Picture the scene. You’ve searched for a nice coat or a kitchen appliance you need. Then, over the next few days, you see the same product all over your social feed or in banner ads on various websites. You’ve been retargeted!
Let’s dig into the process and find out how you use it to help drive your sales and conversions.
What are retargeting lists?
Prospects who visit your website or app don’t always do what you want. They’ll often look around, maybe sign up for your newsletter or lead magnet, but they won’t make a purchase or subscription.
While this is frustrating, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s well-established that customers need a few touchpoints before buying something.
Another thing that business owners will be familiar with is users who have bought something in the past but have become inactive. Or accounts that have added some items to a shopping cart but failed to click the buy button.
So, what are you meant to do with this data? You can passively sit on it and hope they change their mind. Or, you can get proactive and build retargeting lists to improve your advertising effectiveness.
Retargeting lists are a collection of names, emails, and other data you collect from customers or prospects. Some of this information is stored on your CRM, while others exist on your email marketing list or your Google, Meta, or Bing accounts.
Why using retargeting lists should be part of your marketing strategy
Retargeting is a marketing tactic designed to get your brand in front of users already familiar with your product or services. It focuses on prospects who have engaged with your company in some way already, such as:
- Bought something previously
- Signed up for your newsletter
- Added items to a shopping cart but abandoned it
- Downloaded your app or a piece of content
- Engaged with your brand on social media
In other words, they’ve expressed an interest already. Compared with marketing to entirely new audiences, these people are more likely to convert because they’ve already shown an attraction to your brand.
Some of the reasons for using retargeting lists include the following:
- Keeping your brand top of mind when prospects are evaluating different solutions
- Prompting users to buy your products
- Nurturing or pushing prospects down the sales funnel
- Re-engaging leads that have gotten away
- Reminding users about products they have put in their shopping carts
Overall, retargeting lists is a way of wringing extra revenue from your business without focusing on brand-new prospects.
How to fill your retargeting lists
Audience data collection has gotten more challenging in recent years. People have become more concerned about privacy in light of controversies involving Big Data firms like Meta and Google.
However, while things like the iOS14 update and Google’s eventual removal of third-party cookies have made data collection more difficult, plenty of users are happy to share their data if it means they get more personalized recommendations.
The importance of first-party data
In light of these changes, collecting first-party data has become a crucial strategy. Thankfully, there are several ways that you can do this. Remember, it’s not just details like your customer’s email address that are valuable; it’s also things like their buying history, interests, preferences, and so on.
Some of the best ways of collecting first-party data include:
- Login in details for your website
- Website contact forms
- App downloads or data
- Interactions with customer service
- Newsletter sign ups
- Social media interactions
- Lead generation campaigns
- Feedback, polls, and surveys
- Online chats
- Webinar and online event attendance
- Web cookies and pixels
How retargeting improves Google, Meta, and Bing ads
When running ads on Google, Meta, and Bing, you can target fresh audiences that haven’t engaged with your product before. These ads are excellent ways to take advantage of search terms or raise awareness about your brand. However, for a more robust marketing strategy, you need to think about retargeting for a more succesful marketing strategy.
Here are some of the benefits of retargeting ads
- Better ROI: Showing ads to customers who are already interested in your brand increases your advertising effectiveness compared to fresh users.
- Higher CTR: Similarly, you can exp click-through rates (CTRs) from users who are already familiar with your brand
- Lower CPC: Remarketing ads can improve your Quality Score and ad relevance, which can contribute to lower CPC during ad auctions.
- Increased CLTV: By re-engaging existing customers, you can increase the customer lifetime value (CLTV) and claw back some of the money you’ve spent on customer acquisition costs.
- Greater personalization: Retargeting lists allow for segmentation based on behavior, interests, and actions. You can leverage this data to serve more personalized, relevant ads or offers.
Remarketing list tips
Using remarketing lists has lots of benefits. However, to get the most from this marketing strategy, you must follow a few best practices.
Always have an objective: Any marketing strategy needs a goal. So, before you start using your remarketing list, think about what you want to achieve.
Do you want to target users who have abandoned shopping carts? Do you want to target newsletter subscribers who haven’t bought anything? Maybe you want to win back customers who haven’t purchased in a while.
Cap ad frequency: Ad platforms allow you to cap the daily, weekly, or monthly limits for ad impressions shown to your remarketing list. Setting these limits is important because you don’t want to harass your prospects and turn them off your brand.
If an ad hasn’t worked the first few times, it’s probably not going to convert the fifth or sixth time. You can spend that ad money in better places.
Segment your list: As we mentioned above, segmenting your list by ad campaign objective is critical. However, you can also use age, demographic, or interest data to serve more relevant campaigns. So dig down and make your data collection work for you.
Final thoughts
Retargeting lists are a great way to boost your advertising effectiveness. By focusing on users who have already engaged with your brand, you can increase ROAS with better click-through rates and lower cost-per-click numbers.
Data collection is an essential part of this marketing strategy. When you feed platforms like Google, Meta, or Bing customer data from your email list or CRM, you can target these users across various ad placements. The result is more relevant, personalized ads with a higher chance of conversion.
