Remarketing (also known as retargeting) is commonly known as “the
annoying Amazon product that was viewed a month ago that I keep seeing
advertised everywhere I go.”
But the world of remarketing is much more diverse than that - it
lives outside of banner ads, and can be applied to a variety of
technologies.
The goal of this article is to walk you through the concepts of
remarketing, help you identify common mistakes, and to demonstrate how Sherpa
can create great remarketing campaigns for you.
CATEGORIES OF REMARKETING
WEBSITE INTEGRATION
The most common form of
remarketing is to pull customer data from a website integration. This allows you
to tie a view of your website from a specific IP address to a custom ad
presented to that same IP address elsewhere on the internet. You do this
knowing that the visitor was on a relevant page within a given timeframe,
providing them an ad related to what they saw.
Keep in mind that you will
not remarket to just anyone that visited your website - it should always be
your goal to find the page or pages that best indicate potential purchase
intent, and to only create ads for those potential customers.
For example: Sherpa hosts events called “Alcohol &
Analytics,” and for a 2018 event we decided that visitors to our website that saw the “Digital Marketing” section
of our website would be an ideal audience. We then created a
campaign that would provide these users the opportunity to learn a bit more
about digital marketing like in the ad you see below.
EMAIL LISTS AND CRM INTEGRATION
Re-marketing software allows you to upload customer lists, known
as segments, to specifically target a group of individuals. You supply the software with a list of email
addresses that represent your potential customers, and if an email address from
your segment is used to sign-in to a Google or Facebook app, you have a ‘user
match’ and your custom ad will be served to that user while on that platform.
This allows you to utilize prospects from CRM systems and other email
lists you have acquired in order to display compatible ads to compatible customers
without them needing to have visited your website first.
APPLICATION INTEGRATION
Retargeting may be a term
coined within the digital marketing world, but the strategy can be applied
effectively to other systems as well. The Real Canadian Superstore - PC Optimumsystem
is a fantastic example of a remarketing strategy that works very efficiently
and promotes conversions.
Grocery shoppers are habitual; they tend to pick up the same things with a
predictable frequency. What their grocery store app does is incentivize users
to pick up their commonly purchased goods sooner, in higher frequency, while
suggesting different brands and complementary goods.
It does this by displaying a custom promotion after each time you shop, playing
off an algorithm not unlike the ones we see on YouTube (as suggested videos) or
Facebook (with suggested articles).
Sherpa’s team is adept at applying
this same algorithmic process to our customer’s product lines, in order to stimulate
additional purchases.
(For
context, a $100 dollar shop generates around 6,000 points. For every 10,000
points, you receive a
$10 gift card)
GEOFENCING
Geofence advertising, or geofencing, is the ability to use GPS data
(global positioning systems) or RFID data (Radio-frequency identification) to
trigger a marketing message. This can be implemented in many consumer
applications by using the location services available on mobile phones.
For example, a Sport Chek consumer app could trigger a
notification with a store's latest deals every time the consumer walks into a
shopping mall that has a Sport Chek, based on the GPS data provided by their
mobile phone. This could be the extra
incentive your customer needs to pay them a visit.
LEVERAGING WIFI HOTSPOTS
Another effective way to
build a remarketing segment list is through Wi-Fi hotspots. When you require an
email to login on to Wi-Fi, it provides you the opportunity to compile an email
list, get consent to send promotional emails, and build a custom segment for
remarketing.
For example, an automotive repair shop that builds an email list
of customers that have been in the shop and had service work done could seasonally
create advertisements reminding visitors to come back to the shop for regular
maintenance.
REMARKETING BLUNDERS
HARASSING CUSTOMERS
Many advertisements can seem “spammy” and unprofessional, but if a
campaign is run properly, it can easily be the push that advances the prospect
along the path to purchase.
But remarketing is also not right for every campaign, and can often lead to the
feeling of being harassed by a brand. The message or concept of the campaign
should never feel desperate. Instead, it should provide information or
additional resources that the user may not know about the product or an
incentive to come back and purchase.
Retargeting current customers with irrelevant information, or asking customers
to purchase a product they’ve already bought, is a waste of marketing budget
and is understandably the number one knock against remarketing strategies.
Solution:
The primary reason this happens is that many companies do not take
the time to properly segment their audiences, which results in sending out a
generic system of ads to every user, and rarely results in a good conversion
rate.
It is necessary to create a strategy that segments those who have
purchased and those who have not purchased separately, in order to avoid
harassing existing customers and to increase the effectiveness of the ads.
Once segments have been defined, you can target previous clients with
messaging, for example, that relates to training and complimentary products
rather than pushing the same product they just purchased.
COMPETING AGAINST YOUR OWN ADS
You may not know this but if your company uses multiple
retargeting services, the ads created are most likely bidding against each
other. The solution is NOT just to use one service. Using multiple services is
beneficial as different services have different networks of ad space, but these
services also overlap.
Solution:
Sherpa knows how to plan a campaign between multiple re-marketing
providers with the insight and know how to maximize reach across all platforms
without competing or bidding for the same space.
POOR SEGMENTATION & MEASUREMENT
With remarketing, it is easy to generalize the needs for each
segment and make assumptions
that Google Analytics will track the traffic coming from all paid
advertisements.
The fact is that many remarketing platforms do not have the ability to send
descriptive information to Google Analytics. When tracking, most analytics
software will just group it in with other ‘display advertising’ within reports.
Solution:
When it comes to digital
marketing, Sherpa believes failing fast and failing cheap is the best way to
perfect a digital campaign. We plan ahead, implement a small experimental
budget to start, and continually measure and optimize as the campaign runs.
Optimization is by far the most valuable part of the process, but without
proper segmentation and measurement, optimizations are only based on assumptions.
When it comes to measurement, we fully commit to the tedious process of
creating a UTM code and a unique phone number to truly track conversions within
the sales funnel to their original source. We believe that if you’re not
going to spend the time to do this right, then it shouldn’t be done at
all.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Remarketing strategies have been around for a long time, but as
technology advances there are more and more opportunities to apply the core
framework in diverse ways. Sherpa takes pride in being thought leaders in this
realm. and if there are any questions regarding these strategies, or how they
could benefit your company, feel free to reach out (email me!)
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Thanks for reading!
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