I'll Be Back! Words You Want Every Customer To Say

Just like Arnold playing The Terminator your customers should come back. Having people who have purchased from you before come back to spend money with you again is a goal for most eCommerce stores.

This article applies to online eCommerce stores mainly, but the principles can be applied to service based businesses none the less.

"We spend more ?? to acquire a new customer than we do any existing & returning customer, so we need to put focus on servicing our existing customers" - Jordan Fogarty CEO and founder of Be Media.

I agree with Jordan 100%. It makes complete sense to provide great products and the level of service an existing customer already knows you for. Every online store should have a 3 stage approach to your marketing sales acquisitions strategy.

The importance of consistent revenue coming in is critical, the new sales are what helps you grow ...IF YOU continue to sell to and service your existing audience.

Here are 3 important audience segments to focus on for growth:

1. Engage current active customers
2. Reengage people who have been in contact with your brand
3. Attract and convert new customers

If you can keep your existing audience engaged and purchasing your store products then you have a solid baseline to build on. Taking a wide net and throwing it over the store visitors that visited but got away will help bring them back to your store. Create a full circle marketing strategy by incorporating retargeting Ads into your marketing tactics.

Another tactic is to ReMarket your store and products to people who visited your website or to be MORE SPECIFIC and target the exact product they viewed back to them again. To really spike their interest you can add a specialised message, offer or discount just for them.

This tactic when deployed effectively will result in more people returning to your store, more people purchasing from an abandoned cart and more return website traffic that equals a really good signal to the Google factory.

This all works together to become a very powerful tactic that brings people back and increases your overall sales revenue. People do come back and buy, you just need to prompt them.

The biggest holiday periods are fast approaching with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas holiday period fast approaching. These holidays SHOULD be earmarked on every online stores marketing and promotions calendar months in advance. Plans must be created with time to brief creative work in and for marketing teams to implement the campaigns.

4 Most Popular Places for Retargeting

1 Google Display Network

2 YouTube

3 Twitter Tailored Audiences

4 Facebook Advertising

These four platforms are the most popular places to advertise for retargeting right now this may change and there are many more to showcase your ads on but these work the best.

The year 2020 is the year that eCommerce matured into mainstream.

How Do We Engage Current Active Customers?

1 You keep your social media profiles active with a mix of fun, informative and promotional content.

2 Run competitions, giveaways, quizzes and share to win style campaigns. People love free stuff and to be acknowledged by a brand they follow.

3 You keep a structured email schedule to deliver email blasts on strategic dates that align with holidays and known buying positive happenings, trends and historical data.

The idea is to appeal to them in the moment. Even the Terminator checks his emails for the latest deals.

How Do We Reengage People Who Have Been In Contact With Our Brand?

You run ReMarketing campaigns to get back in front of those people who visited your website and left without buying. You can use very advanced segmentation to seperate people who visited the home page verse people who viewed the specific product pages.

The classic coupon code for a discount works, and in some extremes offering two for one works if your margins allow it.

How Do We Attract & Convert New Customers?

My standard response is that you hire an advertising professional who can get your brand in front of the people who you know are your best audience. You need to pay to play in this space, there are no free rides unless you invest in an SEO service but for fast leads you need paid advertising like what is offered here.

You make sure that you have some form of lead capture form, pop up or email capture on your website. This helps catch the people who are not ready to buy right now. These people need more convincing or want to do some deeper research into your brand and price points.

These people can be converted if you send them emails with promotions, success stories, helpful "how to fix abc" type emails and lots of gifs people are enjoying the gifs.

Fact There is a movement of young shoppers who visit stores and add products they want to their cart to then leave the store without buying. But why?

The concept is simple. They know how marketing works. They do it just to get the ReMarketing sales sequence of brands they follow. Usually this is a discount coupon, 2 for 1 code, share to unlock deals and better sales offers than coming in and buying the product straight away.

This is pretty important to know. Now you can see why ReMarketing is a big part of eCommerce sales and the buyer journey. Retargeting is a good tactic Arnold understands this.

