Retargeting is a relatively new development in the marketing industry, but it’s revolutionizing how companies do business online. Even a new science still has certain protocols and best practices, so when you develop your retargeting campaign, keep these concepts in mind.
Cap Frequency
If you’ve ever watched a football game that ran the same ad six times before the end of the first quarter, you know how irritating a constant barrage of the same message can be. The last thing you want to do is exasperate your potential customers, so make sure they’re getting the message at the right time and place. Marketing automation software helps coordinate a complex campaign and ensure you aren’t over-serving, especially if you plan on retargeting across multiple channels. You want them to know where to find you, not see you lurking around every corner of the Internet as they browse.
Burn It Up
You’ve come up with a contingency plan for reaching out to potential customers who have failed to make a purchase yet, but your retargeting campaign should also leave room for your successes. When a client’s gone through the business end of your sales funnel, use a burn pixel code on your final transaction page so your marketing software can sort customers from leads. You waste your marketing team’s efforts and tax your customers’ patience when ads exhort clients to buy what they’ve already bought. Instead, retarget them with upselling offers and loyalty programs.
Division Multiplies Responses
Until you know your lead’s history of interaction with you and something about who that prospect is, you can’t make your marketing message relevant. Sophisticated retargeting software lets you install pixels on separate pages to direct your marketing efforts to different audience segments. For example, if you do HVAC work, you might send one email to people who spent most of their time on your installation page, another to those who wanted service agreements and a third to the people who went straight for emergency AC services.
Take the Long View
Click-through rates on display ads and banners can seem dismayingly low to anyone who isn’t familiar with them, but direct clicks only tell part of the story, especially for B2B businesses that don’t typically have eye-catching banners on high-traffic sites. Instead of counting clicks, look at view-throughs – occasions on which a visitor was served an ad and visited the website but didn’t click. A view-through window of anywhere from a few days to a month can give you an indication of how sticky your retargeted ad is even if it wasn’t clicked.
Choose a Single Retargeting Provider
If you were at an auction, you wouldn’t hold up two paddles and bid against yourself. If you have more than one retargeting provider, that’s what you’re doing. Each is bidding in real time to serve an ad to your visitor, and each could potentially drive prices higher than they need to be. You’ll also run into trouble with frequency caps, so stick with a single one-stop shop for all your retargeting efforts.
Get Creative
Boring ads and emails don’t win the interest of retargeted leads any more than they earn a second look from newcomers. Set your creative team free to connect with an already highly segmented audience with narrowly focused, relevant content that directly addresses your prospects’ needs. Personalize correspondence whenever possible too; we all find ourselves pretty fascinating, so email marketing addressed to our names, professions and tastes will have a much higher response rate.
Contact our retargeting experts today at 855.867.3224 to help you devise your retargeting strategy.
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