The Extensive Guide to successful Online Remarketing: Part 3

We’ve delved into the importance and mechanics of a remarketing strategy in our previous sections of this extensive guide, part one and part two, and now it’s time to look at how we can enhance the foundations of our remarketing strategy. The new sections are:

7. Email Remarketing
8. Social Media Remarketing (Twitter & Facebook)
9. Creating Killer Remarketing Ads
10. Dynamic Remarketing Ads

7. Email Remarketing Strategy

Remarketing is not limited to PPC. An email remarketing strategy can increase the lifetime value of your customers by increasing sales, increasing the amount a person spends, and increasing the time they stick with your brand.

Having email addresses to use for your strategy is the essential first step. One of the best ways to obtain potential customer’s email addresses is by offering them something for their submission. Many eCommerce sites will give email subscribers a discount code for their sign-up.

Gap offers 40% off to those that sign up:

If you’re more on the services side, a periodical e-newsletter is a great way of offering value for email submissions. Create informational, exclusive content that is worth submitting an email address for.

Cater to Different Types of Customers

Everyone is a unique butterfly–so why would you send everyone the same generic remarketing email? Segment your customers. Segmenting customers can help you understand which customers are the most valuable and what it takes to keep them coming back.

The advantages of segmentation are covered in an article from Internet Retailer, the women’s fashion brand Intermix increased its conversion rates from below 1% to 8% by using personalized emails based on customer profiles.

The first step for segmenting your customers is the consideration of how you obtained your customer’s email addresses.

Was it from a newsletter sign-up? These people are interested in your brand and your voice, send them emails that keep them up to date. Emphasize their value; offer them discounts, opportunities, and information before the rest of your customers.

Was it a customer support inquiry? Send these people emails promising you will do better next time, throw in a small discount for good will. Let them know that their issues matter.

Was it a past purchase? Show them items that you might like. Take advantage of social validation and show them what other customers have shopped for after making similar purchases.

Catering to your customers’ personas is a great way of extending their Lifetime Value.

These segmentations are just the beginning. We recommend looking at statistics such as past purchase frequency, past purchase values, which acquisition channel customers came from, location, and demographical information. Use these statistics to build out criteria for your different groups of customers (similar to audience lists). Test out what kinds of emails work best with which groups and optimize your profits.

Use Product Lifecycles

In the great circle of life, products live and they die. You can be there to console with your grieving customers when your products run their course. And what would be better than to remind your customer that life starts again, that they can purchase again and redraw the great circle?

Warby Parker does a terrific job of recognizing its product’s life cycles as well as making their customers feel cared for in this remarketing email:

Ask Your Customers to Stay Longer

If you offer a subscription based service or enter into contracts, create emails that ask your customers to stick around for longer. You can entice them into doing so by offering them some sort of discount on rates, additional free periods, and/or exclusive services.

Rand Fishkin created a blog post after being wowed by a remarketing email from WP engine that asked him to switch to annual billing.

A simple switch from monthly to annual billing could lengthen the lifetime of your customers.

Show Your Customers How Valuable You Are

Keep your customers around for longer by illuminating what you are doing for them. Remarket the value of your services by showing them real, personalized results in periodical emails. It’s like monthly reporting to your higher ups, except much more friendly.

Look at this example from fitbit:

Re-affirming what you give your customer is a great way of lengthening their lifetime value.

Make Your Customers Feel Good About Themselves

What’s better than a compliment out of the blue? Letting your customers know that they’re awesome can never hurt. Throw your customers compliments and they might recognize that there are humans behind the brand your emails represent.

Modcloth taps right into its customers’ tastes by appreciating their style choices and offering them a chance to find pieces that’ll add to it.

The greatest advantage of email remarketing is the control it gives you. You decide who the emails are sent to, you decide what goes into the email, and you even get to decide on what your signature looks like.

8. Social Media Remarketing Strategy

There’s PPC on those social media sites the kids are using too, so you know what that means–there’s more remarketing strategy to take advantage of!

A great benefit of remarketing on social media is the social proofing that your ads can create. By remarketing to customers who have purchased from you before you can create conversations on your advertisements. This happens because happy customers often share positive comments and could be willing to answer potential customers’ questions on your social advertisements.

Social media remarketing taps into your social following. On Facebook you can target users who have liked your page, and on Twitter remarketing allows you to target users who have already visited your website and who are on Twitter after being exposed to a Promoted Tweet or Twitter Card from your business. This allows you to increase your market reach and keep your brand top of mind.

Social Media Examiner is a great resource for social media information. Here are two articles that will help you set up your remarketing audiences on Twitter and Facebook. The cool thing about these platforms is that you can create lookalike audiences that take former targeting and tracking criteria, making the setup process easier.