Now the lowdown for business owners is by using a ReMarketing strategy you can:

1 - Bring back people who were already interested in buying but want a better deal.

2 - Increase overall conversion rates with higher ReMarketing impressions for your store by bringing back people who are more likely to purchase.

3 - Reach 70% more people across the internet in your targeted geo locations thanks to the Google Display Network and Facebook's Ad Network.

4 - Increase repeat visitors by 50%, boost conversions by 51% and increase time on site by 300%*!

5 - Help SEO efforts big time by bringing back returning visitors to your store helping Google and other search engines see your store as a popular place for shoppers to hang out.

This is a winning combo!

How Does Retargeting Work?

On most sites, 92% of visitors leave without buying or converting. Some may sign up to your email list because they are interested but not ready to buy yet. We still like the ones who sign up by email, we can convert them later on.

Retargeting helps you get back in front of and win back the visitors who came to your store but left empty handed. Using this tactic you can turn people from visitors into customers or at least email subscribers that you can promote other items down the track.

Lets simplify all this nerd talk

Arnold visits your website, looks at the camo cargo pants. he scrolls a bit then adds x3 pairs of cargo pants to his cart.

Arnold didn't like the cost of shipping to the California from your Sydney warehouse so he leaves your website. Hasta la vista baby!

While Arnold was on your store you have placed a little bit of cookie dough on his computer signal (footprint) and now know a bit about him. The browser cookies are critical for us to make this happen.

Later that night Arnold was searching for some bazooka's and spare tank parts and on the website he was visiting he sees your Advert for camo pants in XXL. Thanks to the browser cookies we can now reach Arnold on that website.

He like this because you have a special deal just for Arnold. The deal available to Arnold only if he takes action now is that he gets 5% off his total order price if he comes back and buys now.

Well Arnold doesn't need to think twice about this, he acts and he clicks on your Advert to return to your store and lands on the camo cargo pants page where he continues his purchase journey.

You just made Arnold a very reasonable offer and he liked it enough to purchase regardless of the shipping costs. He saw a saving on the price and took the bait. You successfully brought Arnold back.

Thats retargeting in a nutshell. The power of browser cookies, some Ad creative and a compelling sales offering just helped you sell 3 pairs of cargo pants.

The key to retargeting is, it’s MUCH easier to advertise and sell to people who already like you vs. brand new customers. In our case Arnold already knew about your store.

3 Types of Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads can be used at all stages of your sales funnel.

To simplify things, there are three main types of retargeting ads I recommend running:

1. Direct sales ads
2. Lead generation ads
3. Content ads

Content Retargeting Ads

Content ads push viewers to a helpful article on your site. There’s no sale to be made, or sign-up for an email list as your end goal. A good use case for a content ad is if you just published a new blog post and you want to make sure past visitors don’t miss out.

Content marketing is IN, if you are not playing the content marketing game think it over. Ecommerce stores that took part in content marketing and targeted products and releases with a content plan saw a 48% increase in sales from blog style content.

We want people to sign up for our email list as well this helps us grow our audience. This is a great long term strategy and thanks to the power of browser cookies we can reach people just about anywhere online.

Lead Generation Retargeting Ads

These still work pretty well. Lead generation ads can be direct links to a free download form for a beauty cream test kit, software trial, or even just a link to your email newsletter subscription page.

No matter how you aim to generate leads, the key is to create something of VALUE for your customer (and help them solve a problem) with your free product or software. 

Direct Purchase Retargeting Ads

Direct purchase ads retarget users with the goal of bringing them back to your product purchase page. With these ads, you want to get people to click on your ad and take a next step through your funnel to purchase.

It can be best to target these ads at users you already have a fairly strong relationship with: for example, those on your mailing lists.

Even better, you can offer a percentage off coupon for users who finish their checkout. For example, if a user comes to your site, sees a product, and then abandons your site, you can serve them ads for a discount on the product.

