As marketers we're all familiar with the fact that many visitors don't convert the first time they come to your website. For whatever reason they leave without purchasing your product, even though they might have been keenly interested in buying.
If you do manage to capture their email address, you can continue marketing to them. But what if they don't opt in to your list? Unless you do something, you will likely lose those visitors forever.
That's why remarketing is such a great idea. Simply by adding a bit of code to your website, remarketing “tags” place a cookie on your visitors. Now when they leave your website, they see ads that are encouraging them to go back to your website and complete what they started. For example, if you're selling a service, your ads would remind them of your service and clicking your ad will send them straight back to your website.
These ads will give you a much higher conversion rate than normal because the people viewing them have already expressed interest by visiting your website. As most sales people will tell you, often times making the sales is simply a matter of asking for it enough times until you get that yes. And with remarketing your visitors see reminders of you everywhere. Some of those visitors will return and purchase your product, or at the very least opt in to your list.
There are actually different types of remarketing that you can use:
Site remarketing is the example above – your ads keep you in their mind after they've left your website.
Search remarketing is targeting search engine users who have searched for the keywords of your choice. Choose your search terms wisely, because some searches are much more likely to result in sales than others.
Social media remarketing is like site remarketing – you place a bit of code on shared links within social networks and then serve relevant ads. When your link is forwarded, the people receiving the link also see your ads.
What are the biggest benefits to use remarketing? Obviously you stay in front of your visitors after they've left your website. This provides you with a greater return on your traffic – the same traffic yields better results and more sales. Plus you get to try different calls to action. What motivates one person to buy might be different than what motivates someone else. By giving them a variety of marketing messages, the odds increase that one will hit home.
You can even segment your website users based upon specific actions they've taken on your website. Thus they are reminded of the same product they looked at, even if you offer dozens of different possibilities. This is yet another reason why remarketing works so well – you are able to zero in on their exact interest and market to them accordingly.