Remarketing is a powerful form of marketing, but it’s important to understand the limitations. It’s not like PPC, where you can turn on a campaign and see traffic flooding to your website. And it’s not like display marketing, where you can advertise to new potential customers on other websites. Remarketing is all about re-engaging visitors once they have left their website.
The best remarketing campaigns are born from strategy. It’s easy to decide you need a remarketing campaign, set it up and watch it run. But with a little planning, you could be reengaging lapsed customers, up-selling, cross-selling and offering a better user experience.
Imagine you run a local shop and you are able to collect the contact information of everyone who comes in the shop just to look around. You then get to call them a week later and give them a short message about the shop.
What would you say?
Would you contact everyone?
And would you give them all the same message?
You should shape your remarketing strategy in a similar way. Here are some things to think about when building your strategy.
Think about your goals
The goal is nearly always more customers or more orders. But how do you want to achieve this? Do you want to up-sell, cross-sell, remind people about items left in their basket, provide more information about your services, increase traffic etc. The list goes on.
Every campaign should have a goal in mind, or you will never know if you are successful. By first understanding the limitations of remarketing, you can begin to see strategy take shape. Remarketing won’t bring in as much traffic as PPC, but you know that you are speaking to an engaged audience, so your customer is at a different stage in the user journey. Use this information to shape your goals.
Remarketing is all about lists
The main goal of your remarketing strategy should not be the end result – more visitors and conversions – but what you build along the way. Building powerful and effective lists should be your primary goal. The beauty of building lists is that they will be continually refreshed with new potential customers.
The simplest way to build a list is to include all traffic to your website. This means that anyone who has landed on your website will stay on the list for as long as you specify in the membership duration. But this really isn’t the best way to build quality leads.
By segmenting your website visitors, you can exclude low quality leads, such as the people who left your website in under 10 seconds. You can also segment them based on the pages they have looked at. For example, you could create an entire audience of people who landed on the “contact us” page but never filled in your contact form.
Design creative for each list
Every list should have its own creative with a customised message. Remember, they have already been on your website and are familiar with your brand, so tell them something they don’t already know. Perhaps this could be a discount code on their next purchase. Or it could be a glowing review or testimonial.
Whatever the message, it’s important to create strong brand cohesion between your banners and your website. You should also include a call to action that aligns with your strategy.
Protect your brand
Before you set your ads live, you have the option to decide on the website categories you want your ads to appear on. It’s a good idea to remove forums, parked domains and error pages from the list. These are generally full of low-quality content and you don’t want to align your company with this kind of website.
It’s important to remember that not everyone will understand how remarketing works. If they see your advert on a website, they may assume that you have specifically sought out advertising on this site. Keeping a close eye on social media mentions can help you to identify problem sites and add them to your block list.
If you’re interested in getting started with remarketing, get in touch with the Auburn team today. We can help you to create a compelling strategy that will help to turn lapsed visitors into customers.