Remarketing campaigns are a vital part of conversion-oriented marketing and allow businesses to “follow up” with recent shoppers most likely to make a purchase. In this article, we’ll review the types of remarketing campaigns, their benefits, and common considerations for this campaign type.
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing is promotion targeted specifically to consumers already familiar with your brand. Remarketing audiences for digital campaigns tend to focus on recent website visitors and past purchasers; however, this definition could be expanded to include email subscribers and recent visitors to your social media profiles.
Remarketing campaigns are common across all industries though heavily utilized by e-commerce brands. If you’ve ever visited an apparel company’s site without completing a purchase during your visit, you have started noticing ads for that brand as you browsed other sites and apps. This is remarketing. Many savvy brands take this a step further and display ads featuring the exact product(s) you were viewing (known as dynamic remarketing.)
Benefits of Remarketing
Remarketing allows you to “follow up” with specific audiences. For example, ads can be exclusively targeted to recent site visitors, highlighting a special offer to entice them to return and complete a purchase or schedule an appointment.
Remarketing also provides upsell opportunities to those who have already purchased from you. Ads can be targeted to existing customers to promote a new product/service or to purchasers of certain products to promote accessories for those items.
Remarketing is available on most ad platforms like Google Ads and social media advertising. Ads to these audiences can be included as an additional segment within existing campaigns though it’s best to separate these efforts into a unique campaign for more tailored messaging and more accurate campaign analysis.
The development of first-party data and remarketing audiences will become increasingly important as tech platforms consider a “cookieless” future. Though applauded for consumer privacy, this trend may significantly impact the digital advertising landscape.
Remarketing Considerations
When considering remarketing, your desired audiences must be large enough to be targeted by ad platforms. At the time of this post, remarketing campaigns via Google Display require audiences of at least 100 active users within the last 30 days; Google Search requires 1,000+ active visitors or users.
Remarketing can include many audience types, each of which could necessitate separate campaigns or ad groups, depending on the segments’ priority and messaging. Common remarketing audiences are recent website visitors, uploaded .csv files of previous customers or contacts, and people who have recently engaged with your social media profiles.
Consider filtering your audiences to exclude users who recently completed your desired action. If your customers typically only require one purchase or conversion from a marketing standpoint, you might exclude these converters to focus your ads on prospects still in their shopping journey. E-commerce businesses may narrow their remarketing lists to target visitors who abandoned their purchase at specific points such as a cart summary or checkout-type page.
Summary
Remarketing is an excellent strategy to maintain a presence in front of shoppers likely to make a purchase. With proper segmentation and tailored messaging, remarketing campaigns provide an extremely cost-efficient opportunity to close additional conversions for your business.
