What is Remarketing & How to Master Digital Remarketing 

Are visitors not converting? Learn how to master digital remarketing to better convert leads into actual customers in this post.

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Digital marketing focuses on sourcing traffic—how to get the most eyes on your content which is the main battleground for those working with SEO. If you’re not remarketing though, you’re not getting the most out of your content.

If you’re successfully sourcing leads but not converting them, you need to know about remarketing. If you can master digital remarketing, then you will have the best method of re-engaging with customers who’ve shown an interest in your business.  

What Do We Mean by Remarketing? 

Have you ever filled your cart on a site or an app, then left without buying?

Did you get an email or a push notification later saying your cart had been saved for you?

That’s an example of remarketing. It goes further than follow-up emails, though. Digital remarketing means engaging with users who have already interacted with your business. They might be existing consumers, or they could be anyone who’s visited your website. 

To master digital remarketing, you first have to start by collecting site or app data, then using that to identify target users. You can separate the users into stages of their buyer’s journey. For example, they’ve visited a product page and left or they’ve signed up for an account but not purchased it. 

Once you have your target users, you can direct personalized advertising to them. The idea is that you tailor this marketing to the customer and their buyer’s journey. There are various ways of doing this, from Google’s advertising network to social media targeting. The full process is more in-depth, using tracking cookies and data analytics. 

Are you ready to master digital remarketing?

We’ll go into more detail about the types of remarketing and how they work. 

The Business Benefits of Digital Remarketing

Around 98% percent of first-time visitors to a website leave without converting. Retargeting that 98% leads to much higher returns from your marketing. The benefits of remarketing lead to a much more efficient marketing process. 

Make More out of High-Quality Traffic & Leads

There are many reasons a user might not convert into a customer. Not all of those reasons are down to your business, either. Sometimes, we browse sites for comparison, other times we might want some information. With so much competition in the online space, we might forget about one product if a comparable alternative comes along. That’s why remarketing can be such a valuable tool. You’re keeping your brand at the front of the user’s mind. 

You may already have a great SEO and content strategy that’s bringing viewers to your site. Remarketing helps keep those users engaged. They might leave your ecosystem temporarily but won’t forget about your brand easily. 

You’ll find that the CLV of your converted customers goes up when you retarget them. It’s enabling you to get the most from your acquisition costs. You won’t see real-time cost reductions, but the increased long-term revenue means that your ROI is higher.  

Image sourced from motocms.com

Adaptability

Another reason for the cross-industry benefits of remarketing is its flexibility. It doesn’t matter what your product or service is. You can use retargeting across most of the same channels as standard digital marketing. 

Whether you want to remarket through search ads, social media, or dynamic on-site ads, there’s a retargeting solution. It’s also customizable, you’ll be grouping users based on their behavior which means you can personalize your marketing. 

B2B

While it has proven popular across many markets, remarketing has proven to be even more successful for B2B marketing. According to Kwanzoo, almost 150% are more successful than their B2C counterparts. There’s more than one factor to this. Undeniably, though, there’s stiff competition in B2B systems and software. Many companies offer similar services, and the main deciding factor for a business client is the level of service to value they get from a product. 

So if you’re a VoIP provider, you’re going up against every alternative to Phone.com on the market. Thoughtful retargeting that addresses the experience of a business client directly can put you above the competition in terms of brand awareness.   

Increase Conversion Rates

Studies agree that remarketing increases conversion rates across all industries. Ecommerce sees the main benefit. When you master digital remarketing, the average conversion rates go up 28% for retargeted customers. Furthermore, the more times a user has seen a retargeted ad, the more likely they are to convert. 

The fatigue rate for remarketed ads is lower than a general display ad. It might seem counterintuitive to marketers; we all know we hate seeing repeat ads. However, the data suggests that we are much more comfortable with it when it is a retargeted ad. 

Image sourced from wordstream.com

Types of Digital Remarketing

Most remarketing strategies fall into one of these categories. They’re separated mostly by how you collect the retargeting information and the platforms you can target. 

Pixel Targeting 

This form of remarketing uses web code known as pixel tags to anonymously track user data. When a user visits a page or performs an action, the pixel tag creates a tracking cookie. That cookie tracks their user ID, which your ad marketing agency network provider can use to serve retargeted ads.

Depending on the provider, this has a lot of potential applications. You can use this for display ads or native ads. Google display network has one of the most extensive reaches for retargeted display ads. Pixel tags can also be used for social media retargeting, serving users ads through their social media feeds using the same tracking method. Facebook reaches the most users, at 1.4 million a day on average.  

