Drive Sales With Ecommerce Retargeting

By Author: Sudeesh Dodda
Total Articles: 61
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Expecting audience to buy from your initial marketing activities itself is a sure shot route to disappointment. You should have a little patience. Do you know it takes multiple touchpoints to generate sales? Maybe sometimes five or sometimes more than 8 touches from a brand before a customer buys a product in ecommerce retargeting.

You probably should opt for more than the solitary engagement, before your webpage becomes a full-fledged customer shopping ground. Here is where the eCommerce retargeting comes into the picture. This concept allows you to follow leads around the internet to get the magic touchpoint in a short time and in the quickest way possible. So, let’s discuss first the basics of eCommerce retargeting.

What is eCommerce retargeting?
In eCommerce retargeting, you can display ads on external sites to reach out to your audience after they have browsed and left your online store. There are two ways you use retargeting advertising:

Connecting with customers: These are the people who have already bought products from you and you want to sell more. Here you already have your customers data. ...
... You just need to simply add the email address to your retargeting ad network to display your customer’s specific ads.
Connecting with visitors/ browsers: People have just visited and bought nothing till now. Based on the browser cookies you can promote the products your audience have shown interest in.
How do the eCommerce retargeting advertising work?
There are a number of platforms you can use for retargeting advertising. But the most popular ones are:

Google
Facebook
These two platforms have huge reach as we are all aware of the Facebook and Google usage by people all over the world. Google holds 90% of the global search engines market and more than 2 billion people log into Facebook every month. These platforms also have exclusive and wide display networks where you can easily advertise. You can use banner ads to retarget people on websites all over the internet. Let’s have a look at the process:

Install a code or tracking pixel on your website.
Then go into your Google or Facebook account
Upload the list of customer emails you already have or create the list based on your page views.
Upload the images and text you want to show in your ads.
Set your budget you want to spend.
And then you are ready to go
The ad will get pushed to your audience either in Facebook or Google platform or their display network as per your choice.

How to use retargeting in eCommerce?
First of all, you should streamline the different phases of a buyer’s journey. You need to know your customer details and where they are in their buying journey. Your ads will have different goals depending on your customer’s buying journey. So, make sure you make the most appropriate ad and align your audience accordingly.

There are a number of ways you can use retargeting in eCommerce:

Recovering abandoned carts: Every seller in the eCommerce world is aware of cart Abandonment. Here customer gets interested in a product, adds it in the cart but doesn’t buy it. Many sellers often prefer Email marketing as the ultimate solution. But the email marketing doesn’t give 100% guarantee of preventing cart abandonment. But if you layer a retargeting ad on top of the email marketing then it can be powerful as well as profitable.

eCommerce RetargettingLet’s have a look at the eCommerce marketing strategy from Nomadic company, which is a travel bag retailer. Add some product to your cart on their site and you will receive Facebook News Feed ad:

what is a retargeting adFacebook Sidebar ad:
remarketing vs retargetingGoogle Display Network ads on third party websites
nomaticThe customer’s mind at some point will trigger to buy the product if he continuously sees the ad in his/her Facebook login page. You can even show your customer different products from the same category. If he is not convinced with one product, there might be chances of him to get attracted to other products.

Product recommendations and cross-selling
One of the best times to showcase your other products in front of your customer is right after they have purchased from you. This is the right time as the customer is arguably at the height of confidence and trust in your store. Here is a perfect time, where you can use eCommerce retargeting ads and show some product recommendations.

Strengthen the relationship with your customers
Got a new product in your store and you are sure that your customer will like it? Running some sale? Then its high time to run eCommerce retargeting ads. Promoting not on channels like email or social media where your customer is frequent is the most impractical thing you would be doing. The best way to communicate with your customers when they are not directly engaging with your site or emails is to use retargeting ads. Use retargeting ads to follow up these promotions.

While doing such promotion put yourself in your customer shoes and think. When was the last time you actually visited an online store on your own? You might have visited either if you have the need or the store might have advertised some appealing deals. Retargeted ads help build great relationships with your customers. If you have a customer since a long time and you have a system of adding points on customer accounts on every purchase, then you can remind your customers to use it and get additional discounts through retargeting ads.

E-commerce Retargeting Best Practices
When you are building, creating and launching the retargeting ads, there are few basic tips you should follow. These tips are applicable for all platforms:

The message should be Relevant:
There may be a lot of hustle and bustle for a product. But if the retargeting ad doesn’t have a relevant message and advertising capability, people will lose interest. The relevant message helps to build a relationship with your customer. The irrelevant message always comes off like spam.

Suppose if you are selling products specifically to men then make sure that your retargeting ads are not going out to women. Create a message depending on the customer journey. Every customer is in the different phase of their buying journey. So, build relevant messages as per the journey.

Segment your customer
The best way to attract your customer through messages is to personalize. Many of you might think that every customer is different so how can I personalize the messages. It would be so difficult to do that. So, here segmentation comes into the picture.

With segmentation, you can separate your list of customers into small different groups. Then accordingly customize your message as per the specific segment. So, let’s see how to do this:

First, you need to know the different types of customer you are dealing with and then the customer journey. There are three different segments you should focus on are:

Demographics: Demographics include location, gender, age, marital status, etc. details about your customer.
Campaign Engagement: This segment is based on the engagement of your customer towards your campaign. You should know whether your customers are active or inactive.
Shopping Behavior: In this segment, you can target your customer at any stage, no matter which phase of the shopping journey they are.
Pay attention to various other aspects of your Ad
It is very important to make your ad appealing by focusing on creative elements as well:

Visuals: Ensure that the images you are using are not only attractive but conveying the message you want to send. Include the brand logo, target image that shouts loud about the offer, is the first step of creating a great retargeting ad.
Message: Think about your customer journey and what they want to hear? Depending on that create a striking message.
Create Strong Call to Action: Create a strong CTA that will attract your customers like “Learn More”, Shop Now” and many more.
Create Urgency: Create a retargeting Ad that is time-sensitive. Words such as few days left, limited time offer, only a few products left or a countdown timer will create urgency among the customer and the fear of missing out.
Frequently Test your ad:
Even if your ads are working well, you should take time to frequently change them and test whether it is bringing more business or not. Make four different iterations where you can pick a set and work on it effortlessly. Make 2 copies of wordings and 2 copies of visual and combine them accordingly. You then chose among the four that which one works best.

Retargeting ads are a critical tool for building healthy customer relationship and continued success. Leverage retargeting ads and engage your customer when they are not browsing your online store or social accounts.