Remarketing: The What, Why, and How

Ads are everywhere. HIghways, TVs, web pages, social media, you name it. While companies pay online marketing agencies a lot to situate themselves and their advertisements on the right platforms and to the right users, the rampant oversaturation of ads may have conditioned us to ignore or avoid them as much as we can. Consequently, the more ads we saw, the lesser their impact on us, and the less effective they became at conversion.

However, this did not mean that businesses abandon advertisements altogether, since very soon, a powerful tool called remarketing emerged as a solution to this dilemma.

What is remarketing?

Have you ever visited an online store, added items to your cart, left midway without checking out, and then the very next day saw an online ad featuring the very products you left in your cart? Then you have been remarketed.

Remarketing or retargeting is the process of engaging audiences who have already interacted with your brand, encouraging them to take a desired action. It allows for strategic repositioning of ads in front of these audiences, reminding them to make a purchase, and helping you increase brand awareness. Think of remarketing as a second chance to convert, up-sell, or retain customers. Remarketing is a tool almost exclusive to the digital world. It’s hard for retailers to continue advertising to customers who walk into a real-life retail store and leave without buying a product. However, online retailers can recruit Kuwait internet marketing services to leverage the online space and maximize sales by using remarketing strategies. A potential customer qualifies to be retargeted if she has:

Visited your website,
Clicked on your ad,
Followed you on any social media, or
Searched for you on Google

Now let’s clarify some terms.

While retargeting is more about serving ads to potential customers based on cookies, and remarketing is about collecting user information to create lists and send sales emails, we are using both these terms interchangeably.
You might have heard of behavioral retargeting, which is just a longer term for remarketing. It’s when you target customers based on their past behavior online, which includes the pages they visited, the time they spent on these pages, and the links they clicked on.

How does remarketing work?

Setting up a remarketing campaign for your website requires a pixel installation. When you hire internet marketing agencies to create an advertising campaign with an ad network like Google AdWords, you will be provided with a piece of code (or pixel tag) that you will insert in the tail end of your website. Every time a new visitor accesses your site with a Google or Facebook account, the code will be automatically activated, it will drop an anonymous browser cookie, and the user will be added to your remarketing list. This code will record information like the things the customer was searching for, their browsing activity, if they added anything to their shopping cart, whether they completed the purchase or not, etc. So the next time this same user pays a visit to other websites that host advertisements from your ad network provider, they will be served your ad. This will happen as long as you are actively running a campaign.

When an internet browser visits a new website and are asked to accept their terms of use, they’re basically allowing the website to collect their unique pixel tag. These tags can be collected via one of two ways:

Third-party cookies - These come from various sources and they collect and store data about the customer’s journey (or the “cookie crumbs” they leave) throughout the web.
First-party data - This is collected by your business and it directly tracks customer behavior on your website.

With Google’s decision to push forward a cookieless world, it’s become important for businesses to reorient their remarketing efforts by hiring a Kuwait online marketing agency to start using first-party data that allows tracking. To begin, make sure you are well-equipped with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that lets you track and store data about your website visitors.

Finally, know that remarketing works on a Cost-per-Click (CPC), Cost-per-Impression (CPM), and Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) model, which means that you can budget your spending and adjust your bids by defining how much you wish to pay per click, per impression, or per conversion.

Why does your business need a remarketing strategy?

Remarketing is an important part of any marketing strategy. Its value is rooted in human behavior and psychology. Sometimes humans need to be repeatedly exposed to the same message in order for it to stick. In the same vein, your customers might need to encounter your brand multiple times before they finally convert. There are several benefits of creating personalized ads and retargeting customers.

It increases outreach by allowing businesses to reach a larger audience than they would typically reach through traditional marketing methods. Consequently, more customers are reached, resulting in increased conversions and sales. Remember that Google has more than 2 million websites in its entire network, which means you will be able to position yourself in the mind of the target user no matter where they are.
Remarketing lets businesses tailor their message to individual consumers, increasing the ad’s relevance. As a result of this improved targeting, potential customers are more likely to engage with the ad and are doubly encouraged to make the purchase.
Remarketing campaigns are incredibly cost-effective. Instead of reaching out to a hypothetical target audience based on market research, businesses can receive a higher ROI by retargeting consumers who have already displayed interest in their product/service.
By keeping their business at the forefront of their customers’ minds, companies can increase brand awareness, which in turn can strengthen customer loyalty, and help keep their product/service as their first pick when they’re ready to make a purchase decision in the future.
Remarketing campaigns are proven to produce higher conversion rates than traditional marketing strategies. According to Marketo, for example, 96% of visitors that visit your website are not ready to buy yet. However, when those customers are retargeted, 70% of them are more likely to convert.
Although an obviously important tactic in e-commerce, remarketing can be used in all industries and verticals that have a digital presence.
Sometimes, users get distracted while shopping online due to various reasons and simply forget that they had visited your website. Remarketing is a great way to remind shoppers who have browsed through your product/service to complete their purchase.

We understand that maintaining customer interest isn’t easy. In fact, research shows that about 58% of visitors leave websites immediately after finding them. Our goal is to make you aware of remarketing and its effects, something most major companies are already practicing. Tune in next week, where we will cover the different types of remarketing strategies and how you can implement them in your specific business. We at Design Master, a long-standing Kuwait digital marketing company, understand that marketing is an interactive and dynamic process. Our team of internet marketing experts and SEO specialists in Kuwait will help you utilize the internet, electronic devices, search engines, social media, and other online channels to connect with potential customers.

What are you waiting for? Contact us today to transform your digital presence.