Our Guide to Ecommerce Remarketing

03/05/2021 | Share:

If you run an ecommerce site, taking every opportunity to get your products out in front of prospective buyers is critical. Your marketing activities to help achieve this might include building a following on social media, producing content for your website or using platforms such as Facebook Ads to reach certain demographics.

But what about remarketing?

Many ecommerce entrepreneurs ignore this approach even though it’s proven to deliver results and more conversions than many other marketing methods. It’s also become a lot more sophisticated over the last few years. 

Here we take a close look at remarketing and how introducing it into your marketing mix can make a big difference to that all-important bottom line.

What is remarketing?

If you’ve ever searched for a product or service and then found numerous ads for that same item on your social media feeds, you’ve been remarketed to. Amazon and other large online stores are prime examples but smaller, niche ecommerce sites can also benefit.

Let’s say someone visits your website, browses particular products and then leaves without purchasing anything. You know that they are interested in X or Y so you follow them up using a targeted ad that might just encourage them to revisit your site and press the buy button.

According to SmartInsights, for every 100 people who visit an ecommerce site, only between 1 and 3% convert and buy something. That means the vast majority are visiting, browsing and then leaving.

Remarketing allows you to go back to these users with a more targeted and relevant marketing message. A good retargeting marketing ad is about ten times more likely to lead to a conversion than a generic ad.

That’s because you’re able to talk directly to the needs of your potential customer rather than guessing what they want.

How does remarketing work?

Most of us have visited a new website and found a pop-up message telling us about cookies. If you’re like everyone else, you click you’re okay with the idea and head into the main site without giving it much thought.

What this does is allow the website to track what you view on their site and to use that data to make ad targeting decisions.

Let’s say your potential customer lands on a product page. They have a good look and then they decide to go elsewhere. There are all sorts of reasons why people don’t buy on their first visit. They could be waiting for their salary to be paid into their account, maybe they’re busy with something else and not quite ready to buy or they’re simply doing more research and looking for the best deal.

If they’ve allowed cookies, you can track where on your site they go and find out what they are interested in. The cookie doesn’t store any personal information such as name or address but does tell your ad partner, for example, Google or Facebook, that this person has visited a certain page and is looking at certain products.

Advantages of remarketing

It’s much easier to market to a warm prospect rather than a cold one. If you know that a person has shown interest in a particular product, you can tailor your ads so that they hopefully nudge your prospect a little further down the sales funnel.

Remarketing raises brand awareness. Appearing in ads on sites like Facebook gives you more visibility and even creates a certain kudos in the eyes of potential customers. Of course, the major benefit of remarketing is that it increases conversions.

Ad marketing can be an expensive and time-consuming business. Creating a good mix, developing the appropriate messages and targeting the right audience takes time and effort.

If you have a warm prospect, it’s important not to waste that opportunity.

Where to use remarketing

The good news is that there are a lot more opportunities for remarketing nowadays and it’s much less complicated. You can get your messages in front of potential customers relatively easily. The big challenge is developing a collection of ads that presses the right buttons and gets your prospect returning to your site to buy.

You could, for example, create video ads that appear on channels like YouTube. You may want to ensure your marketing message comes up when that potential customer does another search on Google. Display ads appear on many web pages nowadays and then there’s social media advertising with platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.

The key to success with remarketing is ensuring that you tailor your ad messaging to the individual. One of the buzzwords in marketing today is dynamic advertising which is all about creating greater personalisation. If you can achieve this with your remarketing, it should certainly boost conversions and give you a head start over the competition. It will also ensure you make the most of your advertising budget.