So, you’ve spruced up your social strategy, tried running ad campaigns, and followed the advice of dozens of marketing influencers.
You’ve gotten some new followers and engagement on social media has slightly increased, but conversions are still minimal.
Why? What are the successful brands doing that you’re not?
The most successful brands aren’t focusing their full attention on ads and tactics to attract cold leads.
They’re putting just as much effort (if not more) on converting people who already know the brand. They’re not focused on cold traffic but are bolstering the relationships they already have.
This is where the money’s made. It’s easier to persuade customers who know your brand to buy, and it costs you a lot less.
Did you know? It costs five times more to acquire new buyers than to satisfy and retain current customers.
What you need is a strategy that’ll target the people in-between decisions; the uncertain ones, the window shoppers who’ve seen what they want but haven’t yet opened their wallets.
These customers have lingered around your ecommerce site long enough but keep leaving without purchasing anything.
How do you change this? How do you get them to finally hit purchase?
The answer: retargeting.
What is Retargeting?
Retargeting, also referred to as remarketing, is a strategy to remind your target audience about your brand or products to generate a behavior or action.
The people you’re retargeting have already entered your sales funnel process.
In some instances, these customers might have completed a purchase. In others, they might get halfway through your purchase funnel before abandoning.
In both cases, money is being left on the table if you’re not reminding them about your best products.
For those who completed their purchase, retargeting can help introduce them to other products your store offers, bringing them back to purchase follow up products.
If they abandoned their cart before checking out, retargeting can remind them of the product they were so close to buying.
Getting these retargeting messages across is simple. There are tools like Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, and even apps like Jumper that can help you spread the word.
But before you waste ad spend, you should know that retargeting is an art of its own. To retarget the right way, you need to first make the connection between what the right message is and who the right target audiences are.
Retargeting requires you to focus on identifying who your best prospects are. From there, figure out what they want to get that simple strategy to convert them.
What Can Retargeting Achieve?
If done right, retargeting can:
- Reduce cost per impression thanks to precision targeting.
- Improve conversion rates thus improving ROI.
- Effectively position your brand at top-of-mind. If your customers know you’re around, they’ll remember the next time they’re looking to purchase that product.
Retargeting can be done in various forms: running ads, via email marketing campaigns, establishing loyalty campaigns, sending out SMS reminders or browser notifications and even through the use of influencer marketing.
Ideally, regardless of the platform you choose, retargeting messages revolve around:
- Reminding customers of your brand/presence
- Reminding a potential customer about the item they’ve not checked out
- Offering incentives for customers to make a purchase
- Upselling, reselling, or cross-selling
- Promoting items of a similar nature that existing customers could be interested in
- Promoting to people on-the-go to remind them that they can purchase from anywhere
With the right retargeting strategy in place, sales are bound to flood in.
Research says that retargeting can cause nearly 26% of users to return to complete check-out processes.
Don’t believe us?
Just ask the good people at Marvel.
When Jumper stepped in to collaborate with Marvel for Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp, ticket sales went through the roof.
But a lot of that success came from people’s second engagement with our checkout bot.
We retargeted people who engaged with the Infinity War campaign to buy tickets for Ant-Man and the Wasp.
The result? A whopping 71% conversion from engagement to sale just by retargeting segments of their audience.
If you’re thinking, “but that’s Marvel. My business isn’t as popular!”
Then you should know that even your business can capitalize on such strategies.
Want the not-so-secret recipe to ecommerce success?
Here it is.
The Simple Retargeting Strategy You Need to Drive Sales
A retargeting strategy should be customer-focused.
The message you write should cater to the segment you’re writing to.
The platform you choose should be the platform of choice for your customer.
To drive sales, you need a retargeting strategy that takes all this into consideration.
With retargeting, you should always drill down to the details of how you’re going to carry out your retargeting strategy.
In this content-riddled world, you need to direct messages to targeted segments.
With segmentation, you can stand out amidst the noise and clutter on social media.
To make it easy for you, here’s a simple strategy you can follow:
Segment Different Behavior
Tailor your content based on the behavior of the crowd.
Here are some segments you can consider running retargeting tests on:
- Newly identified target market
- Social media followers
- Visitors to your ecommerce site’s homepage
- Visitors to individual product pages
- Visitors who have added items into the cart, but abandoned it
- Recent customers (e.g. those who purchased items between 20-30 days)
- Repeat customers (e.g. those who have not purchased in the past 3 months)
- Email campaign openers/non-openers
Segment Your Channels
Once you know who to address, get specific with where you want to reach these segments.
Let’s say a customer abandoned his or her cart on your ecommerce store.
You don’t have their email address (they haven’t keyed it in), nor do you have any personal details. You do, with proper set-up, have tools like Facebook Pixel to help you reach this person on social media. Facebook then becomes the best place for you to re-engage this person.
Or if you’re trying to retarget to an existing customer.
Why beat around the bush and try to appear on their social media timelines when you can go straight into their email inbox? This makes it more personalized – enticing them to purchase from you even more. Voila – email marketing is your answer.
Set Up Your Tools
Now that you know who you want to target and where to reach them, implement tools to automate your retargeting processes.
