You must have heard the term ‘remarketing’ or ‘retargeting’ in the field of digital marketing, but may not be sure about what it exactly is.
We have all visited various e-commerce sites and made online purchases. Once you shop from a particular online portal, it is not necessary that you would keep going back to the same site repeatedly. You may stop making purchases from that portal and switch on to a new shopping site.
As you do this, you must have received e-mails and messages that read something like ‘we miss you!’ or ‘we haven’t heard from you in a bit!’ When you check the details, the messages are sent by that very site you stopped shopping from. This is nothing but remarketing of business.
Remarketing – A Brief
Remarketing or retargeting is an effective advertising tool that helps an organisation to retain the customers. As the name suggests, it helps a brand in marketing itself again to the customers that have once made a transaction.
Though remarketing can be practised in traditional physical markets as well, it is more prevalent in online marketing and advertising. Here, we would discuss online remarketing that is essentially based on digital advertising.
Remarketing And Data Management
It is impossible for a business to go about with the process of remarketing if it has a poor data management system. A customer can only be targeted again of the portal has their contact details.
When a customer logs into an e-commerce site, they are asked to add their contact details – such as their phone number, email address and even their social media handle (optional). This would provide the organisation with enough information for them to send them promotional messages through several media.
Importance Of Analytics
Data management would also provide the business with important analytics. It would give the entrepreneur all the information about the data and time of every purchase made by every customer. It would also give them details about the articles purchased; time spent on a particular web page, number of times a customer purchased a certain product and the feedback given by the customers.
All this information would help the business to craft effective promotional messages. If a customer has repeatedly purchased cotton shorts from your site, you would send them an email or a text message notifying them about the new stock of shorts arrived in your warehouse.
A customer would also add details about important events of their lives, such as their anniversary or birthdays. As the business portal has this data, it would mail or text the customer on these days. On their birthdays, the text would wish them ‘happy returns of the day’ and would give them an exclusive discount for a day on some of their products.
In case of an anniversary, the portal would wish them all the happiness in the world and would given them special offers on buying gifts for their better half!
This is how an e-commerce venture can remarket themselves to their customers based on their very own details and information provided at the time of logging in. Therefore, there is no remarketing without efficient data management. One minor mistake in handling the data and your entire process may backfire that may also lead to loss of a valuable customer!
How Do You Get Started With Remarketing?
In order to remarket your brand or to start a remarketing campaign, you need to sign your business up with firms that offer remarketing services. A business can generally not perform this function all by itself, which is why it is always preferred to take an external help for remarketing.
Two of the biggest companies offering remarketing services to business organisations are Google AdWords and Facebook. Though other famous platforms like Twitter are also offering similar services, these are the portals that are the most sought after.
As a business wanting to remarket, you can also go with the option of going with a third-party platform such as AdRoll for managing your campaigns, which would further give you access to various remarketing platforms. Portals like Sharpspring are popular examples of automation services that would collaborate with your email marketing and would further aid your remarketing campaign.
Steps Involved In Remarketing
Right from the moment a visitor lands on your website to the moment it visits your site again, remarketing has four basic steps that any business would have to go through in order to retain their visitors:
1. Arrival Of The Visitor: When a random visitor lands to your website, the code for remarketing stored on your website would automatically drop in a cookie into their browsers that would track their activities after leaving your site.
2. When The Visitor Leaves: Now as your visitor leaves your website, you can put your ads on the sites they would be surfing in order to constantly remind them of your existence! These ads can be banners, texts or even video ads playing alongside the site they are surfing.
If you are running an online flight booking portal, you can have a banner of showing the lowest fares of the flights your customers showed interest in while browsing. If you are a site dealing with food delivery, have a banner showing the cuisine your customers prefer while they’re surfing other sites. If you are a financial institution offering services like overdraft and invoice finance to businessmen, have an ad showing your interest rates in bold, encouraging your visitors to click on the ad.
3. Deciding Where To Show The Ads: You also need to decide where you need your ads to be displayed to your customers. If you take help of Facebook, majority of the ads would be displayed in the ad section of your customer’s Facebook account. If you go with Instagram, you can have your ad in the middle of them browsing stories or in the middle of their feeds. Google would put your ads along with the pages your customers search on Google.
4. Getting The Remarketing Done: When your customer sees an ad featuring your brand, the idea of them having visited your site would click and you have an increment in your recall value right there! Now, if you have an attractive and encouraging ad, your customer would definitely click the link and would land up on your website again. This is where your job of remarketing is done. Let the rest be handled by the web design and your core marketing team!
