Trying to decide what marketing strategies you should use to bring back past customers and retain the current ones? You may have heard about, and even be torn between using, remarketing and retargeting. Let's sort out that confusion today.
Both remarketing and retargeting have proven to help entreprofessionals re-engage with people who have shown interest in their professional services at some point. Also, they are both effective ways to nurture leads. But, when choosing between the two marketing tactics, try to consider your motives and the purpose of the tactic being employed. While these two are useful, let's try to look at the differences among remarketing and retargeting so you can have a better idea of when and how to use each.
What Is Remarketing?
Remarketing is a marketing strategy that re-engages prospects, as well as current and past clients, by using the email channel of marketing. Typically, remarketing is based upon a trigger that initiates an effort to reconnect with someone via e-mail following their previous actions such as making a purchase, signing up online, subscribing, or any other defined and electronically trackable activity.
But even though there are tons of articles tackling the differences between remarketing and retargeting, people still find it a bit confusing. The Vimagery Team suggests that remarketing is best used when the marketing motive is about "retention or follow-up."
Types of Remarketing
1. Remarketing to Bring Prospects and Clients Back.
To bring people back to the table is probably a main reason why you're even reading this article. According to a recent study, when businesses use a segmented email campaign, they can experience an increase in revenue by as much as 760%. So, if you really want to get those people back into your sales funnel you should be doing these:
If your website has low traffic. You can create an email campaign that targets all users with a special offer to increase your traffic. For example, have a discount offer or give coupons to attract your prospects to purchase or repurchase your product or service.
Note: This type of email marketing strategy applies to all users.
For a higher traffic website. You can re-engage with your prospects and customers by sending an email that directs them to a relevant online page of your website. For example, when a user has already visited your contact page, and another user consumed some of your blog content, you shouldn't necessarily send these two users to the same page in a remarketing campaign. Instead of sending them to your home page, try to redirect the Contact Page visitor to a landing page that houses a specific call to action. The Blog visitor could be directed to higher value, gated content like an e-book, video, or podcast that they can get access to in exchange for additional personal information such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
2. Inform & Retain Customers.
Some find it challenging to engage with people via content. One of the challenging aspects is deciding which channels to use to inform and retain customers consistently. Thanks to email, you can freely send your customers any nurturing messages with just a few clicks. If the content is showing up in an email, there's a higher chance that people will read it as opposed to hoping they come across it during a future visit to your website. The more people that consume your content, the more people will be informed about who you are and the services you provide.
Bonus tip: You can promote your professional services by informing them of your offers that are related to their past purchases. For example, if the customer previously purchased a consultation, you can send an email about an annual membership plan or other additional service that you offer.
3. Upsell.
The people most likely to make additional purchases with you are those people who have shown interest by way of previously purchasing, signing up, submitting contact information, and the like. Usually, entreprofessionals use email to drive more conversions and sales by introducing new offers or products, discounts, and coupons via email close in time relative to that previous activity. Referred to as an upsell strategy, this technique has been an effective strategy to drive significant returns. In fact, an average of 60% of consumers have purchased additional products or services after receiving an upsell marketing message by email.
Benefits of Remarketing
Benefit 1: Brand Recall
Of all the benefits, brand recall is the best one. Why? Because remarketing is a highly effective tool when it comes to reminding your prospects about your business brand. Remarketing by way of sending an email is more accessible and relevant way of promoting your business brand.
Benefit 2: Huge Returns
Remarketing improves your revenue by way of directing a prospect or past customer back to your website or landing page. Take note that only 2% of web visitors convert during the first time they encounter your site. That is why remarketing is considered a second chance of motivating your target prospects to avail of your product or service.
Benefit 3: Ensures Content Relevancy
A remarketing campaign takes the data you’ve learned about the site visitor and, via email, pushes additional content, offers, and messaging that is specifically relevant. For example, if the target recipient visited your services page, the best thing to do when remarketing is to send a link to a landing page that tackles an in-depth idea about a specific type of services that you offer. That particular message would resonate as presumably the target recipient is in some way interested in your services as measured by the fact they visited that specific page on your main site.
What Is Retargeting?
Retargeting is a marketing strategy that re-engages prospects, as well as current and past clients, by using ads that seemingly follow the target recipient around the web triggered by that target’s specific activity on your website. Without getting into all of the very technical aspects of this strategy, when a user visits your website, there is a bit of data that your website can store on the user’s device. This bit of data is referred to as a cookie. Once there, other web platforms with which the user interacts can see this stored cookie on the users device and deliver up to the user specific ad content that you set. For example, when a prospect visits a page about architectural designs, that site can place a cookie on the user’s laptop. Then, when the user jumps over to Google to do a search, the architectural design web site can push a related ad to the Google page for that user to see. Remember, only about 2% of site visitors progress up the sales funnel during their first visit. But after the second or third visit, retargeting can help to increase conversion rates by as much as 150%.
