How Remarketing Keeps Customers Coming Back
What is remarketing?
How can I use it to bring customers back when they’re ready to buy?
How can I prep myself to do remarketing?
A customer buying your product on their first website visit is like someone falling in love at first sight: It doesn’t happen too often.
In fact, a good amount of shoppers won’t seal the deal on their first site visit. Some might need to go back 2 to 4 times before they’ll hit “buy.”
That means you often need to woo customers back after they’ve left your online store.
The technical term for that post-visit “wining and dining” is remarketing, or retargeting. (We know, so romantic.) You’ve probably experienced remarketing before. Let’s see if you can spot an example now.
This is how remarketing works: Someone visits your site and you give them (or actually their web browser) a tracking “cookie.”
That cookie records that the person visited your site and what they did on it. Now you can advertise your company and products to that person as they browse other sites.
There are 4 things you need for this process. First, your website needs enough active visitors. Check how many your remarketing platform requires.
Next, figure out who you’ll be remarketing to. Take a look at your visitors and decide which are worthy enough to woo back (AKA, which ones will help you reach your business goals). These are your target customers.
You’ll also need a remarketing tag, which is a piece of code that remembers all your site visitors. Once you get the tag from your remarketing platform, you put it on every page of your site.
The last piece is your online advertising. The remarketing tag can help you sort which people see which ads. Make sure to limit how often they see your ads: You want to woo them, not annoy them.
LISTEN UP
Once you have all the pieces, you can start targeting different types of potential customers – from those who are “just looking” to current customers who can be convinced to buy more. You do this by grouping them into remarketing lists.
Let’s say you want to “upsell” to current customers.
You can create a list that includes only site visitors who have bought something from you before.
If your goal is to focus on people who abandoned shopping carts without buying anything…
You’d actually make two lists: one for people who visited your “shopping cart” page and one for people who also visited the “order confirmation” page.
Your ad campaign would be shown to the people in the first list, but exclude any who also showed up in the second list.
Or maybe your goal is to target visitors who have looked at a certain product type or category.
This list would include anyone who visited the category’s page on your site. For example, if you want to tell people you’re having a sale on shoes, you can show your ads to anyone who’s checked out your site’s shoe section before.
Another goal might be to turn recent customers into repeat customers.
This gets pretty advanced, but let’s say you want to woo customers back to your site 30 to 90 days after they made their last purchase.
You can create a 30-day duration list and a 90-day duration list, and only show your ads to the people on the 90-day list who are not also on the 30-day one.
DO THIS NOW
Now that you’ve learned about remarketing lists, you can practice using one to target an audience and get a sample remarketing ad.
If you’re participating in the course, go to the next section to access your self assessment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Remarketing uses cookies to track what people do on your site.
You can create unique ads to show those people while they're on other sites.
This helps being current and potential customers back to your site.