It goes without saying that your marketing funnel, the process that guides a prospect, taking them from stranger to customer, is one of the most important and effective assets in your marketing arsenal. If you want to take your marketing conversions to new and exciting levels, your marketing funnels will need to include some form of retargeting.
In practical terms this involves:
The monitoring of your customers’ behaviour and then using that insight to pull them back to your website.
By far, when done well, retargeting is a sure fire way to supercharge your marketing ROI.
So, what is retargeting?
Have you ever visited a website and then later started seeing banners for that website following you around all over the web?
That’s retargeting, also known and referred to as remarketing (both terms tend to be completely interchangeable).
Consider you’ve visited a retail based website, like Amazon for example looking for a new pair of flip flops for you upcoming holiday. Whilst you scroll through and click into various options, a planted cookie will track this information.
You’ve considered a couple of options, but decide you’ll make a decision later on, so you click through to a few other unrelated websites, perhaps Facebook. Whilst there, adverts appear showing the exact flip flops you were looking at and considering!
It was clearly meant to be, so you click the advert taking you back to Amazon and you make the purchase, happy in the knowledge you have the perfect flip flops for your vacation!
This is retargeting.
The obvious benefits of using retargeting for marketing
Chances are, your marketing funnel is built to drive brand awareness and increase conversions. After all, most are.
Retargeting can assist both awareness and conversions, simply because you have the opportunity to create direct, unique, relevant and personalised ads.
The retargeting statistics below speak for themselves:
- 3 out of 4 customers notice retargeted ads (invesp)
- Retargeted ads drive an average 10 times better click-through-rate (CTR) than display ads (Lazar)
- 26% of consumers will return to a site through retargeting (invesp)
- People who see retargeted ads are up to 70% more likely to convert (Costello)
- Retargeting can increase web traffic by an impressive 700% (Lazar)
Let’s say you have a marketing site and a visitor clicks on a link to your SEO services page. They’re going to be placed on your SEO retargeting list, meaning they’ll now receive emails and see adverts containing SEO-related content, since that’s what they’ve demonstrated an interest in.
Although standard sales funnels can certainly be effective, most are impassive and lie stagnant.
Not too long ago, marketers had no other options but to create their marketing strategies based on audience analytics and market research.
But thanks to the power of retargeting, you can now continue communicating with customers and prospects without needing to manually email or call them on the phone.
Target a specific audience and deliver tailored value
Retargeting also opens your marketing up to a number of other campaigns.
It’s not as simple as “Well, if they hit a product page, I’m just going to follow them around with that banner.”
Rather it works like this.
If a website visitor reads one of your blog posts and the topic was about creating marketing funnels, you can follow them around on the internet in the form of display ads, perhaps offering a free marketing funnel eBook.
Then, once they opt in through the eBook, they’re placed onto another pixel on Meta (Facebook).
Meta knows these people have opted in and downloaded your eBook make them likely to be a warm lead, so the next step might be to catch them with a relevant webinar or to compel them to buy a product.
What happens then?
The lead in question filters further through the marketing funnel.
Retargeting pushes leads through the funnel faster
The idea behind any marketing funnel is to move people down through the various stages.
If you know they usually purchase after five touches with your brand, try to see if you can cut that down to two or three with the implementation of retargeting.
Mailchimp’s own research has shown that 97% of customers don’t purchase on their first visit to a website. This is exactly why you need to follow them around and make sure you do what you can so they enter back into your funnel at the right stage.
In order to do that, you’ll need to retarget them with fresh and relevant content.
If someone comes to your homepage and they don’t convert when you do a remarketing campaign, do you think you should send them back to your homepage?
No, of course not! Your homepage clearly didn’t resonate with it’s content, so try to nudge them back onto another, more relevant part of your website with something new.
Remember: retargeting is about developing relationships
Just like dating, the key to retargeting is building relationships and trust.
Someone comes to your website, they don’t buy, you remarket to them, and they keep seeing your ads everywhere. Soon, they’ll begin to feel and think like they know you, and are now more likely to give you a chance, which they wouldn’t give to a total stranger.
It’s always worth keeping in mind the marketing ‘rule of seven’ with retargeting:
Audiences need to see your message at least seven times before they take action or buy from you.
The process retargeting follows is this:
- Earn your site visitors and potential customers’ trust by making them comfortable with you.
- Gently push to get them back to your site by educating them further through blog posts, webinars, training materials and email follow-up sequences.
- Ask them to make a purchase. Your audience is much more likely to convert if they’ve already invested in trusting you.
As with all aspects of digital marketing, retargeting requires a consistent application. It may take a few months to see any ROI, and it’s likely you’ll have to test and tweak your messaging.
But remember, the more you know your audience, the better you can retarget them as they work through your marketing funnel.
Manage it perfectly and who knows, in time you’ll have customers saying, ‘I love this brand, it’s almost as if they read my mind and know exactly what I want.’
With the successes that retargeting can bring to marketing and sales, can you afford to not include it as an integral part of your marketing strategy? Perhaps today should be the day!
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