Remarketing is very effective in comparison to other types of ads. It allows you to show ads to people who have already visited your site, which makes it more likely that they will either convert or come back and make another purchase. On average, people are 76% more likely to click on a retargeting ad than a regular display ad.
Retargeting is an effective way to close sales that did not happen initially, and is relatively inexpensive compared to other types of advertising.
1. Use Copy to Combat Sales Objections
Many of us use image ads in order to make our brand more recognizable to people. We know that the users we are targeting on the Display Network or social media platforms are not likely to click on our ads and go to our landing pages. So, we create ads that feature our tagline and primary brand assets, in the hopes that the viewer will remember our brand.
Since your remarketing audience is already familiar with your brand, there is no need to show them ads that are general and introduce your company. It is important to remember that these people visited your site but did not make a purchase. This can be seen as an opportunity to try and persuade them to come back and make a purchase.
There is an ad from HubSpot that is a perfect example of retargeting. They use their knowledge of a common objection to their product to address it in the ad. They know that people are concerned that the product will take too long to set up, so they reassure the viewer that it only takes 25 seconds. The image of the timer drives home the point.
2. Showcase Products You Know They’re Interested In
You can do a lot of window shopping on the internet. A friends spends a lot of time looking at designer clothing without intending to buy anything. She just likes to look at their newest styles and see what will be appearing in stores like Forever 21 in the next few months.
No matter how much I tell her not to, she always ends up falling in love with a few new styles and spending a lot of time on the product pages, wondering if she can afford to buy them.
Dynamic Remarketing is a feature that automatically creates ads featuring the products that the viewer looked at during their last visit to the site. These ads are effective in reminding the viewer of how much they liked the product and tempting them to buy it.
3. Push Them to Take the Plunge Using Urgency
Another friend can be a dangerous customer for travel sites, as she is always looking for her next vacation on websites like SkyScanner, Airfare Watchdog, and AirBnb. She had overbooked herself so much that she is running out of PTO/travel cash, so she has been trying to exercise more restraint recently.
The technique, called FOMO, causes the reader to feel a fear of missing out, and thus encourages them to make a purchase.
This effective tactic can improve both click-through rates and conversion rates. One easy way to take advantage of this and create a sense of FOMO in your remarketing audience is to use ad customizers. These are short snippets of code that will insert countdowns into your ads.
4. Offer Discounts Codes and Coupons
The internet has made it easy for people to comparison shop, which is a problem for advertisers. Advertisers work hard to get people to their product, but if someone visits their site and then leaves to compare prices, the advertiser risks losing that customer. If a customer finds a better deal on a competitor’s site or gets distracted and doesn’t buy anything, the advertiser has lost that sale.
Remarketing ads are the best way to reduce the risk of losing potential customers. By offering a discount or special offer, you can regain their interest.
5. Encourage Cart Abandoners to Complete the Check-Out Process
Based on Forrester’s report, the majority of people who start to purchase something online do not finish the transaction. Furthermore, most of these abandoned shopping carts are abandoned right before the purchase would have been completed. This is concerning for those who advertise online, as they have managed to get a potential customer interested enough in a product to add it to their cart, but the customer has still not completed the purchase.
6. Show Complementary Products to Cross-Sell to Existing Customers
Even if a prospect converts, that doesn’t mean you should stop marketing to them. Instead of excluding them from your remarketing efforts, try targeting them with different ads to sell them complementary products.
If you decide to go this route, you should make sure you understand what products your customers frequently purchase together, so you can offer a discount that makes sense for them. If the products aren’t complementary to each other, your advertisement will be less effective. For example, one of my friends recently bought a new phone and, upon check-out, he was offered a coupon for a plastic surgery discount. This is probably not the best example of products that go well together.
7. Remind Past Buyers How Much They Love Your Brand
If you’re using remarketing to connect with customers who have already converted, be smart about your copy. There are several creative ways to do this.
If your company provides a recurring service, you can use remarketing ads to remind customers to schedule future appointments. For example, if you have a salon that offers online booking for hair coloring appointments, you could set up a remarketing campaign to display ads reminding these customers to book appointments every few weeks to get their roots touched up.
8. Retarget Specific URL Visits
Some marketers make the mistake of running a retargeting campaign based on website visits in the past 90 days on Facebook or Google Ads. This is a mistake.