Here are some Audience Segmentation Types To Use

This is starter level easy

1 Homepage viewers

This is a list built upon the most broad interaction a person can have with a business website. This is anyone that views your home page, after clicking through from your email signature, social media profiles, business listings, basically anywhere on the web you have listed, promoted and advertised your main url, which goes straight to your homepage.

Ad Creative: Use a generic brand focused banner for this type of targeting.

2 Category Page Viewers

This list and strategy, works especially well for multi-product category collections mainly eCommerce. Can work for service based businesses as well but best suited for eCom. You might not do this for all categories and instead only do it for your top 6 product categories. People in this list have shown interest in a particular product category like "Side by Sides" for example.

Ad Creative: The type of banner creative and messaging for this type is to keep it relevant to the categories that you are promoting. You also need seperate ReMarketing lists per category do not bundle them all together as one big collection of assorted categories.

Tip: A logical next step when someone does purchase from the above adverts is to setup an exclusion list for users that enter the purchase funnel. We must not overlap our ReMarketing Lists+ReMarketing Ad Banners. When someone buys they then become excluded from our ReMarketing Adverts.

3 Specific Service, Product, Offer or Landing Page viewers

This is the really powerful type because it is so specific to what the visitor was looking at and wanting to purchase. All the visitor needs to do is land on this page from an email promotion, social media post or Google search and we can cookie them and ReMarket to them later on.

Ad Creative: This should be very specific to the product. You wont do this for all products but in our example the product is a high ticket purchase so we can do it per product because the revenue that is generated is well worth our time to invest in this targeting. It should speak to special discounts or offers that resonates with your audience to take immediate action.

4 Shopping Cart Abandoners

This image is a bad example, but I really wanted to get a picture of Arnold and his tank into this article.

We talked about these people earlier and they are still a good audience to pursue. They have shown interest and intent to buy but didn't for some reason. All we need to do is prompt them to come back.

Ad Creative: Should have the product on the banner and a call to action being either a discount or coupon for coming back and spending with you. You can be a little cheeky with the messaging here as well, people come back if you can make them laugh (If that is on brand).

5 Past visitors that have already converted

These are the visitors that bought from your site, who are now customers OR they took a conversion action, such as submitting their contact info in a lead form. They have already given you money for something and believed in your brand, they are the perfect audience to bring back to your store.

Ad Creative: Showing similar products to what these customers have already purchased works. You can also display products that bundle or are the latest version of abc product so that the audience will resonate with the product latest model, newest style and have an understanding of that product already as they own a similar one already. Branding is a good signal for these ads.

Now A Section for the Paid Traffic Nerds

Pixel-Based Retargeting vs. List-Based Retargeting

In order to successfully run retargeting campaigns, you first need some data to help you identify who you’re going to retarget. This might take a few days or weeks depending on how much website traffic you get.

There are two main types of data used in retargeting campaigns:

• Pixel-based
• List-based

Pixel-Based Retargeting

Pixel retargeting is the most popular type of retargeting. The data is solid and you can get a lot of it when its setup.

It works like this:

1. Arnold visits your website
2. A tracking pixel leaves a cookie in the Arnold's browser
3. When Arnold leaves your site, you can retarget ads to him using a retargeting platform like Google or Facebook

All the big brands are doing this. How did they get so big? it wasn't just brute force selling on Google they had a full circle targeting strategy in place to capture even more of the market.

List-Based Retargeting

You can also create retargeting campaigns targeting people who are currently on your email list, or targeting email addresses of current customers. Once you have a list of either your current customers or email subscribers, here’s how you specifically set up list-based retargeting works:

1. You upload a list of email addresses
2. You create an Ad you’d like to target towards these users
3. The ad platform serve retargeting ads just to users who match the email addresses you uploaded

You probably guessed it, This is not point and click simple. You can do it if you invest in the time to learn it but you can save time and hire people to do it for you.

With an understanding of how to target your customers, the next step is understanding where to target your customers. Thats the advertising help that you need to make your store more successful than ever.

Thats how you make every customer come back to your store and buy from you. Put it to work and get those sweet holiday product orders rolling in.

#retargeting #remarketing #arnold #terminator