1. Introduction

Did you know that acquiring a new customer can cost four to five times more than retaining an existing one? This is one of marketing’s most fundamental lessons, and it consistently surprises people.

However, these ratios can be valid in some other, very close cases. For example, when you want to advertise to those who have never heard of your product before, versus those who have already spent 5 minutes on your website browsing your products. 

In this article, we will introduce you to the world of remarketing, its benefits, and implementation techniques. 

2. What is remarketing?

“Remarketing is a marketing tactic that helps you engage with your past visitors and encourage them to convert.” In contrast to the general belief, a conversion not only means a purchase event. For example, submitting a lead form, email address, or clicking a ‘Call Now’ button are all potential conversions.

But why is remarketing most effective online? Why has it become a key tool in marketing in the 21st century? 

3. How does remarketing work?

Remarketing can occur in both offline and online environments. However, both need some kind of marking. You must be able to identify the visitor to contact them afterwards. It is not impossible to get this offline, like with app scanning or in-app coupons. However, it is easier to find the solution online. 

In the online world, when you accept cookies at a shop, the shop can use your data for marketing. Of course, the shop can’t get access to your name, email address, phone number, or home address, just your ID number.

This data set keeps track of your past shopping behaviour under your ID number. It shows how far you got in the buyer’s journey. It also points out what distracted you from your main goal and where you left the site. If the seller wants to start a campaign, like on Google, that targets past visitors, he can use his Google Analytics data. This data stores information about the visitors. He can connect it to his Google Ads account and create target groups based on this data.

Google will detect those ID numbers, connect them to the actual Google Accounts, and display the chosen ads to the chosen ad groups. Simply, this is why we get surprised by how Google knows what we searched for the other day. It is not magic; it is rather a smoothly operated system that ensures that advertisers convince their potential buyers more easily.  

4. What are its key benefits?

In this part of the article, we will discuss the advantages of using remarketing as one of your marketing strategies.

a. Increased conversion rates

A conversion rate is a highly expressive metric: it shows almost everything that a firm leader wants to know about its business. Reaching the goals, or not; that is the question. And unfortunately, sometimes business decisions are based on very basic calculations: if we can’t sell 100 products in a month, we can’t finance our monthly costs.

However, grabbing more conversions needs a change: a change of the trends, our products’ price, or a change of our data gathering methods. One of the most important marketing messages is to strive for exploring the “why-s”, rather than only concentrating on the “what”. If you have data on your past visitors, you can not only analyse their shopping behaviour, optimise your site based on their decisions, and more. This is a crucial aspect, but you never get back the same visitor again.

Or do you? Remarketing gives you a chance to draw back the visitors who did not buy from your website. They showed interest in your products by visiting your site.

b. Better ROI and cost efficiency

Without the use of remarketing, 97% of your past visitors never go back to your website. This is staggering. Even if you do everything right and spend enormous resources to convince these potential buyers, they would rather buy the products elsewhere.

And this is not really their fault either; other companies are also trying to acquire these interested customers, and they aim to capture those users at the final stage of the decision process.

That’s because these online users are very valuable to your competitors as well. One study indicates that retargeted users cost up to eight times less to reach per click than new users. If you want to save money on other marketing campaigns, and you have data to run retargeting ads, it is your chance to increase your return on investment, with a budget option. 

c. Improved brand recall and awareness

Do you know how many times potential customers see retargeting ads on average before making the decision? On average, it is 5 to 9 times. It seems like a lot, but considering that it appears during their browsing and reading activity, and they concentrate on other stuff, it is not surprising.

However, subconsciously, they still memorise a portion of your ads. The colours, your logo, or a well-written message. Like, they might not recognise that you are selling domain names, but your rocket-themed messages might influence them indirectly.

In conclusion, when you get them to click on your site and buy what they want, they already know your site. This helps them become loyal buyers. 

5. How to implement it effectively?

The thing is, a remarketing campaign is efficient if it is implemented perfectly. However, one simple mistake can erase all of your hard work. In this part of the article, we walk you through the whole process, step by step. 

a. Define clear goals

You can’t just create a remarketing campaign out of nothing. Defining a goal (or more) is essential to creating your plan.

​For example, you sell telephones, but a new one on your online shop doesn’t perform appropriately. From your measurement, you realize that enough traffic is delivered to the product, but still, out of 15 add-to-cart events, no one actually bought the product. You figure out that it may be because of your high price, compared to your competitors.

Here, your goal is to increase the purchase events by convincing your past visitors through discounts. 

b. Data is everything

A remarketing strategy is nothing without clear insights: to understand that you have potential, and to figure out user intentions. That’s why you need Google Analytics measurement and a session recorder software.

First, sticking to our last example: if you don’t acknowledge that you have momentum, but something is missing, you never start to think about a remarketing campaign. That’s why you need Google Analytics: to be clear about everything that is happening on your website.

Second, if you know that something has happened, it’s still not enough. You never go to a doctor for a simple cough, but it can be an indicator of something serious. You need to understand the “WHY”, which a session recording software can tell you the best. This software records some of those sessions that your website visitors made during their visits. You can check what they looked like, where they clicked, or where they ended their session. If it happened during their price-checking activity, you find the cause and react to that efficiently. 

c. Craft compelling ad creatives

Remarketing is a marketing strategy, but one of its last steps reacts to its marketing approach the most. Now that you know why your potential buyers left your site, you need to fix the problem and highlight your solution to your audience. 

Is it the price? Then shoot below, and communicate!

Conclusion

In this article, we walked you through the world of remarketing, its advantages, and a potential form of establishment. Be cautious, remarketing has great power, but only if you know how to use it.

Suggested:

How Marketing Teams Collaborate Smarter on Creative Projects?

How AI Is Shaping The Future Of Digital Marketing Automation?