Isn’t it annoying that despite high engagement rates, traffic numbers and hundreds of messages, your conversion and sales rate is still low? Isn’t it frustrating to know that even though there are thousands of people who may be interested in your product, not even 10% of them are buying from you?
It is. It’s pull-your-hair-gauge-your-eyes-out-scream-your-lungs-out annoying. But it’s natural.
Your customers are spoilt for choice. Every day, an average person may see up to 6000 to 10000 ads. This number calls for some applause of its own, but let’s keep that aside. The sheer volume of ads being run by millions of advertisers across the world can easily confuse a customer. But there’s an easy solution to build top of the mind recall in this tough competition: retargeting.
Let’s discuss this with the help of an example: you go to a marketplace to purchase a product and while window shopping, see a shirt that you may like, but you want to explore more. After maybe 20 minutes of exploring, you pass through that shop again and the shirt catches your eye. You remember that you did think of the shirt as something you’d like to buy, and so you enter the shop and make the purchase.
Now take that example and convert it to digital practice. Retargeting can build that recall factor for you when your customer is tired of “screen shopping”, reminding them of the products they were initially interested in, and give them a final push to purchase from a brand they genuinely like.
But that’s not it. Retargeting isn’t just a smart way to create eCommerce sales – it can also be a great way to build your brand and create engagement on social media. Here are a couple of advantages that every marketer should know:
- Retargeting reduces your cost. Instead of letting you cast a wide net of targeting in each step of your funnel and wasting your budget, it helps you narrow down your ad’s reach to the selected few customers who know, and trust, your brand already.
- Have I mentioned how great this strategy is for brand building? Whether you’re using it for video views, website traffic, or messages, retargeting can create top of the mind recall, enticing customers to connect with a brand they know.
The above two are just some examples of how targeting can help your brand. But while we’re all aware of how beneficial this ad strategy is, let’s discuss how it can be used to create profitable results for your business. Here are a few tried and tested strategies that have helped my clients convert their audience into loyal customers:
Create offers they just can’t refuse
Cliched pun aside, discounts and offers are an online shopper’s best friend. There are millions of users who wait for discount and sales seasons to make their season’s purchases.
Retargeting can help you create exclusive offers for those customers. For example, you can target people who left their cards mid-shopping and offer discounts for the products they didn’t buy with an exclusive code, or you could run re-purchase ads for perishable goods they bought a while ago. It’s that simple!
These kinds of offers not only bring a flood of eCommerce sales, but also strengthen the customer’s association with the brand.
Personalize your communication
We understand that it isn’t easy to create personalized communication for every click on your website or for each person who asks you a query. But the good news is, not every customer needs your special attention, only a selected few do, including:
- Those who have made a certain value of sales from your website
- People who regularly communicate with you on Facebook.
- Followers or fans who’ve earned top fan badges on Facebook.
These are just some examples of the people you should keep an eye out for. Personalizing your communication for them can be a great way to break out of the clutter and create valuable content, while also ensuring a loyal following of your brand
Facebook also offers you ways to segregate these customers from the rest. If you have a database of the people who are usually in touch with your brand, you can easily add a column for customer value in your datasheet and upload the details on Facebook. This will enable the platform to separate these customers for you and help you create special campaigns for these people.
Create lookalike audiences
Retargeting measures are not just a good way to create recall-based ads, but they also save you from the excessive research it takes to find out the type of customers you really want to target by creating Lookalike Audiences for you. Lookalike audience refers to the people who are similar to those who have either already purchased from your store, or who’ve interacted with you before.
This feature of Facebook is actually very useful for brands generating leads on a regular basis.
The audience data they collect can easily translate into another audience pool that can be as close or as further matched to your current customers. This feature is now available on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and all other major advertising platforms that understand the value of your time, and want to help you create without going through the nitty-gritty of creating a new audience each time.
So there you are – now you know the different ways your retargeting strategies can be used to bring actionable results for your brand. Have you employed any such strategies before? Tell us how they’ve worked for you, and what else you’d like to learn about retargeting and ads on Mainstream.
