When you are running an online business, you will probably be spending about a quarter of your budget on advertising. When it comes to marketing every penny spent is graphed against every penny earned. Hence, one cannot deny the importance of advertising as a marketing effort in driving people to your website. It is especially important for e-commerce businesses where advertising campaigns directly translate into cash.

How successful are your ad campaigns?

So, you ran an advertising campaign and it had a good reach as well. You have noticed that after running this campaign, your website is getting good traffic and the number of hits is certainly going up north. Since your ad campaign was meant to drive traffic to your website you might as well call this a successful one. However, the big question still remains – how many of the people that visited your website actually went ahead and bought something from you? If you do the math, you will see that 97% of them did not make a purchase. And that means your advertising campaign wasn’t all that fruitful.

Enter Retargeting ads

The reason why 97% left without buying from you is that this was the first time they met you. If they have to make a purchase, they must have that trust in you that comes from the feeling of knowing you. But since you too have spent money on these ads, when a visitor leaves without buying it’s a loss. This is where you deploy retargeting aka remarketing to get these customers back to your website. By showing the ads to the people who have been on your website before, you can re-engage with your audience. But before you can retarget these ads, there are a few more hiccups along the way.

• What time of the day will you post these ads?
• Will you create one common ad for all the customers – if not, how are you going to categorize and show them ads relevant to what their interests are
• What platform will you choose to retarget your ads?
• How will you track if your retargeting campaign is effective?

The answer to all these questions and the similar ones which arise is – marketing automation because the journey of the buyer is not so linear. Let us first have a look at an example of how marketing automation will help you with retargeting advertisements.

Pop-up Retargeting

This type of retargeting uses marketing automation to create pop-up ads for customers before they leave the website. It gives you a chance to engage with your customers while they are still interested in your products. This way, the conversion rate is actually higher as the customer is still on your website and you are basically tossing them a shiny little bait. By using marketing automation, you can study the customer’s behavior and set a trigger to spike their interest based on their activity by offering them a live discount or prompting them to leave their contact details so that you can send them better offers.

This seems interesting – what more can marketing automation do in terms of retargeting

To begin with, marketing automation can help you segment your customers based on their website activity so that when you retarget your ads, you show them the products which are relevant to their interest instead of again throwing your whole website in their face or showing irrelevant content. Marketing automation also helps you easily create lookalike audiences based on the segmentation of your visitor database.

Better Personalization and engagement

Marketing automation helps track browsing behavior based on which you have a better understanding of your customer’s needs. It is like personalized marketing software using which you can create better brand awareness and improve customer loyalty. You will be able to connect back with up to 84% of the lost audience by sending via marketing automation software – automatic emails for special occasions like a birthday or an anniversary. It also sends cart abandonment emails, reminders, and special offers such as a long time no see offers. It’s a great tool to help maintain contact with your customers without having to spend much time and money.

Align your content based on the customer’s lifecycle stage

Using marketing automation you can ma out different kinds of content. You can then align these to the specific stage in the lifecycle of a customer. You can then use different platforms to display this content; for example, on LinkedIn, you can display blogs and infographics, while Twitter and Facebook can be used for customers deeper in the funnel by showing like whitepapers, webinars, and case studies. This is especially for businesses that operate around the B2B model.

Tracking results

Marketing automation lets you define the objective of your retargeting ad while you are creating it. You can simply insert a UTM tracking code via which you can get detailed reports on clicks and conversions.

Depending on what the needs of your company are, you can choose different kinds of marketing automation software to help with your retargeting campaign in the form of social remarketing, look-alike retargeting, programmatic video and buying, mobile ad buying, geo-targeting, discovering new marketing channels, etc. as per your needs.

The thing about retargeting your ads using marketing automation is that you can create highly personalized (because personalization has become such an important concept in marketing) ads. It helps you get better click-through rates and thus conversion. You can dramatically increase your sales revenue by sending the right message at the right time. In other words, retargeting is a gift to the marketing community and marketing automation is your coupon to avail of this gift.