It’s not effective to target everyone who visits your site. A 50 percent conversion rate is not reasonable when your audience is in the millions. For example, if visitor X comes to your website, reads one blog post, and then leaves, you can’t target them effectively.
Visitor Y came to your site, read a blog post, filled out a lead- magnet form, and checked out your product and pricing page. What kind of retargeting offer would you give them?
If you’re not careful, you could end up sending the wrong offer to the wrong person at the wrong stage of their buyer’s journey.
People who don’t convert on your products usually experience two things:
- They don’t want to pay you money yet.
- They don’t know how your product can help them.
URL-based retargeting is an effective way to reach your target audience. This is one of the best methods I have seen.
The platforms I would recommend are Google Ads and Facebook. I find Facebook to be more successful than Google Ads for retargeting ads, but you might have different results.
To create a new custom audience on Facebook Business Suite, open the platform and click “More Tools” then “Ad Manager”.
Design a new ad campaign and enter your information. When you get to the audience section, select “create a new custom audience.” Custom audiences on Facebook should be your top retargeting strategy.
You can create a new custom audience from a drop-down menu, selecting website traffic as the marketing goal. For the next step, choose “People who visited specific web pages” to create lists of people who visited certain URLs.
You can further refine your Facebook retargeting ads by:
- Device used
- Frequency
Doing this will tell you one major thing:
People who visit this product frequently need a little push to convert. Use an ad that shows them how to use that product and the value or benefit of buying it.
9. Retargeting Existing Customers
One problem email lists face is that most subscribers will become unresponsive at some point. The list will experience “churn,” where new visitors join and old ones become unresponsive.
This means that your email upsells are not reaching your intended customers. So what can you do to fix this issue? Start retargeting your existing customers. I think that this strategy is a good idea because the ads will be very relevant to your customers, which will result in a high CTR. To get started, go to Facebook’s Ads Manager and navigate to the audience section. Then click on “Create an Audience”.
You can create a Custom Audience by selecting ‘Customer List’. This is where you can upload your audience list. If a green check mark is present, then the audience list is ready to be used. If you see a yellow exclamation point, you might need to update some identifiers manually.
We will be able to import contacts from MailChimp or upload a list of current or old customers. The key is to sort the customer file or email list by how old or unresponsive customers are.
If you have loyal customers who keep buying from you, don’t spend money on ads targeting them. Instead, focus your efforts on customers who haven’t bought from you in a while, or those who haven’t responded to your marketing emails. By doing this, you’ll have a better chance of getting them to come back to your products.
10. Lead-gen Ads Based on Page Engagement
If you haven’t had success with website-based retargeting, Facebook’s “Lead Ads” might be your best bet.
These are basically ads that offer something in exchange for customer information like email address and job type. It’s the same idea as running an e-book offer on a landing page on your website, just on Facebook. They are some of the most intuitive, natural-looking forms you can create.
The average person does not go on Facebook every day specifically to see advertisements. They go on to interact with friends and family or read news articles. Therefore, taking someone off of the site is a large risk that can result in your advertisement budget being wasted and a decrease in conversions.
Lead ads are successful because they do not interrupt the process of a typical Facebook user while still allowing them to get the lead magnet.
We need to create a custom audience in order to get started with a lead-generation ad. To do this, we select “Facebook Page” from the list of sources. From there, we have a bunch of options we can choose from in order to be more specific with our retargeting.
You can create a new lead-gen ad by targeting anyone who engaged with a post or ad, someone who clicked on a CTA, or someone who saved your page or post.
Edit the content of your ad so that it is focused on lead generation. Choose a single image, single video, or slideshow as your ad format. Carousels are often too complex for ads that are focused on lead generation.
This is where you start to create an offer or incentive for these customers to give you their email address.
I love using Facebook’s page-based retargeting to drive users back to my site or convert them on lead magnets and products. The people who see these ads are often very engaged and use Facebook differently than most users. Instead of mainly using it to interact with family or friends, they actively seek out businesses on the platform.
Use this opportunity to turn visitors who wouldn’t convert on your site or showed interest in your pages into customers.
What are you waiting for?
Retargeting is a good investment if you can carry out a successful campaign. Focusing on people who have already interacted with your brand and come close to buying gives you a better chance of making a sale than targeting an audience who have never heard of or interacted with your brand before.