Do you often encounter ads from brands or websites you recently looked up? Well, news flash- that is not a coincidence, you were retargeted!
Most internet users approach e-commerce sites to browse with no intention of actually making a purchase. Only around 2.17% of e-commerce visits convert into purchases. Thus, the responsibility of retaining customers falls on online retailers like you.
This is where remarketing for electronic commerce businesses steps in. Remarketing is an extremely useful online advertising tool that allows you to recapture potential customers and re-engage them with your brand.
Many digital marketers tend to get visitors on their email list, but remarketing has shown better conversion results than traditional tactics. That is why remarketing for e-commerce is crucial today.
Here is a complete guide for everything you need to know about remarketing.
What is E-Commerce Remarketing?
E-commerce remarketing is a digital marketing technique. It allows you to promote a product to a client who has already displayed interest by engaging with similar product pages or buying a related product on your website.
It is called “re”-marketing because it targets past visitors whose data has been collected via tags, cookies, or email list collections. You get a second chance to market your product or up-sell, which in turn helps with the retention of customers.
The two most popular avenues of remarketing ads are Facebook and Google ads. This is expected because the Google Display Network reaches 90% of worldwide users, and Facebook has 2.9 billion active users. Between them, you can quickly generate targeted traffic for your website.
When talking about remarketing, the term retargeting often shows up. Take a look at how closely these two terms are related and why are they often used interchangeably.
 
Remarketing vs Retargeting
While these words are used synonymically, a fine line separates the two. As an online retailer, it would benefit you to know the difference.
- Remarketing: It is an email marketing toolkit. It is used to re-engage clients whose mail ids have already been obtained by your business, either when they sign up for a discount or when they make a purchase on your e-commerce site.
- Retargeting: It includes digital marketing techniques like paid ads to retain prospective clients. If a consumer has interacted with your brand on your web page or clicked on a picture of your product on the Facebook marketplace, retargeting campaigns can advertise to them again.
Over time, remarketing has become an umbrella term to include both remarketing and retargeting strategies. Google ads also subscribe to this evolved definition of remarketing. So, for the course of this article, you can think of the two terms exchangeably.
Benefits of Remarketing Campaigns
Every ecommerce business has KPIs to help them keep the company’s objectives at the forefront. An effective remarketing campaign can help the business across multiple KPIs in the marketing, customer service, and sales departments.
Take a look at the different ways in which your ecommerce business can flourish using a solid retargeting strategy.
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Heighten Brand Awareness
There is a rule in marketing called the rule of seven. It states that a customer needs to interact with your brand an average of seven times before they make a purchase. So, to make your brand recognisable, pursue your clients with ubiquitous ads.
Google Display Network is one of the most affordable ways to make your brand the talk of the town. Due to the increase in visibility through Google ads, brand awareness escalates, and it helps in making your brand a household name.
It also helps create a semblance of trust among clients. They will gravitate toward a name or logo that is familiar to them, which will boost your Clickthrough Rate (CTR).
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Increases Client LTV
Remarketing gives you access to vital information about consumer behaviour. If you know that a client has brought or shown interest in a product before on a regular basis, the chances are that they will continue to buy the product.
Through your remarketing ads, you can direct them to similar product pages on your site. This helps increase the lifetime value of the customer. However, for this to work, you must learn to segment your clients. This allows you to send high-precision targeted ads to a custom audience.
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Boosts ROI
Using segmentation, you can make the most of your website traffic. You can offer your target audience a customized experience. It is as impactful a difference as being asked to place an order at your regular cafe versus immediately presented with your usual order.
This service improvement can build brand image and lead to more sales. Dynamic retargeting can help your ecommerce business regardless of which sector they belong to. It jacks up your conversion rate and helps you retain clients for longer.
How Does Remarketing Work?
Remarketing campaigns are surprisingly easy to set up but before getting into the details, take a look at the four simple stages in which remarketing works.
- Stage 1: A customer uses your ecommerce website or interacts with your social media channels.
- Stage 2: Your website records user details using cookies and tags. The information differs based on their internet settings. Usually, the data includes age group, gender, geo-location, pages viewed, and offers clicked.
- Stage 3: marketer (you or someone from your team) segments the data into audiences. Every audience is added to a different campaign based on their interests and depending upon some additional criteria.
- Stage 4: Then, the user starts receiving your ads on different platforms. These ads contain products they recently viewed or items related to their recent purchases.
In essence, remarketing makes use of the traces that a customer leaves on your ecommerce web pages and allows you to send retargeting ads their way. Now, read ahead to find out what exactly enables your site to record data from your customers.
Remarketing Pixel Tags
When you create remarketing campaigns with a network, they provide you with a compact piece of code, called a pixel tag, to add to your website’s code.
Pixel tags enable your website to place cookies. A cookie helps your website keep track of customer activities and visits. Only the website that placed the cookie can receive information from it. For example, when a customer adds an item to their cart on an online shopping site, they can still find that item in their cart later because of cookies.
Every user has a unique IP address, and their website activity can be traced using their cookie trail. In remarketing, your ad server can acquire a visitor’s IP address and store it in a relevant remarketing list.
Remarketing Lists
A remarketing list is a record of visitors to your e-commerce store based on their activity. For instance, a ‘Homepage’ list will consist of all the customers who visited your homepage. So, when a user visits your homepage, their cookie gets added to your remarketing lists.
This custom list allows you to market your product specifically to the people who visited your homepage and various such segmented audiences.
5 Strategies to Use Facebook and Google for Remarketing ads
You now know about how remarketing works, but there is still a long way to go in learning how to actually generate remarketing ads. Facebook and Google ads provide convenient techniques to incorporate into your remarketing campaigns.
