E-commerce is all about selling online - whether your first interaction with the customer is through digital marketing or direct engagement. Typically, customers who leverage e-commerce businesses and who complete online purchases are looking for the convenience of shopping from home, and the ease with which they can research and compare different brands and prices across the market.

In this blog post, we’re looking specifically at those customers who have considered and shown an interest in your products, but who have not yet completed a purchase. In this case, retargeting becomes the order of the day, through campaigns, ads, and other strategies.

Understanding Retargeting

Retargeting is a specific form of advertising which is designed for those users who are already familiar with your brand, website, or products.

It uses data to track when a customer has visited a site and look at what they were interested in, which webpages they spent time on, and what they searched for. This empowers a business or brand to create retargeting techniques to deliver specific adverts to that users device in places they spend time online - think social media ads and paid ads on popular websites.

If retargeting is successful, that prospective customer will re-engage and will convert to complete a purchase.

Let’s take a closer look at how it works…

Setting up a Retargeting Campaign

Retargeting campaigns use data from cookies, pixel tracking, and other technologies which are integrated into our online browsing experience.

Every website that asks you to accept cookie data is essentially asking for permission to track your online activity for the sake of future retargeting. This data is then used to inform Google Ads, Facebook retargeting ads, the paid ads you see on Instagram, and even adverts on videos and news pages.

As a business, the main thing you need to focus on is installing and configuring the tracking pixels to your e-commerce site. You can then use the data to segment your audience based on what they buy and how they interact with your site - determining which products you can try to upsell to them and how you can re-engage them with new launches and upgrades.

Once you know who you are targeting and what you want to target them with, it’s time to create the ad.

Crafting Compelling Retargeting Ads

A compelling retargeting ad is different from a standard ad. It assumes that the reader knows a bit about the brand or product, and so removes the need for introductions. Instead, the purpose of a retargeting ad is to capture attention and remind the consumer about why they were interested in the brand or product in the first place.

These ads need to be persuasive, with some of the best examples combining the benefits of a product or service with some light humour and entertaining language. Incentives can also work really well in retargeting ads, including free shipping and discounts - think all of the incentives you would offer in an abandoned basket email, but on a bigger scale.

Best Practices for Audience Segmentation

Earlier in this post we touched on audience segmentation as an important step in building and designing a retargeting campaign. This is because, while all those receiving a retargeting ad have a common interest - your brand - they will all come to you from different backgrounds, needs, and motivations.

Some will have got as far as adding your product to their basket and just need a small push in the right direction, while others will be past customers who have dropped off the radar, and others still showed an interest and had a browse but never really committed to a purchase.

Segmenting this audience means that each group receives an ad tailored to their experience - with the hope being that this will make the ad feel relevant.

Optimising Retargeting Strategies

As with any marketing campaign, the best way to optimise these ads is to proceed with a flexible attitude. That is, A/B test different messages and ideas, personalise offers when you can, and be careful not to come across too “salesy” or too persistent.

Some of the most effective retargeting is dynamic and responds to what the user is doing online, making these ads relevant to their experience and what they are doing. Which is where collaborative retargeting comes in.

Integrating Retargeting with Other Marketing Efforts

Retargeting is just one branch of your brand or business marketing and should be combined with other approaches to ensure that you are meeting the widest possible audience on a regular basis.

What that means is that while retargeting is important, engaging new and existing customers should not be overlooked - with email marketing, social media, and SEO / content marketing all bridging the different audience groups and ensuring that you offer value to all consumers. By bringing visitors to a website by these marketing efforts, they can then be successfully retargeted with specific ad campaigns in the future.

Measuring Retargeting Success

KPIs are a big deal in the world of e-commerce. They let businesses know how well different strategies are performing and allow for monitoring of all the different marketing channels and platforms.

To look specifically at retargeting, it’s worth measuring conversion and sales as well as click-through rates (CTR), the cost per new or retargeted acquisition, and the overall return on investment for each sale. This will let you know not only the success rate of the campaign, but how much it has cost you to achieve that sale and what the percentage of profit is.

Ethical Considerations and Privacy

Finally, to the challenges and things you need to address when dealing with retargeting campaigns. When we talk about ethical considerations and the importance of privacy, it’s important to focus on GDPR and how you collect and store data, as well as delivering lots of information and warning to consumers about how you will use any data on them that you collect.

You also need to make sure that you give them an opportunity to opt-out of communication and tracking if they want to - or else risk fines and penalisation.

Here at Social Loop, we understand the complexities of data protection and retargeting - and are well versed in helping our clients ensure that they are doing everything right. For more information, get in touch with our team today.