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From Browsing to Buying: How Retargeting Can Convert Customers

Retargeting is marketing to consumers who have already visited your website or shown interest in your products. Because these shoppers already know your brand, they convert more readily than cold audiences. Effective retargeting combines audience data, segmentation, personalized ads, A/B testing, controlled ad frequency, and cross-channel placement, measured with KPIs like click-through and conversion rates.

11 min read · RapidCents Editorial Team

Published 2023-05-31 · Last reviewed 2023-05-31

From Browsing to Buying: How Retargeting Can Convert Customers

Scope: For business owners and marketers who want to use retargeting campaigns to convert website visitors who browsed but did not buy.

Retargeting and Converting Customers

Let's consider a scenario where you are a consumer and want to purchase a hair dryer. You visit the hair dryer brand's website and browse around hair dryers, but you get distracted and never make a purchase. A day or two later, you are watching an online video and suddenly you see an advertisement for the same hair dryer you liked, with a great offer. You don't think twice, and end up making the purchase. This is known as retargeting.

Retargeting is the process of marketing to the consumers who have already shown interest in your services or products. In this process, users who visit your website are tracked and shown advertisements for your product or service. Retargeting reminds customers about your product at various moments, ensuring that they eventually make the purchase. Brands who have used retargeting methods have managed to increase their conversions significantly.

Consumers that are retargeted are often people who have already shown a certain degree of interest in the brand, and hence they are highly likely to make a purchase when reminded about the same brand in different mediums. Retargeting can help brands that get lots of visitors but are unable to make them take a desired action.

Retargeting or remarketing is a powerful tool that has helped brands increase their sales in the world of social media. Converting customers who already showed interest in the brand is easier than finding new customers. Brands can specifically target the people who visited their website and showcase their ads on other mediums that the user might likely use. More and more brands have been using retargeting strategies and increasing the ROI on their marketing budget.

At the end of the day, the reason for running an ad campaign is to convert potential customers into actual buyers. Retargeting is also great for increasing brand recognition. When your customer comes across your brand advertisement across multiple mediums for a couple of days, your brand name gets etched in their mind. When the customer decides in future to buy a product or service, your brand name will automatically pop up in their head.

By reconnecting with customers who have already shown interest in your brand, you can rest assured that the retargeting ads won't be a nuisance for them. You can create special offers for customers while retargeting to enhance conversion rates. Having a customer base that is already aware of your brand's existence is the power of retargeting.

Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your audience is one of the foundations that you need before building a marketing strategy. To understand your audience, you need complete data and analytics. You can collect this data using free and paid software available on the internet. Once you have enough data to understand your target audience, you can start advertising and retargeting interested consumers.

When a user interacts with your brand's website for the first time, you get important data that includes their interests and behaviors. This vital information will help you craft a more personalized retargeting campaign. By running a remarketing campaign with enough data, you can rest assured that it will be a winner. Other data to consider before running the campaign includes the customer's browsing habits, preferences, and pain points.

Use multiple software tools and sources to collect as much customer data as possible. This will greatly help you with your marketing campaigns. Unlike other forms of traditional advertising, retargeting focuses on people who already interacted with your brand. With retargeting, you and your business can shift your focus only to people interested in your product or service. Convincing people who are interested is easier than gaining new customers.

Personalization and Segmentation of Retargeting Messages

Advertise products that consumers wish to see. That is exactly what retargeting does for consumers. No two consumers are the same, and as a business owner you have to create marketing strategies to win different types of consumers. Segmentation is the process of dividing your consumers into various categories. These categories can be based on their behavior, demographics, and interests.

Once you segment your target audience, the next step is to personalize your marketing campaign so that it reflects the interests of the chosen target audience. Personalization is the process of tailoring a message to an individual's specific needs and preferences. Segmentation and personalization, when used correctly in a marketing campaign, will yield a higher conversion rate.

This method helps your retargeting campaign become more effective and resonate better with the chosen target audience. Showing consumers relevant ads will prevent them from hating the ads and will turn them into loyal followers of the brand. At a time when all brands are retargeting consumers, make your campaign stand out by incorporating segmentation into your brand ads. With segmentation, you can track your customers' shopping cart activity and provide exclusive discounts just for the product that the consumer has already added to their cart.

Creating Compelling Ads

Seeing ads about the exact thing you recently browsed is mind-boggling for consumers, making them want to check it out. Creating compelling retargeting ads comes down to understanding the various elements that are required. These elements will be the decisive factor that persuades a user to click or skip your ads. Common elements of an ad are eye-catching visuals, persuasive copy, and targeting the right audience.

The visuals used in the ads are often the first thing that captures the attention of viewers. If you are selling a product, show a picture of the product. If you are in the service industry, showcase pictures of the service that you do. After the picture comes the copy. Copy can be short or long based on which medium the ad will be published on. Make sure your copy creates a sense of urgency or talks about the benefits of the product.

Now that you have created the ad with an eye-catching image and persuasive copy, the next step is to advertise it to your target audiences. Retargeting ads are most effective since they are shown to people who are already interested in the brand. With the ads created and using the power of retargeting, your ads will only be showcased to your target audiences. This will increase the conversion rate dramatically for your business.

