Create Value With Automated Retargeting

Claim what is yours by bringing visitors back time and time again

Times are tough right now.

Businesses have got to squeeze each penny.

This means lowering overhead and protecting revenue to grow cash reserves.

One of the most cost-effective ways to do this in 2020 is through retargeting, also known as remarketing.

Chances are your business has been collecting data on the behaviour of your audience (visitors, prospects, leads, customers) in your CRM for quite some time.

There is now a great opportunity to put that data to use.

What is retargeting?

Retargeting has been around for years now, but few companies are using it to its full effect.

In 2020, companies hold more data than ever on their website visitors, but the interaction between business and consumer typically stops when they leave the website.

That’s no longer needs to be the case. Now, using cookies, pixels or API calls, a business can show ads for their products whilst the web-surfer visits others, including social media channels, encouraging them to return to the original website.

This can be especially helpful, for instance, if a visitor placed products in their basket, but abandoned the checkout.

Whilst this can feel a little invasive sometimes, the fact is your online audience has given you consent to track them — or at least you should have set it up so that they could; it is a legal requirement these days — and now you own this data and have what’s called legitimate (business) interest to use it, why shouldn’t you?

The fact is, your potential customer likely just forgot to complete their purchase, or maybe the phone rang and they got distracted. The latter happens more often than we assume given we typically see 70% visiting through mobile devices.

Remarketing to them can actually be pretty helpful, resulting in a good outcome for all.

What is the typical ROI?

A 2016 study by popular events management firm Eventbrite found that, to their admitted surprise, the ROI of retargeting was around factor 6.

Typically, retargeting offers:

• Lower cost than broad paid ads
• Better targeting both in terms of audience as offer
• Higher conversion rates
• Improved branding effect

They suggest that when combining a sense of urgency with the ad, for instance offering a discount on the last few tickets of an upcoming event, this can boost ROI to around factor 14!

The enormous ROI makes for a cost-effective solution.

How can I do it?

Larger firms like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn offer their own solutions for retargeting, which are absolutely best-in-class, but many marketers and businesses may opt to engage an agency to set up and run their retargeting efforts for them if they haven’t brought the skills in-house.

Similarly, there are various other tools now available to help with this.

Whatever product or service you offer, bringing prospects back to your website after they’ve already visited it represents an ideal scenario over paying more to attract new visitors because they’ll be further along in the decision making journey, known as the Marketing Funnel.

Retargeter.com suggests that only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit to a website, so bringing warm leads back via retargeting increases your chance of making a sale each time.

Based on personal experience we opted to implement a full funnel with the Facebook ecosystem, combined with a google shopping setup with some remarketing features.

Providing pixels throughout our purchase funnel, setting up campaigns for cart abandon and making sure to double down on getting the kill pixel right.

The kill pixel (purchase validation pixel) makes sure that you don’t target someone that purchased on your platform. Nothing as annoying as watching 5 products, purchasing one after long contemplation and keep being bugged with the other 4 for weeks on end. Really, how many sofa’s do you think I need ?

Our current setup uses internal audience insights, to optimise cost based on probability of purchase, meaning we are willing to pay less for people that typically already purchase every week, combined with a hard rule that we only target a product to a person for maximum 3 days and with a low frequency. We never go for a pure single product view, we rather generate product carrousels in which the abandoned product is 2nd or 3rd option.

We tried other approaches, with 3rd party placements and well known external platforms yet our flash sales model (which means premium products are available for a maximum of 4 days) makes it hard for any third party to really build experience, added value or optimise algorithms fast enough. Past experiences typically yielded positive ROIs yet with an ad-view to purchase timeline of 10 days, making it hard to trust as the promoted products were not even available anymore.

Think the main thing to look out for is setting your KPIs to something that proves real business value in your specific context, rather than go with the typical attribution windows and KPI setups.

The indirect benefit: Branding

It’s important to remember, also, that whilst retargeting is great at bringing back visitors who abandoned making a purchase, it always keeps your brand top of mind.

These helpful reminders won’t just improve your conversion rate, they’ll make it more likely your first-time customers become repeat customers, improving the lifetime value of your customers.

As technology and data collection has improved over time, retargeting can now be personalised to a greater degree, allowing for more effective marketing, to warmer leads.

Outdated and expensive methods of digital marketing and advertising like Google Adwords are not going to be as effective or as helpful to you in the current economic climate, and focussing on smarter more cost-effective solutions like retargeting will allow you to create more value for your business.