How to successfully retarget and remarket for your eCommerce store

It takes more than a unique product to bring success to your online store. You need to roll out a comprehensive marketing strategy to draw traffic to your site.

However, even when you have a sizeable number of visitors flocking to your online store, your sales numbers might not reflect it. After all, only 97 per cent of potential customers who visit your site for the first time don’t buy products.

Therefore, to turn things around, you need to involve remarketing and retargeting in your overall marketing strategy.

Now, marketers often use these two terms interchangeably. And you can’t blame them. After all, both strategies involve bringing products and content before prospects who have already had contact with your brand.

Remarketing usually involves using email to reach out to people who have visited your site. On the other hand, retargeting involves using paid ads to sway previous visitors to come back to your online store.

Read on to find out how you can boost eCommerce sales by incorporating retargeting and remarketing in your brand promotion strategy.

Before we can guide you through how to boost eCommerce sales, let’s take a look at the different areas of your online business where you can apply retargeting and remarketing.

When to apply retargeting and remarketing tactics in your marketing strategy

You don’t have to utilize these two processes to every bit of your marketing scheme. There are some areas where you can get the most out of them.

These include:

• Increasing brand recognition and awareness: Before prospective customers can trust you with their financial information and money, they need to feel comfortable around your brand. One way to ensure that they do is by making your brand visible everywhere your customers go.
  
  Retargeting ads keep your brand visible when prospects are scrolling through their social media, and when they visit other websites.

• Launching new products: When people have already done business with your brand, they’re more open to returning to get new stuff. You can use retargeting ads to marketing new entrants to your product line, luring old customers back to check out the new inventory.

• Highlighting the most popular products: You can use retargeting to show off your top-selling products. If someone came across your site and didn’t buy anything, you can use the retargeting ads to show them what other customers have purchased in droves.

• Clearing inventory: Retargeting and remarketing ads also come in handy if you want to move products that aren’t so popular. But if someone has visited your online store before, they’ll probably be interested in other products you have to sell.

Now that you know where you can apply your retargeting and remarketing strategy, let’s get into some tips and tricks to make this strategy better.

Practical tactics for successful remarketing and retargeting for your online brand

Retargeting and remarketing are strategies that you need to use throughout your online business’ lifespan. To ensure that it holds up throughout that time, you need to adopt savvy mechanisms that’ll boost eCommerce sales.

Here are some tactics you can put into play to take your online brand to the next level.

1. Go after abandoned virtual shopping carts

Even when you implement an effective marketing strategy and reel in customers, you still lose the vast majority of them at the last step. They’ll go through your catalogue and add items to their cart.

However, only a small number will check out their items and clear the carts. Just over 75 per cent of potential customers abandon their cart. Without converting these individuals into buyers, your advertising dollars would have amounted to naught.

Therefore, you need to employ remarketing tactics to increase your chances of making sales.

For instance, if a customer gives up on a transaction, you can send them an email within the next hour so that they can come back and clear their cart. If they don’t act on it, you can send another email a few days later.

You can entice them back by offering a discount if they return to your site and purchase the items in their carts.

2. Use the opportunity to cross- and up-sell

Several online entrepreneurs are under the impression that retargeting and remarketing only boost sales in eCommerce when prospects haven’t turned into paying customers. On the contrary, you can use these strategies to get more business from your existing customers.

Let’s say you run an online store that sells computer accessories. A client bought a wireless mouse the day before. You can use this chance to move more of your inventory out of your online store.

You can use remarketing tactics by offering a complimentary product like a mouse pad. The customer will find the item useful because it makes their earlier purchase work better. This will compel the client to return to your site to buy the mouse pad.

Furthermore, you can increase your chances of getting the customer to come back by offering an incentive like a discount on the next item they purchase.

3. Incorporate content marketing in the scheme

The vast majority of retargeted opportunities consist of product ads. However, if your target audience has already purchased that item, you won’t gain much from that ad.

You can remedy this situation by using the ad space to market your content. Such content includes blog articles, eBooks or videos. Previous customers will come back to your store to check out items related to their previous purchases that were highlighted in the content.

Alternatively, the marketed content also draws in virgin traffic. These new visitors don’t have prior contact with your brand. However, the content’s quality attracted them to visit your store.

More inbound traffic allows you to increase your conversions and sales. If you don’t convert all of them, you can deploy your retargeting ads to reel them back in when they leave your site.

