begin to become annoyed with or blind to advertisements popping up for products they have already purchased. Integrating a small snippet of code called a burn pixel into the post-transaction page of your website ensures that once a customer has made their purchase they are removed from the retargeting list for that particular product. They can still be included in other campaigns but this piece of code makes certain that you do not bombard them with messages to take the same action twice.

Work with Facebook

While Facebook is a non-professional social network the sheer scope of the site ensures that the reach is greater than other social media sites by quite a long way even when attempting to generate B2B leads. There are more than a billion users of Facebook worldwide and the typical user spends around 15% of their total browsing time on the site. Most marketers recognise the usefulness of Facebook as a tool for raising brand awareness but see low conversion rates from Facebook advertising. By targeting those customers who are already further down the pipeline you increase the chances of conversion.

Create Convenient Pathways for Return to Cart

Shopping cart abandonment is a big issue for many online retailers, where customers click through the order process but abandon before completion. There are many reasons for shopping cart abandonment and in some cases this cannot be helped, but for the percentage of customers who abandon for reasons such as the phone ringing, the boss walking in, dinner being ready etc., a subtle retargeting campaign making it fast and simple to complete the purchase can work wonders. Create personalised advertisements offering a fast route to complete a particular purchase with an image of the product and chances are a percentage of cart abandoners will take you up on the offer.

Include Images

Internet browsers have a notoriously short attention span and so any advertisement needs to grab that attention quickly. Our brains process images faster and more automatically than they process text (see our video content marketing blog post) – a split second is enough to grasp image-based content, whereas if browsers have to read to discover the same information many of them will choose not to bother. Integrate images of those products the customer has shown interest in from their browsing history and increase your chances of persuading them to return to your store.

Retargeting / Remarketing works best as part of a bigger digital strategy, combined with content marketing, targeted display and inbound and outbound marketing. Digital strategies such as content marketing help to drive traffic to the site while retargeting focuses more on conversions. Test the waters and see what works best for your business using the tools above to create a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that works on every level, or call Wish.