3 Most Effective Retargeting Strategies to Boost Sales

Technology has empowered marketers in many ways. One of the best examples of technology-driven marketing solutions is the retargeting tools that enable a marketer to target the site visitors who visited the website but didn’t complete the purchase. What makes this tactic even more exciting and popular is that it is inexpensive to retarget. Moreover, you can expect a higher return on investment since you’re only targeting the people who have shown interest in your products.

This article will discuss the major types of retargeting that works and how to implement them.

What are Some of the Most Effective Retargeting Strategies?

The best way to retarget your website visitors is to display Facebook ads on their mobile browser. The three most powerful retargeting strategies to reinstate the visitors to your site are as follows:

1. Retargeting specific URL visits
2. Retargeting existing customers
3. Retargeting leads based on page engagement

Let’s dive into these three strategies separately.

1. Retargeting Specific Page Visits

The most prevalent method of retargeting is based on website visits in the past 90 days. However, it takes time and doesn’t work if you don’t add any filter to it. So, do it intelligently and don’t aim to target everyone who visits your website. To increase your conversion rate, target only those who show keen interest and are willing to buy.

So, how to choose that small group of audience you should focus on for retargeting?

To find those visitors, you need to trace their specific actions taken on your website. For example, if someone lands on your website through a blog post backlinks, they will only read the blog post and bounce away. Targeting such visitors is useless if your immediate goal is conversion. However, if someone comes to your website, reads your blog post, signs up for a newsletter, and also checks your products and services page before he leaves the website, then it reflects a strong buying intent.

This doesn’t mean the first type of visitor may not be your potential customer. However, even if we take them as prospects, they are more likely to be top of the funnel (TOFU) customers, who still need a lot of education, interactions, and nurturing before they convert.

Now how will you retarget both types of visitors?

If you show a lead magnet in a retargeting ad to the second type of visitor, it won’t make sense as they have already shared their contact details on the lead magnet form while visiting the website. Similarly, you cannot offer a free trial to the visitor who just read your blog post and went away because he may still not be aware of your product or services.

Such unplanned retargeting never yields any results, and it’s like targeting the wrong prospect with the wrong offer. Their stages in the buyer’s journey are pretty different.

The Ruskin Bond Ad

Check out this retargeting ad I received on my Facebook account:

You may notice how hyper-focused this ad is. This ad seems to be inspired by the web pages I visited while visiting Ruskin Bond’s website. Ruskin Bond is an Indian author of British descent.

The advertisers might have tracked my activity on the website to serve me with an ad focused on becoming a better writer.

This ad also emphasizes how this product can add value to my life. You should follow the same approach while creating retargeting campaigns.

Here are the two reasons why people don’t want to buy from you.

A. They are not ready to spend money on your product
B. They are not aware of how your product can add value to them

The above ad is the best example of the second reason.

This ad is targeted at a group of high intent buyers.

These targeted ads are flashed as soon as someone visits a website, including the pages that only the strong intent buyers visit.

Tip: Retargeting based on a specific URL or a landing-page-visits always works, and it is the best retargeting practice these days.

Facebook ads are highly effective and popular for most niches and products compared to Google Ads.

Here’s the complete procedure of creating effective retargeting ads on Facebook.

Open Facebook Business Suite. Facebook is known for regularly updating its platform, so instead of giving you the steps, I’ll suggest the path.

First, create a new custom audience.

You need to go to the Ad Manager from the “More Tools” section and create a new campaign. Enter your information and then select “Create a New Custom Audience.”

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Facebook is best known for its custom audience feature, and hence it can be the best retargeting strategy for a business. To make ads even more effective, Facebook offers diverse customization options for their campaigns. You can easily create a new custom audience from the drop-down menu.

Your marketing goal here is to attract website traffic which you can choose from the custom audience menu.

When you choose this audience type, you will be able to create lists of people who visited specific web pages on your website for laser-focused targeting.

The devil lies in the details. So, after creating lists, you can dive into other elements.

You can design a campaign for different objectives, such as promoting a webinar or driving traffic to a specific landing page. Hundreds of thousands of people regularly read about your product and see details on social media channels but never convert. Through retargeting, you can get them back. Here in this section, you can add the URL pages that include a specific word such as a product name, etc.

Facebook allows you to refine your retargeting ads according to options such as “device used” and “frequency.” Frequency is a crucial metric because it shows that the visitor is a ripe lead and needs a slight push to convert.

All you need to do is create ads that explain to your audience how they can use your product, save time, and add value to their lives.

It is one of the most effective remarketing strategies because the user is quite familiar with the product, and they are most likely to make the purchase if they are fully convinced the product will help them.