Remarketing Lists

Remarketing lists are the lists you build from the user data. It is crucial as this helps you separate your remarketing targets based on their behavior. For example, you may have a list of every user ID that visited your site, which would be great for a wide-reach retargeting campaign.

At the same time, you could have another list of users who filled a cart but didn’t purchase. This list would be smaller, but the customers would be more responsive to highly personalized retargeted ads. To get a better idea of where each customer is in their buyer’s journey, consider mapping customer touchpoints. It will give you a roadmap for all the interactions a user has with your business. From this, you can pinpoint your remarketing opportunities.  

Email Remarketing

This is a more traditional way of remarketing but it relies on collecting customer data directly. You build email lists of customers who either signed up for an account or fill in their contact details on your site.  

Then, you send personalized marketing emails based on the action they took. If customers were ready to share their contact details, that’s a highly qualified lead. If you offer the right content in these marketing emails, you’ll see higher click-through rates than a standard marketing email.

Take the example of this business text messaging app from Dialpad. If you go to their site, you can sign up for a free trial of the software, by giving your email address. Not every customer who signs up will purchase the software, but those emails can form a remarketing email list. 

Video Remarketing

This uses similar methods to pixel targeting to retarget video ads and video content through hosts like YouTube. As well as customer data, you can collect viewership data like types of video viewed, average view length, and likes & dislikes.  

Pro Tips for Successful Remarketing

Even the basic principles of remarketing can uplift your marketing strategy. If you want to master remarketing, though, you need to understand how to use the information you’re collecting. These are the best tips we can give you to get the most from your remarketing efforts. 

Create Audience Segments

Demographics, geographics, and audience segmentation are common in marketing. When it comes to retargeting, there are new ways to segment your audience. Habits and behaviors can help you segment customers by their level of engagement.

We touched on this before, this is how you segment your audience into each stage of their buyer’s journey. When you have this, you can incorporate it with personal data like preferences to create hyper-personalized marketing that speaks directly to the customer. 

Use Analytic Data

Optimizing both your pages and your content will be key to getting the most from your retargeting. Identify your high-value pages, the ones that the most users visit. Identify the pages that already convert the most users. You can use this data to direct your retargeted users.  

Analyzing the behavior of users will let you personalize your remarketing more effectively. What users look at, how long they spend on pages, and previous buying habits can all be helpful. Using first-party cookies, you can anonymously track external user data across the network. This can give you insight into users’ off-site browsing habits and more. 

Analyzing all this data might seem like a lot of work, but several software tools can help. Google Analytics will let you extract essential data about your site and competitors. Using this in combination with AI-assisted analytics software can extract the trends from your data. 

Use Personalized Ads & Offers

We keep talking about personalization because it’s a key differentiator for ecommerce sites. Recent studies show that 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand with a personalized experience. Remarketing helps reduce customers’ frustrations when they are flooded with irrelevant marketing. Click-through rates drop drastically for users who’ve seen the same ad multiple times. 

If a standard CTR is 1, then by the time a user has seen the same ad 5 times it’s down to 0.5. That’s only half as effective. Yet, if the same ad is aimed at a retargeted user (one who showed interest the first time) the fatigue rate is halved. It can help get the most return out of repeat advertising. When ads are personalized to the user’s experience, this becomes much more effective. 

Test Your Materials

To narrow down what marketing works best for your user groups, you’ll need to perform marketing tests. The simplest test you can run is an A/B test, where you test two versions of the same marketing on sample groups of your audience.  

You can run simultaneous tests on different audience groups but keep each test simple. Change only one or two elements in each sample, otherwise, your results will be tough to interpret. Run continuous testing, and you will refine your personalized marketing over time. 

You can augment this with information directly from your audience. Use your market research questions or customer satisfaction surveys. You can get more detailed and subjective information about your audience’s preferences this way.

Always run your tests for a suitable amount of time. It can take a while for marketing to reach all of a potential audience, and results can vary over lengthy campaigns. A simple A/B test can run for a few weeks. But, if you’re making a significant change like a branding proposal, you need to take longer to source a wider group of opinions.  

Work Harder and Smarter by Remarketing Effectively

Remarketing is an effective way of getting more out of your marketing. However, there’s a balance between careful retargeting and spamming customers with ads. If you make good use of internal business data and external market data, you can find it. 

It’s undeniable that personalization is becoming more critical for every business, especially those competing in the eCommerce market. Combining remarketing with personalization can improve your long-term revenues and customer satisfaction. By mastering digital remarketing, you can make your marketing materials work harder and smarter for your business.