5 Unique Ways Marketers Can Retarget Their Audience

This is a guest post by Rebecca Keyes, Marketing Manager for AimTell.

Is there anything more frustrating than getting people to come to your website, only to have them leave without converting? While there will always be visitors who come and go without making a purchase, the reality is that these users have shown an initial interest in your brand. And for that reason, they are valuable to you. Instead of risking these individuals never returning, marketers frequently retarget them in an effort to bring them back. You’ve likely been retargeted in your days of browsing the internet. One day you’re looking at a cool new cell phone case, and the next day that same case pops up in an ad you see while browsing a different website (for example).

Retargeting, sometimes called remarketing, is an incredibly useful tool that all brands should be utilizing in an effort to get their audience re-engaged with their brand. Thankfully, there are plenty of platforms and strategies that you can get started with right away. If you want to get started with retargeting but aren’t sure how to do so or where to focus your efforts, keep reading to see our 5 favorite retargeting techniques. Learn what these techniques are, as well as why we like them and how they can help your brand.

5. Google Adwords

Google Adwords is used by a lot of people, and for good reason. Google is a huge search engine that you likely receive a lot of traffic from. You may already be using Google Adwords, and if so, it will be easy for you to set up a retargeting campaign. With Adwords, you can create ads targeted at different groups of people based on their various actions, such as those who have visited your website, downloaded your app, or have subscribed to your emails.

4. Social Media

Next up, retargeting via social media is just as the name suggests: ads are presented on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Typically, these ads are highly personalized. For example, it is common to see ads highlighting products or places a user has looked at previously (like our cell phone case example from before).

In this example, you are seeing a retargeted ad on Facebook. By mentioning the location, even down to the specific hotel this user was viewing, you can easily see how personalized this ad is. Users expect ads they see today to be relevant to them, and part of what makes retargeted ads so great is that by nature they tend to be highly personalized and relevant, giving them an automatic leg up over other types of advertising.

Additionally, taking into consideration how popular social media is (2016 saw nearly 1.8 billion monthly active users on Facebook for example), this technique tends to also be very popular, and for good reason. You may decide one platform works better for you than others, keeping in mind things like your particular industry and the demographics and social media behaviors of your target audience.

3. Videos

image source: marketingland.com

How much time do you think you’ve spent in your life looking at YouTube videos? Probably a lot, right? You aren’t alone. In fact, there are an average 1 billion YouTube video views accumulated every day just on mobile devices. It makes sense then that we would include video retargeting on this list. These types of ads come in various forms; either videos that play before selected YouTube videos (like in the above example), banner ads that pop up at the bottom of videos, or display ads which are seen next to videos.

Are these types of ads good for everyone? Not necessarily. These ads will be much for successful with brands that typically utilize or produce video content. Plenty of research is out there on the effectiveness of video. In fact, 90% of people find videos to be helpful when making a decision about a product. If your brand is capable of producing top notch visual content, put it to good use in the form of video retargeting.

2. Email

Email still remains an effective marketing platform, and for that reason it should be considered when thinking about places to retarget users. In this case, a user visits your website but ultimately abandons your site having not converted, and is then retargeted in the form of an email that is sent to them. If you already have a lot of success with your email campaigns, you should definitely consider email retargeting.

image source: crazyegg.com

For example, you may wish to retarget individuals who have purchased items on your site before but have not recently returned, or have left items in their cart. Including a special offer will only further entice the user to come back to your website.

If you aren’t quite as convinced, research was conducted to see just how effective this type of retargeting was. The results were positive- the average open rate of these emails was 60% and the CTR was 15%. Not bad at all.

1. Web Push Notifications

image source: aimtell.com

Last but not least, one of the best new ways to retarget visitors to your site is via web push notifications. While push notifications for mobile apps have been around for the better part of a decade, website push notifications only became available in the past year or two and are still a relatively new concept to most.

It’s simple. A user opts in to your notifications with one click, and then you can begin retargeting based on a large variety of factors. No need to capture emails. No obtrusive forms. Just one click and you now have permission to market to that individual.

Did a subscriber view your site but never return? Abandon their shopping cart but never interact again with your website? You can send targeted web push notifications based on all of these actions, and more.

Web push notifications differ from typical retargeting methods because they are not ads presented on websites or social platforms, but instead are messages from your brand that are delivered instantly to your audience on their desktop or mobile devices. As a result these notifications are not only dramatically more effective than other retargeting methods, but also one of the most affordable.

To learn more about website push notifications for your Shopify store, visit aimtell.com