Marketing would be a lot easier and more effective if every potential customer or website visitor converted after only one interaction with a business or brand. Unfortunately, this does not happen, and there are various reasons why not. For example, some people need to think about a purchase, need a second opinion, or something came up that took them away from the conversion process. You may start wondering what you can do to increase conversions because you might have done everything else to convert all other parts of your marketing campaign. Remarketing can help you maximize conversions in these instances.
Understanding Remarketing and Cross-channel Remarketing
Remarketing encompasses several strategies meant to bring people back to your website or sales place, so you have additional chances to get them to convert. Remarketing depends on cookies and tracking pixels.
Cookies are small files placed on your browser by websites, which contain certain information about you. For example, a cookie can tell a website that you own an account so you should remain logged in or what products you added to your cart the last time you visited a website.
Tracking pixels are small images the size of a single pixel placed on emails, web pages, and banners to track the people who visit a website.
Cross-channel remarketing uses these technologies to track audiences across multiple marketing channels, helping move them through the sales funnel even when they are not on the primary website.
An example is someone reading about a product on your website, being shown an ad on Facebook about the product, and then receiving an email with a discount code if they visited your website and did not complete a purchase.
As you can see, multiple marketing channels can move the customer from the first step in a sales funnel to the last one.
Understanding all this, how can you make your remarketing efforts more effective?
Know Which Customers You Can Target with Remarketing
Your remarketing efforts will only be successful if you are targeting the right audiences. There are different types of audiences you can retarget, and the first one is website visitors. This is everyone who has been on your website and has received a cookie. These people are already familiar with your offering, and they are therefore easier to convert.
Next, we have interested searchers. These are people who have searched for your product but have not visited your website. These people typically have a high purchase intent but have not yet seen your ad. Reaching these audiences through platforms like Facebook can help build brand awareness and increase conversions.
The other type of audience to retarget is the people in a user list, specifically your email marketing list. Retargeting these people is very effective because they have already interacted with your business once. It can also help drum up repeat business or build awareness in people who left their contact information but never converted.
Google and Facebook have what are known as lookalike audiences. These are people who may have not heard about your business, but whose history shows they are interested in similar or related products. For example, someone who has bought a mattress or pillow in the recent past may be interested in the blankets you are selling.
Know Where to Find Your Audience
You cannot retarget if you do not know the platforms to focus on. These are the platforms where your audience and those more likely to convert converge. You need to identify the platforms and channels your audience and potential customers are interacting with.
Some questions to ask include what websites they visit, what mobile apps they use, and what social media platforms they prefer. As it stands, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram are the biggest retargeting platforms.
These platforms are easy to use and provide you with new avenues for reaching target audiences. They also have detailed analytics that give you all the data needed to retarget more effectively.
Create Better Offers
As a marketer, you are trying to make someone take an action. In most cases, that is completing a purchase. But you might also want them to download something, leave their contact information, get in touch with you, and so on. Sometimes this is not enough, and you need to make the offer more compelling.
This is where understanding your audience comes in. What could you offer on your ad that would be so enticing that they would have no choice but to visit your website or sales page again? By improving your offers and ads, you can improve your click-through rate and maximize your conversions.
Refresh Your Content Often
While it is true that consistency is crucial in branding, there is something to be said about ad fatigue. Because cross-channel remarketing means showing people offers on various channels, they are likely to become blind to them if they see the ads too often and on multiple channels across the internet.
Try changing the design and copy from time to time. Doing so will stop the campaign from going stale and prevent people from getting tired of seeing the same ads all over the internet.
Take Advantage of Analytics
Analytics is one of the most powerful tools you can wield as a marketer. Analytics borne out of measuring and tracking various metrics will give you a clear picture of how things are going so you know if you need to keep going the same way or if you need to take a second look at your campaign.
You can also use this data to find out which of your ads is working and which are not. You can then scrap the ones that are not. Doing so can end up saving you lots of money.
There are numerous tools and technologies that you can use to better understand your campaigns are going. Many of these tools already exist within the various platforms you use for your cross-channel remarketing.
Cross-channel remarketing is essential for all marketers who want to improve their ROI and maximize their conversions. All the tools you need to make your remarketing campaign successful are free and available right now.