  1. Custom Conversion
The network provides Facebook or Google ads remarketing tags when you start a retargeting campaign. These tags match the visitors to your website with Facebook and Google users.
You can also customize your Facebook pixel tag to attract customers of your choice to your website. The commonly used tailored audiences are website visitors, previous Facebook ad conversions, and website conversions.
You can set up your Google remarketing codes by creating a Google Analytics or a Google Ads account. You can then generate a code for each website page. You can create targeted ads for your users by analysing the specific actions they take on your sales funnel.
 
2. Make Your Users Want to Return
This digital marketing strategy relies on remarked, re-engage, and convert cycles. So, you have to develop smart campaigns to make prospects return to your site.
The first thing to remember is to not be obnoxious with your online advertising. Customers left your online business for a reason. Therefore, you need to understand their motivations and ensure they find what they are looking for on their next visit.
Here are some specific pointers to ensure that your ads enthral your remarketing audiences.
Re-engage Your Best Customers
Repeat customers would be the best for remarketing products, especially if they had a pleasant experience the first time around. Use your retargeted ads to offer them promos or show them newer products that complement their prior purchases.
Remarket Seasonal Product
This tactic involves advertising seasonal products to existing customers or new visitors when they return during a particular season. This can range from winter wear in the cold months to gardening equipment in spring.
Adopt Abandoned Cart Campaigns
Online shoppers often abandon their cart after spending hours adding items into it. This online window shopping can be a result of the cart total being too high or them seeking other options on the market. Customize ads for this target market and lure them back with irresistible opportunities.
Tip: You can use your search ads to offer special discounts that were unavailable to the customer on their first visit. This could be coupons, offers, or a seasonal deal.
Attract Blog Visitors
Blogs are a very stylish yet personal way to create brand awareness and trust. Focus on remarketing your e-commerce business to blog visitors for added credibility and recognition.
  3. Frequency Caps
You are already familiar with the rule of seven, but fair warning, it is not for everyone. The research on frequency caps varies from business to business.
While one ecommerce business might swear by the rule of 7, just displaying 5 ads per day works best for another. Some even believe it should be as low as 1 ad per day.
So, as you can tell, there is no hard and fast rule to the frequency of your ads. It will vary according to your product and market. Take some time to figure out what works best for you, and then stick to that routine.
  4. Relevance and Quality Score
One of the many benefits of using remarketing ads is that they increase your relevance and quality score. This thereby decreases your cost-per-conversion.
In case you are receiving lower relevance, and quality scores from your Facebook and Google remarketing ads, increase your campaign budget to improve the scores. This is a cost-effective way to maintain balance in your campaign.
5. Combine Social Demographics with Your Remarketing Campaigns
Customers are more willing to give up information on social media sites than on an online store. From daily posts and stories to their bios, everything reflects their personalities.
Therefore, to supercharge your retargeting campaign, you should include social media demographic targeting in your remarketing strategy. This way, you will be targeting people who are the exact audience for the product you are marketing.
When Should You Remarket?
This is perhaps the most important question to address when it comes to remarketing. Some online store owners run their marketing campaigns constantly for all visitors to their website. However, this can easily irk the customer and put them off your website for good.
Instead, many marketers now opt for a more personalised approach. Focus your remarketing campaigns on predefined criteria. For example, run a campaign for people who visit your page on particular days of the year or during special sales periods.
Alternatively, you can also send out ads to people who visit certain product pages. This way, your ads remain fresh, and your campaign stays a safe distance from being overkill. Always remember that your campaign must in no way annoy the consumer.
Where Can You Remarket?
With remarketing, you have access to the most significant asset of all, data. Dig deep into this resource and find out vital user information like which devices and locations get you your highest conversion rates. All of this can then be channelised into segmented marketing.
There are four major types of remarketing that you can employ on various channels and platforms. Take a look.
- Simple Display Remarketing: The simplest and most popular type of remarketing. It involves showing ads to users on other sites after they have visited yours. You can use various display ad networks like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
- Native Remarketing: This type of remarketing targets audiences that have clicked onto your eCommerce site through native ad placements.
- Search Remarketing: Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) is a popular feature that allows you to customize your ads for people who have previously visited your website.
- Social Media Remarketing: This type is rapidly gaining favor in marketing to the newer generation. Your ads will be displayed on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn after a user has visited your site.
You can gain a tremendous increase in your ROI in exchange for the amount you spend on your advertising. Even if you are working with a limited budget, there are various approaches for you to experiment and fine-tune your campaign with.
How Much Will It Cost You?
Marketing is known to be on the expensive side of the spectrum. However, remarketing is a highly cost-effective method to attract customers. Plus, you already have the assurance that the people you are marketing to are interested in what you have to offer.
You can achieve great KPI results with correct budgeting. There are three budgeting models that are typically used in remarketing – Cost-per-click (CPC) model, Cost-per-impression (CPM) model, and Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model.
With these nuanced variations, you can control your spending depending on your specific remarketing lists and campaigns.
Final Word
Since the beginning of pay-per-click campaigns, Remarketing has been one of the most powerful advertising strategies to hit the internet. It gives marketers the ability to connect with their audience and gauge their needs.
It helps you build brand value and trust among your consumers and helps you retain your valuable leads. You can keep your visitors in your sphere of influence long enough to convert them into customers.
Remarketing also helps you add to your client’s life significantly. This provides brands with great authority and paves the way for a revolution in digital marketing.
There you go; you are now acquainted with various beneficial aspects of retargeting. Remarketing is a powerful tool, and with the proper implementation, you can grow your eCommerce business to great heights.
If you are interested in learning more about using remarketing for eCommerce sites then contact our Sydney SEO team for a free initial consultation.
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