Retargeting Best Practices: Turning Lost Leads into Customers

Don’t you hate it when a significant portion of your potential customers visit your website or app but leave without taking the desired action(s)? In today’s competitive market, where consumers have numerous options, most businesses struggle to convert leads into paying customers. This is where retargeting can turn things around in your favor.

For businesses, conversions are the most crucial metric to understand how a marketing campaign is performing. If a massive number of users are showing interest in your offerings but aren’t converting, you need to think of ways to win back those lost leads. A well-planned retargeting strategy can remind those users of your brand and encourage them to return and complete the action.

You always have the option to hire a professional digital marketing company to set up a retargeting campaign for your brand. But before investing in a retargeting campaign, it is important to have more clarity about the process of retargeting and the best practices.

What Is Retargeting in Digital Marketing?

Retargeting is an effective online advertising strategy that aims to reach out to individuals who have previously visited your website or app but did not take any valuable action. Businesses and organizations often retarget their potential leads or customers by displaying well-designed ads or sending emails. The goal is to re-engage the sale.

With retargeting, businesses try to create touchpoints to remind prospects of their brand, products, or services the prospects were once interested in. The approach involves the use of cookies to display relevant ads to users as they continue browsing. The constant exposure to retargeted ads increases the chances of conversion.

Tips to Improve your Retargeting Campaign

With the right strategy and proper execution, a retargeting campaign can re-engage customers previously interested in your brand and gently nudge them toward conversion. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices that can encourage past visitors to return to your website or app and complete the desired action.

Divide Your Audience into Specific Groups

Segmenting your audience into specific groups based on different criteria is essential for a successful ad retargeting campaign. This audience segmentation will allow you to personalize your ads to meet the specific interests and needs of every group. The tailored messaging improves your chances of engagement and conversion. Some of the most common audience segmentations are:

• Demographic Segmentation: This segmentation is based on criteria such as gender, age, academic qualification, and annual income to target certain groups.

• Geographic Segmentation: This segmentation targets individuals based on their location. Local businesses or campaigns that focus on regional offers can benefit from this segmentation.

• Behavioral Segmentation: Before performing this segmentation, brands need to analyze user behavior on their website. It can be based on criteria such as the time spent on the site, previous purchases, and pages visited.

• Psychological Segmentation: While creating this segmentation, brands need to focus on criteria like users’ interests, attitudes, values, and lifestyles.

Such audience segmentation makes it easier for brands to create highly targeted ads.

Limit the Number of Retargeted Ads

While the goal of a retargeting campaign is to remind users of your brand, products, or services, you do not want to come off as a stalker. It is always better to use a limited number of retargeted ads for the users. About 20 per month is a good number to target. If you try to advertise your brand more times than that, it may appear intrusive to most people.

While a higher number of ads can have adverse effects on users, having fewer ads may fail to make an impact on the users. Most users need to see an ad on repeated occasions before they decide to click on the website (or app) link. If you are planning to show only one ad per month, the users won’t be coming back to complete the desired action on your site or app.

Develop Unique Ads for Different Users

Not every user discovers your brand, product, or service in the same way as the others. While some visit the homepage to learn about your offerings, some land on a specific web page designed for a particular product. So, while you create ad content for your retargeting campaign, aim to have multiple ads to target different potential customers.

The ads targeting users who have left a landing page should highlight crucial information about that particular page. If they have previously shown interest in a certain product, you have better odds of converting the users by showing such product-related ads. On the other hand, if a person has left the homepage, you should retarget them using ads that offer a more general idea about your offerings.

As you may realize, developing your retargeting ads based on different customers increases the chances of conversion for your brand.

Leave out the Users Who Have Already Converted

While developing a strategy for your retargeting campaign, remember to exclude audiences who have already converted into customers. This will ensure that your efforts are directed towards connecting with users who are yet to take the desired action. This action also helps you reduce the expenses associated with media costs as you direct the efforts towards the audience who are yet to convert.

If your existing customers see retargeting ads, it may not cause any major harm. But since they have already converted, it does not make any sense showing them ads that talk about taking an action they have previously taken. By leaving out the converted users, you can offer more personalized messages for precise targeting.

Use Dynamic Retargeting

If you run an e-commerce business, you will benefit from dynamic retargeting. This method automatically displays ads that feature services or products users have already shown interest in. These ads pull data from your product catalog. They can also highlight products left in a shopping cart, items viewed previously, or related products or services. This type of ad ensures that the retargeting ads are highly relevant to each individual, boosting the chances of engagement and conversion.

If the users have browsed certain products on your site in the past but did not buy them, dynamic retargeting shows them those exact products in the ads. You may also create tailored offers or discounts for products they have already viewed to compel them to return to the website and buy those products. Dynamic retargeting also gives you the opportunity to promote products relevant to the items the users have already checked out.

Parting Thoughts

Retargeting gives you a second opportunity to convert potential customers who have already shown interest in your offerings. While retargeting strategies often overlap with your existing marketing strategies, you need a different approach while retargeting ads to users.

The tips mentioned above can be effective in driving engagement and conversions for your brand. However, you need to continuously review your campaign performance and fine-tune your strategies to stay ahead of the competition.