Don’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to retargeting tools.
There are top hacks that work best when it comes to retargeting. Start there, become an expert, and watch your sales grow.
Facebook Pixel
The reason why Facebook Pixel is an important retargeting tool is its compatibility with most of the ecommerce big names (Shopify, for example).
All you have to do is set up your Facebook Pixel and track relevant activities according to your segmentation.
Select different tracking events to retarget specific URL visits.
Say you want to target cart abandoners, track specific conversion goals and actions.
In this case, it would be someone who has added an item to their cart but didn’t reach the thank you page. These are the people you want to retarget your ads to. Specific targeting can be done when you’re setting up your ad campaigns later.
Pro tip: Want to know more about the power of Facebook Pixel? Read Jumper’s advanced guide on Facebook ad targeting.
It’s really as easy as that.
Facebook Ads Manager
The good news with Facebook’s Ads Manager is that you can set up and run campaigns for both Facebook and Instagram from one platform.
Create your ad account and setup your preferred payment option and play around the options to get a hang of it before you dive into creating ads.
Did you know? Website visitors who are shown retargeting ads are 70% more likely to convert.
Jumper
Why Jumper?
Because you need a comprehensive tool to help you do more than just track Pixels and run social media ads.
With Jumper, you get an all-in-one dashboard to help you manage your social messaging, networks and even your ecommerce orders.
Talk about streamlining your business processes!
From Jumper’s dashboard, you can address the following:
- Communicate with your social media followers via messenger chatbots
- Offer customers coupon codes to entice them to complete their purchase
- Re-engage existing customers via integrations
- Track orders from social commerce
- … plus more growth tools and integration.
With Jumper’s integrated approach, you can wear one hat instead of piling up many (because who likes wearing many hats on their head!).
Roll Out
Once you have your integrations all set up and ready, you can start rolling out your retargeting strategy.
Run ads that are hyper-focused on your segments
This is where your integrated tools will play an important part – you can create ads that reach out to these different behavior segments.
When setting up an ad, these are the items you’ll have to determine:
- Objective (e.g. traffic, conversion)
- Audience
- Advance targeting (i.e., demographics, interests etc)
- Placements
- Budget
- Schedule
Cart abandoners
The most obvious segment to run ads for is to people who have abandoned their carts recently on your website.
These people have spent enough time on your website, have shown interest, but have left your site without a purchase for various reasons.
You need to get them back.
Run a Facebook advertisement campaign that focuses on enticing them to come back. Choose visitors to your website who have left at the cart page (where Pixels did not reach the thank you page).
Write messages like “did you forget something?”. Or invoke a sense of urgency with something like “here’s a promo code for you if you complete your purchase before a certain date”. Cash in on their FOMO.
If the person who abandoned your cart is a registered member or has made a purchase before, consider sending them an email instead.
Remember – the right channel matters, too. Get granular with your segmentation.
New customers
On the other end of the spectrum, if your business is relatively new and you need to run ads to raise awareness, don’t just stop there.
Reinforce the interest levels of people who have watched your awareness video by running a retargeting ad to this segment.
Choose a custom audience who have already engaged in your video ad, and re-engage them again with a better offer to convert them into buyers. Come up with a strong call to action in your messages to yield a rate of conversion.
Repeat customers
A good ecommerce business will collect the email address of each buyer and should be able to track each customer’s purchasing habits.
If you’ve noticed someone has not purchased anything new from your website, amidst constant marketing of product offerings, new arrivals etc, create an ad that is relevant to this segment.
Wondering how you can target them on Facebook if you don’t know their profiles?
You can actually create a custom audience based on your email list which you can upload into Facebook. Only people with matching Facebook profiles to that email will see this ad.
Choose buyers who have not purchased in over three months, for instance. Send them a “we miss you” type of message with an incentive to get them to repurchase. You can also promote regular content that’s not product-related to influence them to revisit your site, and hopefully make a purchase.
Pro tip: Use Jumper’s chatbot retargeting feature to re-engage potential customers to drive sales
Track what you’re doing right (or not so right)
Analyze, analyze, analyze.
Facebook Ads Manager will be able to demonstrate which ads are working better than the rest. Jumper can help you track your ecommerce conversions via ads, messenger, and other integrated tools.
Use this analysis to optimize future campaigns and messages. Only spend your ad budget on segments and messages you know are converting.
Companies that are successful with ecommerce are quick to acclimatize to insights on their customer’s behaviors. Follow this best practice.
Pro tip: Read Jumper’s comprehensive blog post on how you can set up and run your Instagram ads for your ecommerce site like a boss.
Retargeting for Long-Term Ecommerce Success
When it comes to boosting your ecommerce site or social commerce platforms, you need to speak your customer’s language.
Understand how their decision-making process works and send across the right call to action.
Not everyone who visits your ecommerce site is going to hit that buy button.
But you can reach out to those who have a higher potential of converting and retarget to get them to come back.
Set up the necessary tools you need to do so and constantly tweak your efforts to stay ahead of your competition.
Want to drive sales on your ecommerce site? Start working on your retargeting strategy now.