2. Retargeting Existing Customers

The second type of retargeting is aimed at unresponsive email subscribers. Over time, many of your email subscribers stop responding to your emails and buying from you. To convert them into active buyers, you need to share your engaging marketing messages with them.

Anybody familiar with email marketing will agree that over time new visitors join you, and old subscribers become unresponsive. However, it is easy to sell to your old subscribers because they have already purchased from you, and you don’t need to put in additional efforts to educate them about your products or services.

Sometimes your emails don’t even reach some of the subscribers because of the filters and network issues. In all such cases, this retargeting method can resurrect those unresponsive customers. It is incredibly cost-effective because such retargeting ads have a high CTR and a high degree of relevance.

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You may try to upsell your unresponsive customers as many companies such as AT&T and American Express are already implementing this strategy and have been quite successful in boosting their sales.

This strategy is beneficial for retailers such as clothing and apparel sellers. It is a harmless way of marketing to existing customers with your current offers. Here is how to set up these ads.

Go to AdWords or Facebook and then go to Facebook Ads Manager>>Audience Section>>Click Create an Audience.

You can create another custom audience from here. Select “Customer List” and upload your audience list.

If you see a green checkmark, you have done it. If a yellow exclamation sign appears, you need to manually update some entries.

You can directly import contacts from MailChimp, apply filters for old and current customers, and upload them on Facebook.

You need to sort your email list to make separate lists for unresponsive customers and old customers.

There is no point in wasting your advertising dollars on customers who are regularly buying from you. Instead, you should target the customers who don’t respond to your marketing emails and don’t convert.

You can try to bring them back to your products by sending messages like “we are missing you!” etc.

3. Lead Generation Ads Based on Page Engagement

If website-based retargeting doesn’t work, you can try lead generation ads-based targeting. “Lead Ads” is Facebook’s powerful lead generation tool. This type of retargeting uses form-based ads as lead magnets. The goal is to collect customer information.

Before we dive into how we can create such ads, let’s look at a few examples.

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As soon as you click the ad, it will take you to the lead generation form that looks like the one shown in the next column in the above table. Such ads don’t force you to leave the Facebook platform. As you know, most people come to Facebook to interact with their friends and family and don’t like to move away from the platform.

Lead form in the lead gen ads appears within the platform and doesn’t take the user offsite, making such ads immensely effective and less annoying. So, it works as a lead magnet that doesn’t interrupt the flow or habit of a social media user.

Suppose you retarget people with page engagement as a metric. In that case, you will get better results because these social media users are hyperactive and hyper-aware and are always on the lookout for new brands and products on Facebook.

Let’s dive into how to set up lead generation ads.

Create a custom audience>> Choose “Facebook Page” from sources>>

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From here, you get a wide range of options to choose from. You can try to be as specific as possible here.

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So, you can target visitors who perform any activity on your website or Facebook pages, such as clicking on a CTA, saving a page or post, or showing engagement with your Facebook post or ad.

After selecting the right metric, save this audience and create a new ad on Ads Manager.

Your goal is lead generation, so select the “Lead Generation” option and select your ad format. You can choose a single image or video for the purpose. Don’t opt for carousels when you are creating a lead generation ad. Now, you can edit the content on the ad.

Don’t forget to give some incentive in exchange for your customers’ email addresses.

You can offer an informative ebook, coupon, or a study or white paper to them, and they will happily fill out your form and click on a CTA button if there is a sound reason for doing that.

Don’t forget to edit your fields to match your needs according to the audience.

Make sure that the form questions are specific and designed to capture only the most crucial customer data. The idea is to take up only a few seconds of the visitors without annoying them.

Most marketers feel that Facebook’s page-based retargeting is the best way to drive visitors back to your site. It’s observed that the most engaged users use social media platforms differently than the average users.

Many specific psychographic customer segments are always searching for businesses and products that add value to their lives. Savvy marketers should take advantage of this fantastic feature of Facebook to convert those who showed interest in your pages or posts but didn’t convert for any reason.

Conclusion

Marketing is no more a simple phenomenon, and it can be an act of sheer folly on behalf of a marketer to assume that they can convert prospects on their very first visit. Since the sales funnel has become highly complex and lengthy, and your first-time visitors might not know who you are or how your product could help them, they are unlikely to make any purchase decision. In other words, they are not ready to buy from you.

Retargeting ads help bring those visitors closer to conversion. The more targeted these ads are, the more likely are users to make a purchase.

The most accurate way of retargeting is retargeting specific page visits. It will help you a lot in converting your site visitors. The second most effective way is to target unresponsive existing customers. If they haven’t bought anything from you in the past few months, send them a few enticing ads to boost sales.

In the end, you should run lead generation ads to pull in already engaged users. As emphasized above, your retargeting ads should be highly focused to drive significant results.