9. How to Create Killer Remarketing Ads

Now let’s get into the special ingredients that will make your remarketing get the results you desire. We have already covered some effective tactics in the email remarketing section that we suggest you think about for your PPC remarketing strategy as well, but now we’ll add to our remarketing strategy best practices:

1. Relevancy: only show your remarketing ads on relevant sites. It is incredibly important that you are selective about where and when your remarketing ads will show. Manage the placements of your remarketing ads so that they are served on trustworthy websites. From the inskin study mentioned earlier, users were 71% more likely to rate an ad positively that appeared on The Independent, a news site, than on a lesser-known site, Catster. No one will be interested in proprietary software when they’re browsing camping websites, planning their next trip.Alongside placements, consider what the ad itself says. Is it relevant to what the customer was looking at? Does it have a call to action encouraging them to return? Create personalized and contextual ad copy that is conducive to the remarketing goals of your ads. Generic ad copy will not be compelling.Monitor your timeframes; displaying your ads too frequently will annoy your customers, and serving your ads for too long will cause them to become irrelevant. A pair of mittens that follows someone across the web; sidling up beside news sites, dancing around gaming pages, and bordering a favorite cooking blog, will quickly become an annoyance. Those mittens will also become highly irrelevant when they follow that same person through winter, spring, and into summer.

   Managing your targeting is done in AdWords by going to the Display Network tab under your Campaign name. In this tab, you can manage your keyword, placement, topic, interests & remarketing, and demographics targeting.

2. Capitalize on your best-performing content. This strategy is best for brands looking to increase on site traffic, which can lead to increased conversion rates. Create remarketing ads out of your most engaged with content, whether it be blog posts, infographics, videos, etc.
   • Use ad copy that highlights how this content will benefit your customers or potential customers.
   • Social proof the ad copy by mentioning how many other people have viewed, shared or liked it.
   • Warn your targets that they are missing out.
3. Use varied formats. On the Display Network size matters! Depending on the website your ad is served on, there might be various display sizes that can be served. These varying sizes compete against each other in interesting ways. If there’s room for one leaderboard ad (a big horizontal banner), but two spots for an inline rectangle, the leader board will stand out. Diversifying the formatting of your remarketing ads will maximize the chances that they will be served in the best positions.Here’s a table of display ad sizes and the impression shares they accrue, created by Larry Kim
   
4. Take advantage of events. There’s nothing like a holiday to spark a conversation—what are you doing on … ? Where are you going for … ? How much food will you eat on … ? Events and holidays are a great starting point for interaction with your customers. Create ad copy that caters to their personal experience of the holidays. Ask them the above questions and offer them opportunities to have these questions asked by coming back to your website and checking out your products, services, and/or content.This J. Crew advertisement is a good example of how you can incorporate the holidays into your remarketing ads:
   
5. Be aware of the emotions that work. Buzzsumo created a study that analyzed what emotions are involved with the clicking of content. Be conscious of the best performing emotions when you’re creating content that looks to bring people back to your site. Here’s an image of their findings taken from an OkDork piece on Buzzsumo’s analysis.
   
6. Feature a familiar, reputable face or name. Not only is it important that your placements are on trustworthy sites but that your advertisements themselves can be trusted. Since these are remarketing ads, it’s always nice to remind your targets of the place the ad is stemming from. A logo on every ad is a good idea, besides, it helps with branding as well. Moreover, if your brand has a reputable spokesperson or representative, feel free to feature them and their endorsements on your advertisements. People love to know that they can trust you.
7. Create a sense of urgency in your remarketing ads. A study by marketing experiments found that
   • A $100 savings incentive with an actual deadline increased enrollment in an online course by 992 percent in the three days following the promotion.
   • Using a date-stamp to create “implied urgency” on the page of a “lowest price” deal increased sales by 10 percent for 48 hours after the page was shared via email.
   • Mentioning the quantity of product available (even without mentioning limited supplies) increased conversion rates by 508 percent.

   Translate these website tactics into your remarketing strategy; create time sensitive deals, alert the customers of supplies, create incentive by establishing deadlines. Use this in your ad design to make it more compelling to click.

10. Dynamic Remarketing Ads

Dynamic remarketing ads take remarketing strategy a step further by allowing your ads to automatically insert products or items related to those that a user viewed on your website.

On AdWords, advertisers have access to a library of templates that automatically resize across mobile and desktop devices. This automated process simplifies your remarketing while displaying relevant items to past website visitors.

Product images and names are pulled from your Google Merchant Center feed.

Google has an extensive guide on how to create dynamic remarketing ads here.

Dynamic product ads are also available on Facebook. If you’ve ever been browsing the social media site and seen a product you’d just been looking at online a few days ago, you’ve probably seen these ads in action.

There are multiple benefits to DPAs on Facebook, some of which are:

• Unique advertisements for unique users
• Targeting is user-based, not cookie-based, so you know you’re reaching real, logged-in people
• Ads stay relevant as they’re automatically updated with current information from your product feed

Go Forth and Remarket!

We now hope that we have aided in the creation of your own remarketing strategy. If you have any further questions or want advice on the improvement of your existing remarketing efforts, feel free to contact us.

Read the next PPC Fundamentals article here: The Power of the Google Display Network
Read the previous PPC Fundamentals article here: The Extensive Guide to Successful Online Remarketing: Part 2