A/B Testing

No marketing campaign is successful without A/B testing. A/B testing helps you find the best elements in marketing content. In this testing method, you create multiple versions of the same marketing material and test them on a small group of target audiences. Based on the data that you generate from audience interactions with these versions, you can create new marketing content compiling all the elements that received the highest interactions.

A/B testing plays an important role in retargeting campaigns because of its continuous nature of changes based on user interest. It is true that retargeting marketing has a higher conversion rate; when you add A/B testing to it, you will end up with even more fine-tuned results. Since you already have the data on the interests and behaviors of the target audience, setting up an A/B test will not be a hassle.

This personalized, A/B-tested retargeting campaign will remind your users about the brand and the product they showed interest in earlier in the day, persuading them to make a purchase. As a business owner, if you ever feel like your retargeting campaign is not giving you the necessary results, then A/B testing is highly recommended.

Frequency and Relevancy of Retargeting Ads

It is an undeniable fact that businesses cannot survive these days without an effective marketing strategy. Consumers, on the other hand, are faced with irrelevant ads day in and day out. With retargeting marketing, consumers will only see ads based on their searches and interests. Even though this is an effective marketing strategy, some brands overdo the frequency and relevancy of showing ads to consumers, eventually making them stray away from the brand website altogether.

Ever since smartphones became popular, advertisers have been exploiting the handheld screen, packing it with ads left and right. Consumers have learned to skip ads if they feel it's too repetitive. As a business owner, try to refrain from overdoing the frequency of ads. The best ads fail to make an impact if they are irrelevant to the person watching. Targeting your ads only to people who fall under the target audience always gives a better conversion rate.

Irrelevant ads are a waste of your brand's marketing budget. If you are using retargeting marketing, stick to the interests and behavior of the consumers. Don't advertise a product or service unrelated to what the customer searched for in the first place.

Retargeting Across Different Mediums

For choosing a medium to advertise on, you are overwhelmed with the available options. With retargeting, the opportunity seems endless. You have to think from the customer's viewpoint: which apps will they use, what social media accounts do they use regularly, and so on. There are social media channels with billions of users worldwide, and there are smaller ones available only in certain neighborhoods.

Google dominates search engine ads and the majority of webpage banner ads. You can also use email marketing as a retargeting strategy. Based on your target audiences, you have to choose the platform they interact with the most to have successful retargeting marketing. A typical retargeting campaign does not focus on just one platform; campaigns work better if you can find at least three platforms your target audiences interact with.

A successful cross-channel campaign requires an in-depth understanding of your target audience's user behavior. Since you have already segmented and created personalized marketing campaigns for each segment, you just have to find the right platform or platforms to take your retargeting marketing live. Segmenting the target audience across different platforms gives different results and outcomes for the campaign. Segments can include people who abandoned carts or people who just browsed your website, and both segments on the same platform can receive a different remarketing campaign.

Measuring the Success of Retargeting

Measuring the success of your retargeting campaign is an essential part of running one. It is only with quantifiable data that you can measure the outcomes of retargeting. There are various key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help you measure campaign success:

• Click-through rate: The number of clicks a particular ad got in comparison to the number of times it was displayed to viewers. A higher click-through rate means more people interacted with your ad.

• Conversion rate: The number of people who saw your ad and took the desired action.

• Cost per click: The cost you pay for every click that you receive on your ad.

• Return on ad spend: The revenue you earn for every dollar you spend on advertising.

These metrics help you figure out whether the retargeting campaign you ran was successful or not. To measure these KPIs, you can use free and paid software like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and AdRoll. With these tools you can measure various metrics to understand customer behaviors and customize your ads accordingly. Your first retargeting campaign may or may not be successful, but you will get plenty of important data from it so that you can ensure the success of all the campaigns after that.

Retargeting marketing is a powerful technique that focuses only on consumers who have shown prior interest in your brand. These campaigns can be made in many ways, spanning multiple platforms, to get the viewer to take a desired action. Creating a retargeting campaign requires a bit of effort and analyzing plenty of data. With this data you can segment and create personalized ads for different consumers. The ad itself has to be eye-catching and should resonate with your target audience in order for them to take the desired action, and once your retargeting campaign starts creating more sales, you need a reliable payment solution to process all the payments.

Frequently asked questions

What is retargeting in marketing?

Retargeting is a type of marketing where a brand advertises to consumers who have already visited the brand's website or taken an action on it. Conversion rates tend to be higher with retargeting because the consumer already knows the brand and has shown interest beforehand.

What content works best in retargeting ads?

Since the customer has already shown interest in your product or service, craft retargeting content accordingly. The best-performing content includes discounts on the products or services the consumer just viewed, customer testimonials, and clear benefit statements.

What are the benefits of retargeting for a brand?

Retargeting increases brand recognition and conversion rates, collects data from consumers who interact with the ads, expands reach, improves return on investment, and helps brands discover new platforms to advertise on.

How do you measure a retargeting campaign's success?

Track KPIs such as click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per click, and return on ad spend. Tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and AdRoll measure these metrics so you can adjust your ads to customer behavior.