Zachary Paruch / 9 Mins Read
Updated: February 24, 2023
Do you wish to increase your conversion rates? One way to achieve this is by starting a remarketing campaign. Here are some tips to ensure high remarketing success.
Did you know that most online businesses only convert around 2% of their traffic? This means that upwards of 98% of your traffic – thousands of potential customers – visit your website and leave without buying or signing up for anything.
It doesn’t matter how much amazing content you develop or how great your SEO is. You could have thousands of visitors to your website every day, but if you aren’t converting them into leads, sales, or revenue, that traffic might as well be worthless.
So, how can you start converting more of that traffic?
One of the most efficient ways to increase conversion rates is to start a remarketing campaign. The word “remarketing” has been the source of some confusion over the past few years (thanks, Google!). Still, basically, it is an umbrella term that means to market again to potential customers who have already been exposed to your marketing efforts.
Remarketing strategies include offline methods (e.g., billboards and signage), phone, email, social media, and retargeting (targeted internet ads).
These strategies – particularly email remarketing and retargeting – can be very effective in increasing conversions for your online business but can also be difficult to understand and properly employ.
Below, we’ve compiled a list of four simple tips to help ensure your remarketing campaign is secure and successful.
Any form of effective online remarketing will require you to either collect the personal information of your customers or use tracking technologies – such as cookies – to monitor and “follow” them with ads across the internet.
State and international laws govern and pertain to these practices, which should be considered and complied with. Failure to comply with any of them could result in steep financial penalties.
You must understand these regulations and take steps toward achieving compliance.
Passed into legislation in 2003, CalOPPA is a state law that pertains not only to California-based online businesses but also those that can be accessed and used by the state’s residents. The law requires that any of these businesses which collect personally identifiable information from Californians include a privacy policy that describes these practices in detail.
Personally identifiable information includes personal data such as names, birthdays, email addresses, locations, and credit card information.
Any remarketing strategy that includes an email campaign will require the collection of email addresses, at the very least. Thus, any business undertaking such a campaign will be subject to CalOPPA.
Failure to comply with CalOPPA could result in fines of up to $2,500 per violation – meaning per user whose email address was collected.
Before planning any email remarketing campaign, be sure to have a privacy policy that describes your current information collection practices and those that you will use for your remarketing strategies.
The European Union adopted a new data privacy law in April of 2016 called the General Data Protection Regulation. This regulation will come into effect on May 25, 2018, and will completely change the privacy landscape of Europe – and that of the rest of the world – along with it.
The regulation will replace and extend the scope of the Data Protection Directive of 1995 and pertain to European businesses and any online business that serves European consumers. The legislation will require privacy as the default setting for online businesses with ties to Europe.
Suppose you are located in Europe, or your remarketing campaign possibly targets residents of Europe. In that case, you must post an extensive privacy policy on your website outlining who you are, how and why you collect personal information, what you will do with that data, and how long you will keep it.
Additionally, you must obtain “informed consent” before using cookies or other tracking technologies with your users. This means they must manually and actively agree to their use – implied consent will no longer be considered compliant.
Any ad retargeting campaign you employ (including Google Remarketing) will use cookies or pixel tags to track potential customers and display customized advertisements. According to the GDPR, this will require you to obtain informed consent from each and every visitor to your site before you are legally allowed to remarket to them.
It also means that you must post a thorough cookie policy on your website outlining your tracking technologies practices.
Failure to comply with the GDPR can result in fines of up to €20 million, or 4 percent of global annual turnover, so be sure to include a comprehensive privacy policy and a system by which users can provide you with their informed consent before you begin a remarketing campaign.
Not all customers are the same. They are invariably all at different places in their lives and in different stages of your conversion funnel – so why use a one-size-fits-all remarketing campaign for all of them?
Integral to the success of any remarketing campaign is your ability to properly identify, define, and segment your target audiences. If you understand your audience, communicating a message will be much easier and more effective – especially if the recipient views the message as relevant and helpful.
As a small business, you probably only cater to two or three distinct customer types. It is crucial to your campaign that you can identify them, where they shop or do their business, and where they fall within your conversion funnel.
Let’s say, for example, that you own an online store that sells and distributes krill oil. Krill oil is an extract from a species of Antarctic krill, and it is claimed that various health benefits are derived from its ingestion.
Visitors to your site can get there in any number of ways. For example:
These customers represent three distinct segments:
Using Adwords tracking, or other similar remarketing tools, you can create lists and segment audiences based on customer types. You can identify the specific pages these customer types tend to land on and assign and distribute customized ads based on them.
