Mark Twain rightly said,“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising”

These golden words must have been uttered somewhere in the 18^th century. Fast forward to the 21^st century and marketers around the globe have cracked the ultimate advertising strategy that is not only helping e-commerce stores retain their valued customers but is also increasing their sales by leaps and bounds! In my previous article I talked about why repeat customers are gold mine for your business and how can you use remarketing strategies to retain them for a longer duration of time. In this article, I will elaborate further about the ultimate marketing strategy.

I present to you - REMARKETING

The things you will learn:

• What is remarketing
• Different types of remarketing
• Benefits of remarketing for a small and medium sized business
• Tools and platforms for remarketing
  
  

Let’s understand what remarketing is all about.

An interesting survey by CMO reveals that 25% of visitors enjoy seeing the remarketing ads on pages they are browsing. 28% said that remarketing ads help them easily navigate to the website they have been meaning to visit.

1. What is remarketing?

Remarketing is a simple strategy to target specific customers who visited your e-commerce site and took some action either a purchase or just product view. It is a great way to re-engage those customers who have shown some interest in your products/services. The easiest way to do it is using remarketing ads.

How remarketing ads work is fairly simple. Once a customer visits your website for the first time, remarketing cookies (installed on your website while setting ads)— which are tiny files that store bits and pieces of user information—get saved on customer’s browser, that  stores  the products and services browsed through, the number of pages visited and for how long did they stay on the page and many other tiny details (no personal info is stored). Now when they visit another site, remarketing cookies stored on browser, starts showing remarketing ads based on input from ad platform.
 

An interesting survey by CMO reveals that 25% of visitors enjoy seeing the remarketing ads on pages they are browsing. 28% of consumers said that remarketing ads help them easily navigate to the website they have been meaning to visit and consumers who retargeted via the ads are 70% more likely to purchase a product from your website. Now that’s huge gain and who wouldn’t possibly want a piece of this amazing pie?

Also read: Wondering if you should build your own e-commerce website or not?

2. Different types of remarketing

In my previous article ‘Are you forgetting your repeat customers?’ I explained the different ways to remarket your products and services to your target audience. Reiterating the steps again:

• Ads for customers who have already visited your website: Someone visited you e-store, browsed through your products and offerings and left without purchasing anything. You can set up specific ads for this customer using various ad platforms that I shall discuss later in the article. 
• Email remarketing: Email remarketing usually consists of email campaigns. It is quite versatile in nature and it can be used for many purposes other than selling your products to customers. You can improve your brand awareness and build a better relationship with your customers using email marketing. 
• Search retargeting: Search retargeting taps in customers using search engines. Keyword can be used to redirect for display remarketing.
• Remarketing list search ads: Using this strategy you can post ads to a particular list such as who abandoned cart, made a purchase in certain category, purchased specific product, visited website for minimum 3 minutes etc. Remarketing lists can be created as per business need and strategy.
• Video remarketing: You can also display your remarketing ads on YouTube. 
• Shopping remarketing: Shopping remarketing is for customers who have  visited/made a purchase on your website. Using this strategy, you can display special discounts and offers just for them. 
  
  

3. Top 3 benefits of remarketing 

Small business owners and entrepreneurs who are new to the field of online marketing often struggle with a common problem- how to create a recall value for your brand in the minds of your customers? Now that you know the answer to this problem is remarketing, let’s understand how this simple yet effective tool can benefit your business. 

• Remarketing is highly cost effective: Remarketing specifically targets only those customers who you want to show your ads to. This way you are spending money on a targeted traffic without spending a thousand dimes. 
• Remarketing boosts your visibility: There could be many reasons why a customer hasn’t converted in the first visit. It could be because they need more time to do further research on the product they are interested in purchasing, they didn’t have the time and exited hurriedly or they want to compare your products and offerings with other websites and then make a decision. Whatever the case be, remarketing solves all these problems because your ad pops up on their screen every time they open a website and this reminds them to complete their purchase on your website.
• Remarketing increases your sales: As mentioned above, using remarketing you can aim to convert nearly 70% of your users. Because the more they see your ad the better they are convinced to try out your products. This also solves the ‘abandoned cart problem’.
  
  

Also read: Getting started with online sales? Here is everything you need to know

4. Platforms you can use for remarketing

There are different tools using which you can place you remarketing campaigns. Following are some of the most commonly used platforms:

• Google ads: it is most likely the case that you are already advertising on Google. In such cases, you only need to add a Google remarketing code called tag or pixel to your website so that all your visitors get tracked using cookies on your site. Using Google remarketing ads you can narrow down your target customers as much as you like and thereby reduce the cost per click while improving the relevancy.
• Retargeting.biz: Highly suitable for e-commerce platforms, Retargeting.biz  helps grow your sales with dynamic ads that are better targeted and more relevant. Their products cover ad management across Google, Facebook and even email marketing. 
• Adroll: With Adroll you can place your ads using one single campaign. A single campaign can be used to place your ads on Facebook, Google and a host of other websites. This platform helps you better understand shopper behaviour and gives you insights to improve your campaigns and generate more revenue.
• SmarterHQ: SmarterHQ is targeted to work on your customer relationships. It helps you deliver an individualized shopping experience to your customers. 
• Facebook ads: Since peoplestarted using Facebook on a daily basis, it is a great platform to showcase your ads to potential customers. The Facebook Pixel allows you to track the actions of your customer after they left the ad page. A custom audience setting allows to you reach out to the customer again and again.
• Retargeter: Every daymarketers are faced with different scenarioswhen it comes to customer behaviour and retargeter exactly helps with that. You no longer need to rely on a single campaign for all your customers.Each campaign can be tailor-made to suit you’re the requirements of your customers.
• Perfect Audience: This platform helps markers retrace the lost visitors who visited your page earlier. Perfect Audience helps you shoot your ad campaigns across mediums like Facebook, Goggle, Twitter, mobile phone etc. A powerful tool that helps track your revenue and conversion, Perfect Avenue is a must have for all marketers.
• Fixel: This toolsworks on the belief that “some visitors are worth more than others”. Fixel is an AI based tool that cleverly studies the user behaviour and lets you plan ad campaigns only for them.
• Criteo: This platform is yet another powerful tool that helps you convert leads using a simple manta of get noticed-get traffic-get sales. Criteo claims togive you an average return of 13% on every ad spent. It can be used by marketers, brands and retails of any size.
  
  

Marketing has indeed evolved in the past few years and these remarketing tools have made conversions so much easier. As a startup and a small business owner of an e-commerce store you can use these platforms to suit your needs and reap the benefits.

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• Want to make your ecommerce store go from good to great? – Here is how!
• 5 proven strategies to boost your ecommerce sales

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