Are you calling your Target Audience to Action?

If you’ve ever run an email marketing campaign and have been disappointed by a low conversion rate, you’re not alone. According to research, around 95% of visitors reaching the checkout page of a retail website abandon their cart – a statistic that clearly illustrates how flaky your internet prospects can be.

However, rather than abandoning your marketing strategy and writing off all your efforts, you can simply remarket to leads who have shown even the slightest interest in what you have to offer. Here we take a look at some of the best practices you can adopt that will help you generate sales, without drastically altering your marketing strategy.

Clearly Define your Audience and your Objectives

Everything you do in marketing should have a clear purpose which should be written down as a firmly-stated goal in your campaign overview.

A remarketing campaign on the other hand, should focus specifically on bringing back past visitors to your website and encouraging them to perform an action, which could be to download, subscribe or make a purchase. Even if the campaign that attracted them in the first place was reasonably well-defined for your target demographic, a remarketing campaign requires further definition and analysis of your audience.

You can work with your website analytics tools to segment your database of lost leads. A useful way to do this is by sliding scale of interest, based on the number of pages viewed and how far the prospect navigated down your sales funnel. This allows you to categorise your lost leads according to their level of interest and remarket to them in a much more targeted way.

Always Remarket your Hottest Leads First

You can determine the lost leads that showed the most interest in what you have on offer by how long they spent looking at your website and how far down the funnel they got to. Consider it the same as skimming the cream from milk or sorting the wheat from the chaff, although never lose sight of the fact that each and every lead, even lost ones, are valuable commodities for your business.

Nevertheless, concentrate your remarketing efforts to the hottest leads and you’ll be more likely of achieving a better conversion rate. Landing pages are essential for successful remarketing and so it’s important to consider what landing page your hottest prospects are sent to. Rather than sending them somewhere they can obtain more information on something they’ve already expressed a clear interest in, send them directly to landing pages with offers and the opportunity to make purchases or register, as they’re already further down the sales funnel than cold leads.

Nurture your Cold Leads for More Chance of Conversion

After you’ve dealt with your hottest prospects, you can turn your attention to cold leads or those visitors who showed the least interest in your products and services. You have to be in it for the long-haul with cold leads as you want to take time to develop a relationship with them, not just to get more data out of them but also to engender trust in your business, which will more likely lead to a sale at some point down the line.

You can nurture your cold prospects with interesting and compelling content but you should avoid the hard sell at all costs. Remember you’ve engaged a preliminary interest from these leads and you have to encourage further engagement to achieve a profitable outcome. Send them product information, reviews, newsletters, offers and discounts, but don’t bombard them.

Remain consistent with your remarketing and you’ll nurture the kind of relationship that will position your business as the ‘go-to’ for whatever products or services they are looking for.

Remarketing to Existing Customers

There is an 80/20 rule of basic marketing that suggests that 20% of your customers provide you with 80% of your total sales revenue. For that reason, it is essential to continue marketing (or remarketing) to your customers long after their initial purchase. You can do this with simple display ads or through regular and consistent email newsletters.

You can use similar content as you would for your cold leads, as your objective here is to encourage your customer to purchase with you again. Do this by creating a community for your customers that gives them a sense of belonging.

Market and promote your business through social networks and keep all your prospects in the loop so that they can actively engage on a social level. With the majority of people connecting to social networks these days, you’ll be ensuring your brand is foremost in their minds by maintaining a solid online presence.

Remarketing with Google AdWords

If Google AdWords is your preferred method of marketing online, you can use the tool to your advantage with a remarketing strategy. To get started, you have to add a small snippet of code to your website known as a remarketing tag, which you can get from AdWords.

Then you create remarketing lists for any of your web pages that are separated into categories, i.e. those who are interested in buying your products vs. those requesting more information. By using the AdWords remarketing tag, you are basically saving data from visitors to the relevant category list for each web page and adding their cookie IDs to your remarketing list.

At this point, you are ready to build a remarketing campaign by using AdWords to send a targeted message that is seen only by those on the respective category list. The ads and targeted messages themselves will appear to your category list as they’re browsing on other Display Network sites or searching on Google and won’t be visible to those not on the list. This ‘intelligent’ remarketing tool is a great way of luring back lost leads, although there is of course a cost element to be considered, as with all pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.

In conclusion, it is easier to view remarketing as a way of building relationships rather than achieving direct sales and you’re more likely to achieve results with this approach too. Remarketing allows you to run a highly optimised campaign that finds new customers at various points of their relationship with your business, which increases the likelihood of conversion. Remarketing shows that you have the persistence to capture a lost audience, which ultimately leads to more sustainable growth for your business.