Sales teams get a lot of credit for converting prospects into customers, but ongoing marketing efforts ensure that your product or service remains top-of-mind until people are ready to buy. This is a critical tenet of any marketing organization, and one powerful method that consistently proves its effectiveness is retargeting.
What is Retargeting?
Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is more than just sending a reminder email or displaying an ad on social media. It’s a strategic digital marketing technique designed to re-engage users who have interacted with your brand but haven’t converted… yet.
These engagement efforts show up as targeted ads across various platforms, including social media, websites, and email, with the ultimate goal of gently reminding and enticing users to return, complete a purchase, or take a desired action. For example, have you ever said this to yourself?
I was just talking about this and suddenly my phone started showing me ads about it!
That’s retargeting. If you use voice recognition on your phone, you may have enabled privacy settings that allow the device not only listen for commands, but also to pay attention to your regular conversations. This means your voice could be sending advertisers data and thus triggering a retargeting ad!
Other advanced retargeting strategies involve customer journey mapping, predictive modeling, and sentiment analysis.
Some of our personal favorite brands are employing effective retargeting strategies – Vineyard Vines (Facebook ad pictured above), Under Armour, Nike, Mpix, Kendra Scott, Ulta, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.
Complexity Behind the Simplicity
The seemingly simple act of reminding someone about items they’ve viewed, brands they’ve been talking about, or abandoned items in a shopping cart requires quite a bit of strategic and technical planning. It’s a bit of art, and a bit of science.
To truly master retargeting, you shouldn’t think of it as any old nameless, faceless marketing touchpoint. Instead, picture yourself trying to rekindle a friendship with someone or getting to know a new member of your community. When you’re reaching back out to someone in a retargeting campaign, you’re saying “hello again” to users who have shown interest in what your company is selling, but for whatever reason haven’t committed to buy.
The strategy behind retargeting involves dynamic ad content that adapts to users’ behavior, offering a personalized experience. Understanding the customer journey, from the initial touchpoint to potential conversion, is crucial in tailoring retargeting efforts effectively.
The hard part? Setting up the technical infrastructure so that you can actually do this.
But First: Let’s Talk About Data
High-quality digital data is the bedrock of a successful retargeting campaign. Leveraging advanced analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) systems allows for a more granular understanding of user behavior. Implementing tools like predictive analytics can forecast user actions, enabling a proactive retargeting approach.
Why does quality matter?
- Precision in Targeting: In a retargeting campaign, you need the ability to precisely target users based on their behavior. Accurate and up-to-date data ensures that your retargeting efforts reach the right audience segments. Without good data, you may target the wrong users, resulting in wasted ad spend and, more critically, potential customer alienation.
- Proactive Strategy with Predictive Analytics: Leveraging advanced analytics, including predictive analytics, relies heavily on the quality of historical data. Predictive models forecast user actions based on patterns and trends. If the underlying data is flawed, these predictions become unreliable, hindering the ability to implement a proactive retargeting approach.
- Mitigating Ad Fatigue: Ad fatigue occurs when users are bombarded with the same or irrelevant ads repeatedly. Quality data allows for effective frequency capping, ensuring that users are not overwhelmed with redundant messages.
- Compliance and Privacy Concerns: Maintaining the quality of data is crucial for compliance with regulations such as GDPR or CCPA. Inaccurate data may result in unintentional privacy breaches, exposing businesses to legal consequences and reputational damage.
- Ability to be Truly Data Driven: Robust data quality facilitates meaningful insights into user behavior, allowing marketers to refine their retargeting strategy over time. Without accurate historical data, the ability to learn from past campaigns and optimize future efforts is severely hampered.
In essence, data quality is the invisible force that shapes the success of a retargeting campaign. It ensures that every interaction with a potential customer is meaningful, accurate, and respectful of their privacy. Without this foundation, retargeting campaigns risk veering off course, missing opportunities, and failing to deliver the personalized, engaging experiences that modern consumers expect.
Checklist for Successful Retargeting Campaigns
Now that we’ve covered the basics – let’s chat about how to master the tactics that lead to successful retargeting campaigns. Here are a few strategic and implementation best practices to empower your retargeting endeavors, ensuring your digital marketing practice is set up for success.
1. Tracking Pixels:
- Implementation Tip: The foundation of any successful retargeting campaign begins with precise tracking pixels. Ensure these pixels are strategically placed on crucial sections of your website, from product pages to checkout, to capture detailed user interactions.
- Popular Pixels: Implement leading retargeting pixels, including Facebook (Meta), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snap, Twitter (X), and Google Ads Remarketing tags, to maximize your campaign’s reach across diverse platforms.
2. Data Architecture:
- Implementation Tip: Craft a robust data architecture by leveraging dynamic variables and a well-structured data layer. This ensures the seamless capture and transmission of essential information, such as product IDs and transaction values, enhancing the granularity of data available for your retargeting campaigns.
- Event Tracking: Implement event tracking for key user interactions, such as button clicks and form submissions. This level of detail provides nuanced insights into user behavior, enabling you to refine retargeting strategies based on specific actions.
3. Segmentation:
- Strategy Tip: Harness the power of machine learning algorithms for dynamic segmentation. In real-time, these algorithms automatically categorize users into relevant segments, ensuring your retargeting messages consistently align with users’ evolving interests and behaviors.
4. Creative:
- Strategy Tip: Elevate your creatives by moving beyond static content. Take advantage of dynamic ad elements that adapt based on user behavior. Employ A/B testing and multivariate testing to continually optimize creative elements, guaranteeing that your ads not only capture attention but also resonate with the unique preferences of each user segment.
5. Smart Personalization:
- Strategy Tip: Embrace the era of intelligent decision-making by incorporating AI into your retargeting campaigns. The efficiency gained through AI tools ensures real-time calibration, leading to more personalized and impactful messaging that ultimately translates into higher conversion rates.
Why Retargeting Matters in Digital Marketing: Building Relationships
Beyond just driving sales, retargeting is a part of the marketer’s effort to build lasting brand relationships. Remember that technology is the means, but connection is the end. Retargeting is a delicate blend of science and art, requiring a nuanced understanding of data, technology, and, most importantly, the human element. Stay agile, stay analytical, and stay connected to ensure sustained success in the rapidly changing digital marketing landscape.
Do you need a hand getting your retargeting campaigns off the ground? Or maybe you’re wondering why your retargeting isn’t converting? Let’s chat, we’d be happy to find ways to help.
