The Evolution of Remarketing

It’s generally more cost effective to improve sales with current customers than seeking new ones—but what about the ones in between? Those that have demonstrated interest in your product but for whatever reason never converted to a sale.

In the digital marketplace these people are everywhere from the ones that abandoned their shopping cart to the ones who got halfway through your site and exited for whatever reason. You were so close, if only you could give them a second chance—that’s where remarketing comes in.

Remarketing is marketing to audiences with a demonstrated interest in your product or service but did not convert. Traditionally, it’s meant people that have visited one of your owned services and using that information to piece together an ad tailored to their interests. Tailoring typically involves three steps:

1. Custom combination lists

This is going into Google Adwords and creating customized lists of non-converters.

2. Segment users and determine duration/frequency

Once you have these lists, segmenting them into more specific categories that you will then allotment duration of time in between visit and ad as well as frequency once time period is over. Often it’s beneficial to use a focus group to determine best practice for lists as a whole.

3. Personalize messaging

Arguably the part that is the most fun—creating ads that target each segmented list and implementing them across decided time tables.

And this practice of remarketing doesn’t just have to be limited to non-convertors or even data harvested from your own website. This is a great practice for upselling to current convertors who perhaps still left five items in their shopping cart and maybe just didn’t feel like dropping all that cash in one day. Hold onto that data and hit them with it next pay cycle. People’s finances change every two weeks but their interests do not.

Also there is new software being developed which provides data for users that have demonstrated similar interests. An example is Microsoft’s Search Companion. It enables you to take keyword data from a user’s search behavior to understand their interests so you can remarket where others have failed. 

Lastly, it should be worth mentioning if you’re going through all this trouble—don’t use the same messaging you did before. The whole point of remarketing is not only timeliness and persistence, but to come at the sale from another angle and that means coming up with new ad ideas and more informed concepts. If all steps are successful no doubt your CRO and ROI will rise.

So happy remarketing people, and be sure to keep it fresh.