A Simple Yet Effective Guide to Generating Sales From Remarketing
Let’s begin.
Point #1: Have you carefully defined your audience and precisely targeted your campaign to reach the right people?
● You’ll launch your first remarketing campaign on the Google Display Network (containing 2 million websites) or on Facebook (having close to 1.5 billion users).
● Let’s look at how you’ll target your audience on both of them.
How to define your audience in Google AdWords?
● Say a visitor jumped off your consultation offer page. And, another visitor jumped off your blog.
● The mindset of these two visitors is different and so might be their interests and their level of buying intent.
● That’s where creating a remarketing list inside Google comes enters the picture.
● You just need to place the remarketing tag on your website and Google will take care of installing the cookie on your website visitor.
● Next comes the most important step – defining which website visitors should be included and excluded from your audience.
● Don’t treat all of your website visitors the same way by only creating one remarketing list targeting everyone who visits.
● Instead, you can bid aggressively for the section of your website visitors having higher value based on your analytics data.
● Once you’ve created a list with your website pages, here are 3 specific targeting examples you can use …
● The key landing pages on your website (like your product page, ebooks/lead magnet page) should be tagged differently.
● You can serve bounced visitors from these pages with aggressive messages and persuade them to complete the transaction.
● Such a remarketing list deserves a higher bid, because the group targeted on it consists of warmer traffic that is more likely to convert. So, you should use higher ad placements to close more sales.
● You can even serve discounts to these visitors and entice them to get back to your product page and complete the sale.
● You can also tag your post conversion landing page and target your previous customers for repeat business.
● It’s a great strategy to increase your brand loyalty and awareness.
● Define your audience categories in AdWords, based on these existing blog post classifications.
● Here are two common mistakes that plague remarketing campaigns.
1. Thinking that remarketing ads creep your customers out just like generic display ads – Nope, they don’t. Ad fatigue isn’t as quick in remarketing. Actually, a remarketing ad fatigues at less than half the rate than a generic display ad does.
2. Not excluding the audience that has already made a purchase from you – This is a classic one. You’ve got to exclude an acquired customer from your new acquisition remarketing and lead nurturing funnel.
● The campaign exclusions tab can be found by clicking on + Targeting under the Display Network tab.
● Then, choose Campaign exclusions >> Add campaign exclusions >> Interests & remarketing.
● Select the converted customer remarketing list you’ve created from the site category.
● You should also exclude your ads from appearing alongside inappropriate content, because it’ll hamper your brand image. Category-based exclusions will help you prevent negative associations with your brand.
● Also try to exclude your ad from websites unrelated to your product and services.
● Note: You don’t need to run your ads 24 x 7. For better profitability and effectiveness, run them following the 5 simple steps in this article.
How to unleash the hidden power of Facebook Ads by creating a custom audience?
● Similar to Google, Facebook also offers you remarketing options to create your own audience list.
● You simply install a pixel (1×1 pixel image) on your website from Facebook’s tools section in Ads manager.
● The code for tracking your website visitors and conversions is a bit different. Jon Loomer discusses the technicalities of the new, upgraded Facebook pixel in this article.
● Let’s jump on how to create your own audience now.
● From your ads manager, select Tools >> Audiences >> Create Audience >> Custom Audience (from the drop-down menu).
● You’ll get a pop-up with three options. Let’s explore the targeting options.
● You can upload your own email list or phone list. Then, Facebook will create an audience for you, based on it.
● Or you can target your website traffic down to the people who haven’t visited your website in a certain amount of time.
● You can even target people who visited your landing page, but didn’t convert i.e. visiting your thankyou page.
● You can also create remarketing ads for your products. For higher relevance, target people who have read your blog’s content on subjects related to your product.
● The demographic targeting you can achieve in Facebook Ads ecosystem is mind-blowing. There are 1500 data points available on an average user.
● You can layer your custom audience with these targeting options. But, don’t get so specific that your ads reach gets thrown out. Strike a balance between your budget and audience size.
● You can further expand the reach of your custom audience by creating a lookalike audience.
● It’s a great strategy that allows you to mirror your current Facebook fans or website visitors.
● You get the option to display your ads to the top 1 percent of users with similar traits in your target country, or to 10 percent of the users in your target country who are most like your target audience.
● You can read some more powerful targeting options in this article by Jon Loomer.
● Rather than running your Ads 24 x 7, you can also schedule them on specific days of the week, at your peak engagement levels.
● Pro Tip: You shouldn’t stop at creating an ad for your various segmented remarketing lists. Expand your efforts to create a customized landing page that incorporates your retargeting message for every segment of your list.
● For maintaining scent, keep the headline, photo and the color of your landing page the same as your ad.
● Also, pay special attention to the copy on your ad and the specific keywords that you use.
● If you create a smooth experience for the user, you can improve your conversions tremendously.
Point #2: Have you experimented with various ad formats? And, are you actually creating compelling ads that grab the attention of your prospects?
● Do you know what can make a user click on a link? It’s when you appeal to them emotionally.
● The plain informational advertisements sans any personality. Try to incorporate the emotions and benefits for your customers in your ad.
● On the Google Display Network, image ads get a higher CTR. Which means the CPC on them is notably different.
● We would suggest that you hire a good designer to create those fancy image ads. And no, plain text ads reformatted into images don’t count.
