Retargeting has been around for a while now. Quite a while in fact… enough to know that it can both win and lose you, customers. It is essential to check back with your target audience, to remind them of your campaign. But retargeting without having the right audience, or making it so impersonal that it will look like “just another marketing spam” will yield less than satisfactory results. Thus, you need to look beyond the brute force approach in retargeting. Now it is time for smart retargeting, the future for retail market!
The smart entails having the right audience to retarget, using the right channels together, and making the call more engaging. Let’s have a look at how we can achieve these.
Don’t just spam anyone and everyone, pick the right audience
It is easy to retarget anyone and everyone who has ever been in your marketing audiences. It may or may not work for every one of them. But hopefully, some of them will be interested, right?
While that is true, this approach also leads to increased marketing costs, as well as the risk of being seen spammy by the people you retarget.
A smarter approach will be to pick those who are actually interested in the campaign but didn’t go ahead with it yet.
This may be chosen from the people who had visited the landing page(s) you have for the campaign and chose to subscribe to your updates. Other examples of good retargeting audiences can be:
- People who have registered an account on your campaign’s site, but haven’t started using it.
- Customers who filled a shopping cart but abandoned it.
- People who were interested in similar campaigns/products before.
- Finally, people who are using or have used competitors.
This way, you will be able to target people who actually are likely to be interested in what you have to say them. The conversion rates of your retargeting efforts will be much higher this way.
Another side to choosing the right audience for retargeting is that just going shotgun on choosing people to retarget can, and often does result in some damage on the brand identity. Let’s be honest, none of us enjoy it when it is like “oh, great, another random marketing message pestering me for something I am not too interested in”.
There are lots of communication channels, utilize the right ones at the right times
Today, there are many digital channels to reach an audience. Each of them has different advantages and disadvantages. Which one leads to the future for the retail market though? Well, all of them, but only in the right context for each!
If you can harmoniously combine your audience research efforts with targeting these channels, you are going to be more likely to reap the rewards for your work.
Today, some of the marketing automation platforms can either be integrated with others or just outright include all the steps of your remarketing journey in their toolkit. Make sure you are using one of those. If, however, you want to facilitate this coordination manually, make sure you do your work very thoroughly so things will not get “lost in translation”. Also, know that you will spend lots of effort, time, and hence money in getting this right.
SMS messages, emails, app push notifications, web push notifications all have their specific pros/cons. App push notifications, for example, have some of the highest engagement and conversion rates, but they require an app to be installed on the targeted users’ device beforehand. Web push notifications, however, does not have this requirement and can work even on desktop/laptop computers.
Finally, no need to feel like all your retargeting needs to be through digital channels. You can use offline, physical media too. Let’s say that your audience frequents a certain venue. Why not print some stickers with QR codes of your campaign, along with an attractive offer on them?
Make your retargeting content engaging, make the user feel special
Something to the effect of “pssst! Why haven’t you still bought this cool thing yet?! You know you want it!” may not necessarily be the best way to go.
We are, after all, end-users too, be honest and ask yourself, what do you usually do with those?
It tends to go like:
“Mmmh… yeah, right…” (clicks delete).
We really need to put the smart in smart retargeting. Do a bit of due diligence and find out a few reasons why the users who were on the line decided not to go past it. Construct your messages with that information. Play on what they liked, reassure them against what they may not have liked.
Having composed a single message to fit-all is too old-school. Make sure that you at least have a few that are crafted for each persona.
If you can get the user feel like they are addressed in person, rather than as a part of a mailing list, your chances of persuading them will be much, much higher.
Make sure the message is engaging, and persuade them that you are selling a solution or something that they desire, and not just trying to move more copies out of your stock, and more dollars out of their pockets.
Use the right tools to get your retargeting smarter
First, you need the information to get your retargeting to be smarter. And by information, we mean lots of it.
Know the audience, know who was interested, who were on the verge of becoming a customer, what did they like, what they didn’t, where are they, what are they using?
Schedule your retargeting for the right time, automate your process based on events, use app push notifications where appropriate, web push notifications where available, etc.
Obviously, the best option is to have a solution that has all these integrated on a single platform.
A couple of other things to look for in the platform are:
- The ability to compose short & to the point, but still engaging marketing content. Especially the shorter message media like SMS and push notifications fit the bill here. The best way to use these would include emojis etc. to make them more relatable and engaging, and also use shortened links to lead users to where the action will take place.
- Also being able to host a page with much more rich content. Text as long as you need, images, animations, videos, etc. You can lead retargeted users here to give them the final push they may need to be convinced. The page may also attract new people on its own with SEO.
Appgain to the rescue! We offer what you need for smart retargeting, and to pave the way to the future for retail market enterprises
Appgain is one of the few solutions that offer all of the above features in a single package, and still with affordable prices.
Our platform gets you valuable attribution and analytics data to form the right audience for retargeting. On top of that, we offer rich push notifications, mobile landing pages, web push notifications, emails, SMS, high quality and engaging social media sharing of content, and creation of QR codes linking to these features so that you can join your offline and online marketing together.
Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.