Types of Retargeting
Fact: Most first-time web visitors won't become clients immediately after their first visit to your site. However, if you master the following retargeting strategies, you'll be able to re-engage and motivate them through your sales funnel to not only become clients, but loyal, paying clients in no time.
1. On-Site Retargeting.
Many businesses have problems capturing the attention of their target audience via traditional websites, causing their bounce rate to skyrocket. With that, their Google rankings start to suffer. That's why one of the most effective ways to keep the audience from leaving your website is to use the on-site retargeting. On-site retargeting is a marketing strategy that places dynamic content, similar to an ad, directly within your site. That dynamic content can change and deliver specific messaging depending on what other pages a user visited.
Tip: Make sure your dynamic content is helpful and not annoying. Instead of just promoting your product or service, create a coupon code or a limited time offer to make them feel there’s a sense of exclusivity.
2. Search Retargeting.
This type of retargeting tactic allows entreprofessionals or marketers to show ads based on a user's search behavior. With search retargeting, it displays ads only to those users who have shown previous interest in your product or service through searching for specific keywords or phrases.
Tip: Before you start displaying ads based on a target audience member’s search behaviors, make sure they have a reasonable understanding of, and enough trust in, your product or service, by providing them with valuable content beforehand.
3. Pixel-Based Retargeting.
Pixel-based retargeting is a type of strategy that displays your ad to any previous visitor to your website. So, once a user visits your site and interacts with specific content, there's a browser cookie that is stored on the user’s device that preserves the information regarding what content was actually viewed. Later, this cookie is used to display ads to that user on various websites and social media platforms like Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The aim is to bring that user back to your site to have them consume additional content or engage via a call to action.
Cons: The downside of pixel-based retargeting is that it doesn't work if you have no website traffic. So, you need to make sure that you have enough traffic before using this retargeting strategy.
Benefits of Retargeting
Benefit 1: Generate More Sales
This is probably one of the main reasons why retargeting strategies are of interest to you in the first place. While it’s unlikely that your web visitors will progress through your sales cycle on the first visit, we assure you, with compelling, well-placed ads, you will surely generate more traffic, and your marketing funnel will see more participants.
Benefit 2: Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the key to business growth. Retargeting positions your brand in front of your target audience on a regular basis. When your ads “follow” them around across the web, you consciously and subconsciously become top of mind. That’s ultimately what is known as building “brand equity.”
Benefit 3: Extend Your Reach To Interested Prospects
Out of sight, out of mind. This phrase can’t be more relevant to the topic at hand. Retargeting campaigns keep your message and brand in front of your target audience, regardless of where they may be at any particular moment online. Retargeting is an excellent way to re-engage with prospects which have shown an interest in your services based on the pages they viewed within your site and the content they consumed. You can use retargeting to encourage them to take the next steps in your sales cycle.
Which Is Better: Retargeting or Remarketing?
With all that has been said, it should now be more evident that the difference between retargeting and remarketing is how re-engagement is being nurtured. Remarketing re-engages prospects and clients by email, while retargeting re-engages by displaying ads or dynamic content. Both have the same purpose. It is to reconnect and bring a person that has previously shown interest in your business brand back to your site to engage with additional content or to select a call to action. But if you're wondering which is a better strategy, the better strategy always depends on your motive and reason for using it.
When the reason for re-engaging with your prospects and clients is to reconnect with current or past customers specifically, and you already have an email list and want to save budget for ads, then remarketing may be the better strategy to employ.
On the other hand, if you focus more on attracting fresh new customers or clients but don't have the email list of interested prospects yet, then the best strategy may be retargeting.
Final Recommendation: Why Not Use BOTH?
As the saying goes, "two is often better than one." If you still feel torn between the two, why not use both if that's appropriate for your specific business. Remember, you can use remarketing and retargeting together. If you want to re-engage with your prospects and customers to encourage converting into loyal paying clients, and at the same time want to gain more traffic and drive more new customers, then use them both. After all, you'll likely achieve greater success employing both of these marketing strategies as opposed to none or just one of them.
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If you're still struggling to decide on whether to use retargeting or remarketing for your business, allow us to help. Click here to see if you qualify for a Vimagery Strategy Session. Together, we can help you to gain an unfair advantage regarding your efforts to cultivate, convert, and close new clients in the weeks and months ahead.