● This brings us to the next point on testing your ad format to find the best message and ad placement that appeals to your target audience.
● There are 14 different types of display ad formats available on the Google Display Network.
● By diversifying your ad formats, you can increase your chances of ad placements in positions with more impressions.
● It’ll also help you in lowering your competition in ad auctions and in fighting ad fatigue by giving advertising networks options to rotate your ads.
● On Facebook, you also need to keep changing your ads to maintain your ad performance. Monitor the response graph and keep an eye out for your peaks and troughs.
● If you have different products, then you need to create different ads for them and start rotating them.
● But, even for the same product, you need to create multiple variations of the same ad, by playing around with your title, ad copy, CTA and, most importantly, your image.
● You can even rotate your target audiences on Facebook to keep your ad campaigns fresh.
● By writing more ads, you get the opportunity to dive deeper into what’s working.
● She confesses that she does not just write one ad and sit back. Rather, she puts in the hard work to write 30+ ads in different ad formations for a single landing page.
● By watching the click-through-rate (CTR) she keeps fine tuning her ads and weeds out the non-performing ones.
Point #3: Fiddle with the unlimited impressions cap on AdWords. And, send your first follow-up email immediately, but without a discount
● This validation point on impressions is for AdWords. But, the following up immediately part is valid for all email remarketing campaigns.
● Let’s look at them one-by-one, starting with Adwords first.
● You might feel that repetitively showing your ads will intrude on and annoy a user.
● You might prefer to set a frequency cap under 3 or 2 (which controls the maximum number of times a user will see your ad).
● But, you shouldn’t start with low impression caps for your campaigns.
● A typical remarketing campaign does not deliver more than two ads per day to your users.
● So, the best way to ensure that your ads get an ample number of impressions is by starting with unlimited impressions.
● Now as you know, drawing generalizations is far from a good marketing strategy, especially when your money is at stake. You need to make data-oriented decisions.
● So, while it’s okay to start with unlimited impressions, you should tweak your frequency, based on your own data.
● You can find the data in your Reach and Frequency report, located inside the Campaigns tab.
● Click on the “Reach Metrics” option from the customized column drop down menu.
● Put simply, reach is the number of unique users who saw your ad and frequency is the number of times they saw it.
● As an advertiser you top priority is to ensure that you’ve created a variety of appealing ads so that your prospective customers don’t get accustomed to seeing just one message from your brand and ignoring it subconsciously.
● If you appeal to your audience’s emotions by creating compelling ads (like we discussed in point #2), then you can play with a higher frequency cap.
● If you’re keen on testing your frequency cap, then Brenda at Martin Software has developed a 4-step process that you can use.
1. Begin by setting up two retargeting lists that are similar to one another, but not overlapping.
2. Set your desired cookie duration, which should be identical for both lists.
3. Create two campaigns promoting the same assets, one for each retargeting list, and set the campaign to rotate the ads to serve evenly.
4. Input your desired frequency caps in the individual campaigns to test against, analyze, and continue playing around with the different frequency caps.
● You could also try testing only one retargeting list, changing the frequency cap week over week over a period of time, and then evaluating the results.
● However, there are many factors that may affect the results, and it won't be as clean as the method above.
● She also shows you how to analyze the performance by exporting the ad frequency data using pivot tables in this article.
● If you aren’t familiar, here is a basic video tutorial on how to use pivot tables.
● You just need to set up frequency as a row label and other data parameters under values.
● You should have fields, including CTR, Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion calculated in your pivot table.
● Next up, we want to talk about email remarketing. Here is a 5-step breakdown of how it works.
1. Initial email sent: Customer clicks through email to website.
2. Web browsing/shopping: Customer browses and carts items.
3. Abandoned cart of form: Customer leaves website without making purchase.
4. Remarketing email sent: Customer receives abandon cart reminded email.
5. Online purchase made: Customer clicks through email and makes purchase.
● To bring you up to speed with the results you can derive through email remarketing.
● Here are 3 things you need to consider for your email marketing campaign.
1. Minimum friction will result in higher sales – Get the basics right. Personalization of the mail addressing your prospect by his name and offering help is important.
● Next, obviously, you need to show a picture of the product your customer abandoned. You also want to link directly to the saved shopping cart from your CTA button (which also must look prominent and instantly garner attention).
● Here is an example showing the correct and incorrect way of sending a remarketing email. i. Right Channel Radios – They address the visitor by his name, remind him of his abandoned product from their website and use a clear CTA “Finish Your Order.” ii. Neiman Marcus – The email is generic – not addressing the visitor by his name, without a prominent CTA and sans any context.
2. Re-engage with your lost leads as fast as possible – One hour. That’s the amount of time that you’ve got to remain at the top of your customer’s mind.
● You’ll experience a tremendous drop in conversions if you engage after the first hour.
3. Send a general comeback email first and the one with the coupon later – Peak design used this strategy to recover 12% of their abandoned carts.
● Within 30 minutes of a cart abandonment, they first sent an email. It was focused on driving prospects to their customer support, so that they could get their objections cleared.
● And, after 30 hours, they offered a 5% discount to close more customers who were on the fence.
● The first one got a 14% CTR and contributed 59% in retargeting revenue.
● The second email got a higher CTR of 18% and the revenue derived was 41%.
● Additionally, here are Peak Design’s top 3 tips for conducting remarketing campaigns.