It’s important to remember to be dynamic in your segmenting. Despite surface differences between customer types, what really matters are the differences that affect conversions. Don’t be afraid to change things up a few times until you get the desired results.
Cart abandonment is the bane of online businesses. This is where a customer looks through your site, decides to add something to their cart and begins the purchasing process, and then ultimately decides to bail and leave your site altogether.
These customers are at the very end of your conversion funnel, but they still don’t convert for some reason. There may be many different reasons for this, and if your cart abandonment rates are especially high, you should analyze them to figure out why.
If your shopping cart abandonment rate is in the average range (60-80%), you should consider contacting those who have left without completing the purchase via email. Cart abandonment emails achieve, on average, a 29% success rate in recouping lost revenue and securing lost sales.
The complexity of such email remarketing strategies varies. When a customer abandons their shopping cart, an email is automatically sent which reminds them that they have yet to complete the purchase. This email may be a general reminder or contain precise information about related products – or even discounts for the items left in the cart.
Regardless, it is important to include a call to action (CTA) to allow them to complete their purchase within the email. If you don’t allow them to do so, you are essentially just nagging the customer, and you will likely turn them off entirely from completing their purchase.
Several companies out there offer cart abandonment email software, including Cartstack. This software is easy to use and will send out the appropriate email automatically, so you can recoup lost revenue without lifting a finger.
Email subject lines, content, and ad copy will make or break your remarketing campaign. While your online remarketing strategies will focus on reaching out to and connecting with previous users to increase customer retention and recoup lost revenue, it's equally crucial to ensure that your copy is conversational, snappy, and engaging but also adheres to specific ad copy best practices.
We’ve outlined several of these best practices for remarketing material copy below.
Most people receive tens – if not hundreds – of emails every day. If you’re like most, you probably don’t open half of them. Studies have shown that only 24.79% of emails are even opened.
This means that three out of every four emails are moved to the trash or are ignored without ever being opened by anyone!
So how can you make sure that your email gets opened?
The one thing you have control over in this situation is your subject line. You must make it compelling enough for the recipient (your potential customer) to open the email and see what’s inside.
The internet is filled with tricks and advice on increasing email click-through rates, but we’ve found that the best way is simple: grab people’s attention.
Everyone is different, but we’ve discovered that the following subject line strategies tend to grab users’ attention and optimize click-through and open rates. We’ve also provided a brief example of each strategy:
Optimizing the copy in your email subject lines will go to great lengths to ensure that your remarketing campaign has the best possible chance of success.
Now that you’ve won the battle for the customer’s attention and got them to open your email, you still have to get them to convert. This is where the content of your remarketing emails is crucial.
There are generally three types of remarketing emails you can use:
Although they are very different in purpose, they all rely on sterling copy to ensure the conversion.
It’s important to be casual and creative. People don’t want cookie-cutter, computer-generated text. They want to see personalized material that “speaks to them” as individuals and offers value (e.g., satisfies a need, provides a discount, or offers free shipping).
Incorporate jokes or puns into your copy. Consumers generally relate to humor. You can also offer discounts for completing their purchase or returning to buy additional items.
Again, the battle is won by grabbing their attention and offering value. Do this, and you will get more success in your email remarketing campaign.
Google makes remarketing through AdWords pretty simple. However, simply having ads on the pages people visit won’t necessarily get you conversions. Your copy also needs to entice them.
Similar to email subject lines – and the email content itself – the ad has to grab the user’s attention (noticing a trend?). Of course, there is an art to ad copy, and not everyone is good at it. However, there are a few tricks that can help you improve your copy almost immediately:
No one wants to read a wall-of-text advertisement. Ads are already borderline an annoyance for users. Reading paragraphs of text is another reason for them not to click on it. Limit your ads to one sentence – or two at a stretch.
This is ad copy 101. Capitalized words draw the eye towards them and are much more noticeable. They also appear stronger and exude a lot more confidence in their message.
Keep it fresh with buzzwords related to the product – or even just the popular parlance of the times (think “dank,” but not that).
This is also ad copy 101. You need to include images in your ads. People are inherently visual in that they direct their attention. Entertaining and creative images will work wonders to spark people’s interest.
As with any best practices advice, there are no universal secrets to success. It’s important to be dynamic and adaptable in your approach to remarketing. If something isn’t working, don’t hesitate to make changes and try different strategies.
Take notes and keep records. Perform A/B tests. Eventually, you will find the best method for you and your business.
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Zachary Paruch is a product manager and small business expert at Termly, where he helps to develop legal policy software for small businesses. When he’s not saving SMBs from lawsuits and financial ruin, he can be found playing soccer, binging a Netflix series, or getting a drink with some good friends.
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