December/January 2020
31
GM BUSINESS connect
digital marketing
Remarketing: what’s all the fuss about? A customer comes into your shop, looks around and then leaves.
An all-too-familiar scenario that often means that another customer has finding the combination of moves passed you by and now they are gone. and messages that will secure a conversion. Fifteen years ago, this was a missed opportunity, a time to rethink strategy, When was the last time you were a “We’ll get the next one” moment? convinced that your phone was Windows of opportunity were limited listening to your conversations? to your shop window, print ads and You felt like you’d mentioned a word of mouth. product or service to a friend, Wouldn’t it have been great to see conducted a brief Google search where that customer went after in a bored lunchtime and thought leaving your shop? nothing more of it? Suddenly, across every website you visited and social What would you have given to know feed you read, adverts for these that they’d gone into a competitor products sprung up. that advertised lower prices, or higher quality, or quicker delivery times? That would be the greatest insight into their priorities you could wish for, information with which you could shape forthcoming strategies, promote that part of your service or offer a special deal next time, matching your deals to their buying priorities. Your brand would instantly seem more in touch with its customers, leading to more loyal customers with a higher average lifetime value, better reviews, and more engaged service users. The data that the digital world provides means that this is now possible. You now have the opportunity to get that exact customer back and replay the scenario again, like that one hard level of your favourite video game. You can change your tactics and try again, and again,
You had shown ‘the cloud’ what you were interested in, a trigger now setting those adverts in motion. Remarketing sounds like a buzzword, but it’s a concept as simple as the name suggests; sending
marketing messages to people that have already interacted with your company. This might be to people that have been on your website and failed to convert; perhaps they got as far as an ordering page and were turned off by high shipping costs, for example. Or, it could be sending targeted messages to people who follow your social media accounts, or customers that have previously made purchases.
It’s a well-known fact that it’s easier and cheaper to re-ignite an existing customer or follow up a hot lead than it is to try to acquire a new customer from a cold start. The data supports this theory, it works and often leads to much higher brand awareness. One study in America reported that remarketing led to a lift in branded searches by a
factor of 10, showing the real results that remarketing can have.
Many businesses worry about asking their customers for their personal data, worrying about overstepping people’s personal boundaries and making them feel uncomfortable. But it seems that this ‘creep factor’ may be overestimated. Pew Research, one of the world’s largest civil polling agencies, found that 47% of us are willing to part with our private data, such as email addresses, to get a better deal. So why isn’t your agency pushing remarketing as a strategy? Many agencies charge a percentage of your marketing budget and since you are likely to spend less with a remarketing campaign to gain similar results, it’s not really in their interest, despite it being in yours. If you have a high traffic website or busy social media accounts, perhaps you too could reap the benefits of remarketing. Implementing a digital strategy built on data insights, businesses now have their chance to get ‘the one that got away’ back. By intertwining our marketing across search engines and social media, we are able to track our shoppers throughout their day, presenting our branded, targeted messages at the optimum time. Typically remarketing costs less-perconversion and often leads to more loyal customers that on average have a higher lifetime value. Sometimes, the chase is worth it.
Joel Rush AsOne Digital Business Development www.asone.co.uk
