Have you ever noticed how you might visit a website or an online store and then go onto Facebook or Instagram and see banners ads for the website and items you’ve browsed almost everywhere? That’s called remarketing via a remarketing campaign. To put it in a textbook definition: Remarketing is when advertisers can track your internet activity and then serve you ads based on what you’ve done on said websites. In all honesty, it sounds a bit creepy. But this isn’t the CIA keeping tabs on what you’re browsing. Remarketing is designed to make the advertising as friendly to the customer as possible.
Let’s expand a bit.
How many billboards, TV ads or magazine spreads have you seen that mean nothing to you? It’s safe to say at least a vast majority. But customers are still bombarded with things they really don’t care about, while remarketing tries to combat that.
As a customer or marketer, you’re probably wondering how remarketing works? When customers visit a website, they get cookied. These cookies tell marketers what pages were visited, what products or services were looked at, how many pages were looked at and how long was spent on the website as well as about a million other things too. Forget about your personal identity – browsers are basically assigned a new ‘ID’ that marketers can market too.
For example: We can’t see that Matthew De Villiers visited the Ford Cape Town online store, but if we ran Ford Cape Town’s marketing (disclaimer: we don’t), we’d be able to remarket to people that have visited the site, with Matthew included.
Google has reported that 88% of online shoppers place an order in a cart and then leave a site. Do you want to reach these customers, or do you want to leave them to the competitor? Through remarketing, marketers can serve a different ad to customers who have visited the site and took no action but left some items in their carts. These ads could offer a discount to target the audience to get back onto the website and checking out.
Remarketing campaigns aim to help marketers show customers the ads they’re actually interested in seeing and giving them personalised offers.
Marketers can take this a step further with dynamic remarketing. Dynamic remarketing helps customers see ads on items they browsed when they were on the website. In conclusion, this personal approach aids to increase conversion rates as it gets previous visitors back online to visit what they started.
But what does all of this mean to businesses?
What makes remarketing relevant to today’s digital age? And so much that almost every business is doing it in some capacity? It’s a vital part of any digital marketing campaign’s effort to the business word.
When remarketing is done properly, businesses enable communication that is clearer to the customer. Be it deepening a relationship with an existing customer by targeting them with new products or services, or using it to show customers who have already shown interest in your product, additional information on what they have looked, remarketing gives marketers the potential to better understand and communicate with new and existing customers. Let’s look at some of the basic reasons why your business needs to use remarketing.
– It’s cheaper: Usually, your ads only serve to the people you target and click on your ads: You’re spending less money for better traffic.
– You can send out personalised offers: This means more engagements, more sales, and more customer retention.
– Very few actions or purchases are made on the very first visit to the site: Think about it – When you see something for the first time, how likely are you to buy it immediately unless you’ve been eying it for a while? But what about after seeing it a few times, combined with a personal deal?
Remarketing is an easy and painless way for a business to connect to a customer. If you’re seeing an ad online that has nothing to do with you, then someone in marketing is not doing their job correctly.
At first, it might seem a little unnerving – Advertisers following customers around the internet and knowing what you want before you do, but remarketing will only continue to grow.