A Step-by-Step Guide for Launching a Remarketing Campaign

As a new business, starting your first marketing campaign can be quite a challenge. Figuring out your target market and determining the best way to draw them in takes a lot of trial and error. Once you’ve finally cracked the code, you’re still not quite finished. Once you turn consumers into paying customers, it’s time to upgrade them to loyal customer status.

While this will happen naturally, to some extent, competition in most markets is fierce. That means you’ll need to do some convincing in order to get your past shoppers to come back to you for more, instead of switching to a rival’s products or services.

This is where a remarketing campaign will come into play. These strategies specifically target people who have already bought from you, making them more likely to return. If you think it’s time for your company to pursue this tactic, this guide on how to launch a remarketing campaign is just for you.

Figure Out Who Your Customers Are

The first step of any remarketing campaign is to determine who has bought from you in the past. If you try to remarket to someone who’s never been a customer of yours, it won’t be nearly as effective. Fortunately, there are two tried-and-true ways to do this.

Tag High-Value Pages

A common method for determining who your paying customers are is to tag the high-value sections of your website, such as shopping carts and sale confirmation pages. Knowing which type of customer completed a sale and which pages trip people up is crucial. Constantly monitoring these pages takes a lot of effort, which is why many companies try to implement the next method.

Create an Account Program

Customer account programs make data collection and management much easier. You will have more detailed stats on who these consumers are, how often they buy from you, and what their favorite products are. You can do a lot with this information.

The only trouble is convincing people to sign up. You can give them perks such as faster checkout and discounts, but you’ll never be able to get all your customers to create an account, so you’ll always need to use this method in tandem with the first one.

Pick a Strategy

Once you have your list of customers to remarket to, it’s time to pick a strategy. You can do as many of these as you want, but it’s never a bad idea to start small and expand your campaign as you go.

Targeted Ads

Online ads are a great way to grab a potential customer’s attention; however, targeted ads are even more effective because your current and former customers already know who you are and like your products. While browsing online, a former customer might see an ad for you that may rekindle their interest. Maybe you have a new product they might like, or you’re holding a site-wide sale they might want to take advantage of.

You can even make these ads more specific by keeping track of their purchases on your site. You can create an ad that reminds them of a product they haven’t bought from you in a while or even one they looked at in the past and didn’t purchase. Your options are endless.

The only trouble is customers have caught on to this method and actively work against it. By using ad blockers or saying no to certain cookies on your site, customers have been ruining the effectiveness of this strategy. Despite that, it’s still quite effective and worth trying.

Email Reminders

Email advertisements are king when it comes to remarketing strategies. They can use many of the same strategies as targeted ads but on a much more personal level. In general, people are more likely to look at an email than a banner ad. While they can always unsubscribe, they’ll be less likely to do so if you give them a reason not to.

Send your followers newsletters telling them about upcoming sales and discounts, as well as exclusive details about new products. Additionally, you can give them personalized discount codes for products you’ll know they’ll buy.

Social Media Prompts

More often than not, your social media followers will contain people who are already your customers. That means this is a prime place to advertise to them. If you haven’t already created a social presence for your brand, you’ll need to know how to choose the right platform for your business. However, these strategies should work no matter which platform you choose.

Once you have a following, you can start making posts that will convince your customers to either get more involved with your brand or buy more of your products. Social media is always a great place to introduce new products, but since it makes having direct conversations with customers much easier, you focus more on that aspect. Asking your followers for feedback and responding to questions and criticisms is a great way to turn an average user into an avid follower.

Also, you can run contests and promotions through your socials. A good way to get past customers excited about your products is to tell them to post photos, videos, or drawings that involve your products in some way, and the most upvoted post will receive a prize. You can also give out exclusive discount codes to those who follow you. Anything to keep them involved will help build a sense of loyalty.

Loyalty Programs

Speaking of loyalty, the mother of all remarketing strategies is the loyalty program. Customer accounts are one thing, but if you set up a loyalty program that gives customers benefits based on how often they shop with you, they will keep returning to reap those rewards.

The real struggle of these programs is finding a balance between giving loyal customers valuable perks without making them too good. If that happens, you could end up losing money when your top shoppers continue to buy from you.

Determine the Perfect Timing Window

Regardless of which strategies you choose, the key is finding the right time to implement them. If you remarket too soon, you could annoy the customer and force them to ignore all future advertorial attempts. If you do it too late, they might have already moved on to someone else. Unfortunately, there’s no exact formula for the timing here. You’ll need to guess and check to determine what works best for your company and customers.

Don’t Forget About Retargeting

Throughout this guide for launching a remarketing campaign, we’ve focused primarily on consumers who have already completed a purchase with you. However, remarketing also includes interested parties who haven’t fully made the conversion to customers just yet. This section of the strategy is known as retargeting.

You can use most of the previously mentioned strategies for retargeting as well. Since people who have never bought from you before aren’t likely to sign up for an account or loyalty program, you’ll need to focus more on tracking them through tagged pages and targeting them through ads.

Regardless of the strategies you take, you should never skip this step. In most cases, over 90% of visitors to your website won’t make a purchase. That means retargeting them could bring in a huge influx of new customers you can then use your other remarketing techniques on. Obviously, retargeting doesn’t guarantee sales, but it will increase them to some extent.

Monitor Your Campaign

The last step of your remarketing campaign is the same as the final step in any other marketing campaign you run: monitor your results. Consumers are constantly changing, which means a strategy that pulled in large numbers a month ago might not do anything for you today.

Marketing is a constant battle for dominance, especially when you consider the fact that your competitors are likely using all these strategies as well. That means if you don’t monitor your results and innovate accordingly, you will get left in the dust.