Remarketing to Potential Customers: How and Why

Every digital marketer spends a lot of time acquiring customers. It involves quite a lot of money and effort to get people to visit a website. Social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing and other means are used to get people into the digital marketing funnel.

The question is, do all of them convert into customers? Of course, the answer is no. There are many who visit your website, check through your web pages, including the products or services page and then leave. No purchases, no queries asked. What do you do about these could-be customers? Do you abandon all hope of getting them onboard the moment they leak out of the marketing funnel?

Remarketing is what you need. Think back on how you find ads of shoes showing up on the sidebar of your screen right after you checked for some shoes online. Search engines have the ability to pick up searched keywords and offer you ads according to the searches that you have made. You can make use of these channels to offer your customers as a way of remarketing. The tone is, you have checked for XYZ shoes on the website (we know you did not buy any!), now look at another option, ABC shoes. Interested in buying a pair?

Once you have the information about the potential customers’ searches, you are in a better position to bid for PPC ads on the searched keywords. The customers who leave without buying do not leave you empty-handed. You have a wealth of information at your disposal, data that you can use to study the behavior and search patterns of the users. This is especially true for those that have left. You already know what gets them interested because you have tapped them successfully once! With a new range of products or services, tap them again in a similar manner. This is known as RLSA or Remarketed List for Search Ads.

These ads, as you have additional insight about the psychology of the potential buyers, usually give you a higher Click through Rate and a higher Conversion Rate as well. You can tap into them through email ids shared with your bank during their first visit to the page. You can even use social media hashtags or profile names to identify individual would-be buyers.

Another way to remarket is to use the new function on Google AdWords: customer match. With the email list that you have, you can check for user behavior across the ad display network of Google.

The customary caution here is that your remarketing method must be very bright. For example, a blunder of a mistake would be to unleash your remarketing process on buyers who have already converted into customers. Similarly, there is a shelf date on how much you can remarket to some buyers. If you find that the period of, say a fortnight, is over and the conversion rate continues to be very low, you might as well abandon that line of remarketing.

Another warning is that you should attune your marketing message in order to ensure that the remarketing process is not a tiresome one. For example, suppose a buyer has not converted into a sale and you keep hitting the buyer with the same marketing message half a dozen times! It will not lead to anything because you are hitting against a wall, burning up your financial resources in the process.

Finally, keep the marketing funnel open at all ends. It need not always be a purchase that you are looking for. It can be any form of engagement with your brand, like a newsletter subscription or participating in an online poll, etc. You should not limit yourself to the concept of making a sale as that would be tough and in the effort, you might put off a buyer who is open to engagement and probably buy later. Do not shut down any avenue for a future sale.

With the competition in the digital marketing arena, the last thing you want is to lose out on potential customers. When you have people visiting your website once, you know that they are interested, however minuscule that interest might be. This is a better opportunity to clinch a sale than dealing with someone who is not into your brand at all!

Till next time!