Remarketing campaigns are a vital part of conversion-oriented marketing and allow businesses to “follow up” with shoppers most likely to purchase. In this article, we’ll review the types of remarketing campaigns, their benefits, and popular considerations in reaching recent website or social profile visitors.
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing is promotion targeted specifically to consumers already familiar with your brand. Remarketing audiences for digital campaigns 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 but not purchased anything during your visit, you may start noticing ads for that brand as you browse 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 browsing (known as dynamic remarketing.)
Benefits of Remarketing
Remarketing allows you to “follow up” with specific audiences you designate. Ads can be exclusively targeted to recent site visitors, highlighting a special offer to entice them to return and complete a purchase or book 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 can 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, “data segments targeting the Google Display Network must have a minimum of 100 active users within the last 30 days for your ads to show; segments targeting Google search must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users.”
Remarketing can include many audience types, each of which could require separate campaigns or ad groups, depending on the messaging and attention each group requires. 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 dropped off at specific stages of a purchase journey such as a cart summary or checkout type page.
Summary
Remarketing is an excellent medium to maintain a presence in front of shoppers familiar with your brand and 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.