4. Aim your retargeted ads towards customers interested in the brand

Unlike in brick-and-mortar stores, an online store owner might find it hard to know if a customer is really interested in a particular product or if they’re a tire-kicker. However, some tech tools can help you make a more informed decision.

When setting up your online store, you need to install various analytics tools. By combing through, you can examine visitors’ behaviour when they land on your site. From here, you can identify those who stay longer and those who just spend a few seconds before closing the page.

This analysis helps you to identify visitors who don’t really show any interest in your products.

Consequently, you can focus your retargeting and remarketing efforts on prospects who have a chance of becoming paying customers. In other words, using these exclusions to inform your strategy will increase your return on investment.

5. Segment your ads

To maximize your return on investment, you need to present your retargeted ads to people who’re interested in that exact item you’re offering.

Use the analytics we mentioned above to figure out what each prospect looked at when they were on your site. For instance, you can create customer segments based on the different product categories that they browsed.

You can then run ultra-specific ads targeting potential customers with products and content relating to what they viewed on your site. When these individuals see these ads when browsing their social media or other websites, they’ll feel compelled to check out your store again.

6. Craft well-optimized ads

You can use all the fancy analytics tools to segment your audience to provide them with suitable ads and content. However, that won’t translate into higher eCommerce sales if you don’t run the right ads.

To create impactful retargeted ads, you need to make sure that they catch the audience’s eye. Therefore, you need to invest in incorporating hi-res product photography in the ads. Alternatively, you can use colour-popping graphics.
These graphics should starkly stand out in the prospect’s social media and other websites they browse.

However, you shouldn’t pour all your optimizing efforts on the visual elements alone. Their primary purpose is to make the client stop what they’re doing and pay attention to them.

Now that you have their attention, you need to provide them with some value. Therefore, you need to craft compelling copy that’ll make customers click on your ad and go to your online store.

As such, you should hone your copywriting skills to ensure that you create impactful retargeted ads. If your creativity doesn’t stretch that far, you can invest in professional copywriting services.

The result should be copy that enthrals the audience, exciting and enticing members back to your online store.

7. Incorporate product pricing in your strategy

What we mean by this is that you should show your retargeted ads to people who can afford the item you’re advertising. This is more so if pricing was the reason they didn’t complete the transaction.

One of the most significant contributors to the high cart abandonment rate is the product price. A potential customer might be excited about your product and adds it to their cart. However, when it comes to checkout, they abandon the cart because the final price is out of their range.

The product price might not even be the problem, per se. The problem could stem from the shipping fees. When you add these to the product price, the total amount turns the customer away.

You can go through your analytics to find out which prospective customers didn’t complete their transactions because they were priced out. You can then retarget ads to them that show discounts or free shipping for the same product they were interested in.

This kind of offer will make them reconnect with the brand and draw them back to the store to complete their purchase.

8. Display ads in moderation

When you pull the trigger on your retargeting, your prospect will see the ad on their various social media feeds. Additionally, they will run into the same ads on their related search engine result pages. To take it further, they’ll also see the ads when reading articles on other websites.

What we’re getting to is that repetitive ads can become pretty annoying. This is particularly apparent when it’s the exact same ad popping up everywhere.
Instead of getting the customer to reconnect with you, the campaign will do the opposite. Your brand will feel like an intruder - a nuisance - forcing the prospect to develop a negative attitude towards your brand.

You can use different ad spots for the same product. This breaks the monotony. Additionally, it steers the customer away from the notion that you’re just spamming their online experience.

In another instance, repetitive ads can also chase away your current customers. If you run a successful retargeted ad, you need to ensure that that specific customer stops seeing it. Otherwise, you risk damaging a long-term business relationship with that client.

You can install burn pixels to prevent this from happening. These are snippets of code that you can add to your site. This type of tracking pixel recognizes when a customer has completed a transaction on your site and then untags them from your retargeting campaign.

Consequently, the customer won’t see that product’s ad anymore.

In summary

Like we’ve seen, your marketing campaign might be sufficient enough to bring a massive number of visitors to your site. However, that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll all stay and buy something from the store.

Still, you can let all those marketing funds to go to waste. That’s why you have to institute remarketing and retargeting campaigns to boost sales in eCommerce.

In this piece, we’ve looked at the various instances where you can deploy these campaigns. However, it doesn’t stop there. You’ll need to employ a wide range of tactics to ensure that the retargeting and remarketing strategy propels your online brand above your competition.