5 top remarketing tips to attract repeat purchases

The digital landscape has changed a lot in recent years, reshaping the way ecommerce businesses interact with customers. Changing browsing behaviours and rising consumer expectations have diluted brand loyalty, in line with a huge increase in competition. As a result, ecommerce brands must work harder to create engaging customer experiences, smooth user journeys and intricate behaviour-based marketing. A key area of focus is remarketing. This is the process of nurturing and retargeting visitors and customers to increase conversions. Space 48 Head of Insight Oliver Lees offers his top 5 remarketing tips and recommendations to drive repeat purchases:

When is the best time to retarget visitors and customers?

Almost immediately. It depends on user actions and customer journey stage, but when it comes to keeping browsers in buying mode and swiftly retargeting visitors with ads, both cart and browse abandonment campaigns are key – you don’t want to let them go to competitors selling similar products.

Consumers visiting your site are looking for products to buy and there are lots of different reasons for them to leave your site without converting. Cart abandonment email campaigns should be actioned within the first hour and include a series of emails at different time intervals.

Frequency and volume of campaigns depends on your business type and the length of your buying journey, with fast-fashion brands at the shorter end of the scale and kitchen and bathroom brands at the other end. For example, industries with a longer and more complicated decision-making process may need to nurture customers anywhere between 30-180 days.

Tips and recommendation for paid social retargeting ads

When remarketing to visitors and customers via paid social, it’s crucial to get into their social space, across relevant channels and devices. Omnichannel retailers in the fashion industry are having huge success with retargeting ads.

The key is rich data. The more intricate the targeting, the more conversions and repeat sales you’ll achieve. Speculative ads are old news. Brands need to up the relevance of their paid social ads and use customer data and insights, including behavioural triggers, to deliver dynamic and tailored retargeting ads.

Facebook is a highly effective paid social channel for remarketing, and the Facebook Pixel is a feature which improves tracking to increase the impact of retargeting ad campaigns. Get our how-to guide to installing and using the Facebook Pixel.

Remarketing via other channels

The most successful omnichannel retailers and ecommerce businesses utilise 6-7 key touch points to connect with their customers. In order to keep your brand front of mind for consumers, an interconnected multichannel strategy is what attracts repeat sales. Retarget customers on a range of different channels, such as Adwords, Bing Ads, and Criteo.

Criteo is a dedicated retargeting solution, which delivers effective tailored online ads to visitors of your ecommerce website, across a wide range of high-profile third-party sites.

With paid search, be innovative with your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) bidding, adjusting bids for visitors going back to Google to get yourself positioned higher in SERPs.

Email marketing is still a very effective channel for remarketing, boasting large ROI and high conversion rates from browse and basket abandonment campaigns. Developing a strategic series of automated, targeted emails for visitors and customers will bring you rewards.

Top retargeting tactics and emerging trends

The most prominent trend in ecommerce, in terms of remarketing, is the adoption of more granularity with data used for retargeting ads and remarketing campaigns. Successful ecommerce businesses are using the following tactics:

• Delivering automated cart abandonment and browse abandonment campaigns
• Targeting listed customers as soon as they log in
• Segmenting customer groups
• Breaking down user behaviours and visits by category, brands, products, etc

Why such intricate retargeting? Well, as we mentioned earlier, consumers are less brand loyalty, there are more competitors than ever for online businesses and SMEs are having greater success by challenging established brands on price.

How are they achieving this? There’s just better technology, AI solutions and analytics platforms available to retailers and marketers now, meaning richer data and better targeting. What’s the catch? The looming spectre of GDPR! Don’t worry though, it’s still a grey area and we can ease some of your fears with our blog ‘GDPR for ecommerce: opportunity or pain in the £$$?’.

Recommendation for frequency, volume and budget management

Across channels, the key is to strike a balance between engaging with customers with relevant content whilst they’re in buying mode and avoiding bombarding consumers with excessive remarketing. Don’t overdo it. With AdWords, for example, you ideally don’t want to show over 3-5 impressions per customer, per day.

With your retargeting budget, you shouldn’t really have a cap, as your budget is essentially tied to the number of visitors and customers. This is different to your acquisition budget, as your remarketing audience will be much smaller.

Summary

We hope our remarketing tips and recommendations have been useful and inspired you to improve and increase the level of your retargeting activities. The key is to make the most of your budget and ensure your retargeting campaigns are relevant, integrated, granular and automated.

Are you in the process of planning your ecommerce strategies for 2018? Grab our handy Guide to Creating an Ecommerce Roadmap and get our step-by-step approach to creating an effective roadmap for the year ahead. Download the free guide now and get on the path to success!