Last week I was a second away from buying a really cute notebook when I realized that it was way too much money for it right before clicking “place order.” I had already put my email in there, so, having been in the marketing field for a while now, it didn’t really surprise me when, an hour later, I got a “Come finish your purchase!” email that included a 10% off discount. However, it did surprise me to get another one a week later saying the same thing, but now including a 20% off. This, my friends, is what we call retargeting incentives based on how long has it been since your last visit.
I’m not ashamed to say that this strategy actually worked on me and that the notes for this article were written in my brand new, really cute, and less expensive than I thought notebook. So if this succeeded with someone that knew exactly what these people were doing, why wouldn’t it work in everyone else? And if it’s so effective, why aren’t more people choosing it? So today, my friends, we’ll go through a deep analysis of remarketing strategies.
It’s a well-known fact that Display Ads are losing effectiveness every day, and how this forces brands to reinvent themselves and come up with new strategies to get as many customers as possible. With this in our hands, we are led to choose where it is that we should put an eye on when launching our campaigns, and a strategy chosen by many is to put it in our audiences and, more specifically, on people who have already shown interest in us.
Retargeting works just like that basically is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting people who have already been to our website to come back and actually convert. A great example of this is Adalysis’s own Ad article that I myself reviewed, where they chose to orientate their Display Ad campaign to people, like me, who had already visited their sites. However, retargeting comes in many sizes and shapes, and it’s not a Display-Ad-exclusive strategy.
As you can see through my own experience, a tactic that is now getting popular is the retargeting incentive, which means that the longer it’s been since your last visit, the more they’ll try to get you back. Just like that annoying ex-boyfriend that just won’t give up on you, this website will take their heavy artillery to make you go back to their website and actually make a conversion. So they’ll either proceed to show you their Ads everywhere, send you emails with the most tempting offers, or really just anything they consider the best way to show you what you are missing.
Just as any other advertising technique, it has its pros and its cons. On the pros, retargeting is a great way to make sure you are going for the right audiences. If you are looking to get a high CTR that actually has a close relationship with your conversions and not just a pointlessly high CTR, making sure that your audience is the right one matters and a lot. If someone has already shown interest in your product, it’s much easier to get them to go back to your site and make a conversion when exposed (again) to your marketing strategies. Even more, if you keep showing up again and again with a bunch of different qualities, promotions, and reasons to get them to choose you. For sure, this is one of the safest ways to get conversions and guarantee you are getting the correct traffic to your site.
However, not everything is as good as it sounds. This technique can sound really cool and efficient, probably because it is, but it also comes with a high price to pay that makes many companies go for other kinds of strategies instead: the complexity of its setup process.
As you may already know, Google Analytics has two faces: In many cases, it’s a really intuitive tool and all you have to do is copy-paste a code to get all the information that you need. However, there’s a reason for the existence of “Google Analytics specialists”, right? Many features, such as retargeting incentives based on your last visit, require a much more sophisticated process to be set up. It’s not just copy-pasting a code, but also developing a personalized way of analyzing based on your own specifications (for example, 10% off an hour since you left the website, 20% off the next week, and so) and setting it up in your website. What happens here is that, more often than not, having a specialist running your Google Analytics (or whichever analysis tool you are using) campaign, is not the cheapest thing to do and that’s why many brands choose to go with an easier one.
So basically, the bottom line here is the trade-off that you are willing to do. Spending some money in developing a retargeting incentive strategy that has proven to be useful, or going for a not-so-profitable much less expensive campaign. Obviously, this will always depend on your Advertising budget, your usual marketing campaign, and, obviously, based on your analytics, if there’s actually a big profit to get from this type of campaign. Whichever is your situation, hopefully, this article has clarified some ideas for you and, if it didn’t, then you’ll probably still see our Ads in the following days ;).
