How to double your eCommerce sales with retargeting

If you own an online business, you will know the critical role of advertising in driving traffic to your website. However, not all the viewers will purchase products on your eStore for the first time that they arrive. There are various reasons to explain their actions. They may not be assured to buy something when they are not aware of the brand in mind, or they get distracted before completing a purchase.

Store owners will not have a chance to convert this kind of visitor to your customers if you do not have any marketing strategy to bring them back to your store. This is why retargeting does appear. This blog will give you more information about the retargeting strategy.

What is retargeting in eCommerce?

Retargeting or in another name remarketing is a marketing strategy that reminds the targeted audience about your brand or products to generate an action. The target audience is the people who have already entered your sales leads.

In some instances, they are your customers who completed the purchase. In others, they are the visitors who just go halfway through the buying process or take some actions like subscribing. 

For those who purchased on your eShop, retargeting will continue to introduce other products to them, which can help bring them back to the next purchase.

For the people who are still not willing to open their wallets and abandon their shopping cart, retargeting will remind them of the product or offer a discount code to push them to complete their purchase.

Retargeting can be done in various forms like running ads, via email marketing campaigns, establishing loyalty programs, sending SMS reminders, or browser notifications. In the next part, we will discover how retargeting works so that store owners can make a detailed plan before implementing it. 

How does retargeting work?

Store admins put a piece of coding on their website, which may know under the name “a pixel”. This code is unnoticeable to the web searchers and does not affect the performance of the site. When a visitor arrived at your online store, the code creates an anonymous browser cookie. 

Later, this viewer browses the website; the cookie will let the retargeting provider know when to serve the ads. The advertising will be ensured to be displayed to only people who have visited your website before. 

We can summarize the workflow of retargeting below.

Once potential customers click your website but drop their checkout process or complete the purchase, later they surf the web to read an article or listen to music, they will start to see your ads. It will remind them of the exciting stuff that you offer and bring them back to your site when they decide to purchase. 

Awesome statistics about retargeting

• Using the retargeting strategy helps increase the conversion rate of your store up to 43% based on the Criteo resource.

Before purchasing, customers often research by browsing various websites to decide which one is suitable for them. The retargeting, by displaying the ads, can attract their eyes and bring them back to your store. If they spend more time on your website, you will have more chances to convert them to your customers.

• More than 90% of marketers admit that retargeting performs as well as or better than search, email, and other displays, and 70% of marketers use retargeting for brand awareness.

This statistic is collected according to the survey of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) by getting the responses of 1000 marketers. 

• 68% of marketing agencies and 49% of brands spend their money on displaying the ads of retargeting.

The Chango study indicated that 68% of agencies are choosing to move their budget into retargeting while 49% of brands do that.

• 30% of people had a positive reaction to retargeting ads, while 11% had a negative one.

Following the statistics, around 30% of customers agreed with retargeting ads, 11% do not like it. The most significant percentage, which is 59% had a neutral reaction.

7 Best practices to boost your eCommerce sales with retargeting 

1. Create content retargeting

Visitors may not make a real purchase when they navigate to your website for the first time. They might just look at your products or blog to understand more about your business and leave your site. To bring them back, a content retargeting is significant. 

The content retargeting has the role in reminding the target audience’s mind about your brand name, product, or service to bring them closer towards conversion.

It can be in various forms like a blog post, which is related to articles that visitors have looked at, or a free ebook that they can download when subscribing. No matter what your business does, you need to make sure that the content that you offer needs to have highly valuable information. Viewers can use this information, and they will appreciate your brand awareness, so the rate to come back to your store will be higher.

2. Try social media retargeting

When someone leaves the website without purchasing, store owners can retarget them on social media such as Facebook. The viewers will see the ads related to the product that they abandoned on the social media platform that they are surfing. 

For example, if someone searches for a watch to buy, but then they drop their cart due to lack of time to purchase at that moment. After that, when they are surfing on Facebook, they will see the ads of this kind of product, which reminds them. They can come back and purchase it.

3. Use video retargeting

Making a video is more complicated than other types of content retargeting. However, videos are a powerful tool to capture attention and drive traffic and increase engagement of your store. Youtube is a great platform that you can create your video retargeting as it has a broad audience. 

For instance, if someone navigates to your website and finds a variety of products. His shopping behaviours are captured at each event by using tracking pixels. When he leaves your website and starts surfing on the internet, video ads will be shown depending on where he is browsing. The video can display products that he is interested in or new other products that he may like or want to discover.

4. Try a retargeting app

One of the right ways that you can apply to make the retargeting strategy is using a retargeting app. Whatever platforms that you are using, there will be various apps that can help you to do the remarketing plan more effectively and more comfortable. 

Nowadays, Shopify is one of the most popular platforms that many store owners select to start their online business. Many useful retargeting apps are available on the Shopify store. These apps support business doers to increase their sales, getting more traffic by product ads exchange or capturing visitors’ attention to turn visitors into the lead via social media like Facebook ads or Instagram ads.

From tons of available apps for retargeting reviews on the market, there are around 14 apps that are the best for retargeting. They include free and paid modules. Store owners may try applying these apps to help increase the conversion rate of their site.

5. Retarget prior customers

Focusing on repeat customers is one of the most effective ways to increase sales instead of trying to attract new clients. For this reason, setting up some retargeting campaigns for customer retention is a useful marketing strategy. 

By segmenting your customers based on their last purchase or their average orders, you can offer some types of incentives like discount codes, or free shipping to encourage customers to click the ads and come back to your store to purchase. 

6. Adjust the frequency of retargeting ads

The most significant percentage (59%) of people have a neutral reaction with retargeting ads if you do not overdo it. If the ads pop up frequently on the browser when customers are surfing on the internet, it will have a negative impact on the relationship between your brand and customers. Because they may get frustrated when viewing so many times of your popup.

7. Recapture abandonment

Around 88% of web surfers drop their online shopping cart without completing the checkout process according to the statistic of Forrester. There are various reasons for abandoned carts like a desire to compare with other shops with lower prices, shipping costs, not ready to purchase yet.

If you do not take any action to remind these potential consumers, you may lose the chance to convert them to your customers. Using abandoned cart emails or pop-up ads to remind them when they browse the website is a retargeting solution that many shop owners apply.

There are various apps about Abandoned Cart Recovery which help store admin on different platforms. For online shops that use the Shopify platform, they may refer to the 27 Best Abandoned Cart Recovery apps. It includes free and paid modules with a variety of features to reduce abandoned cart rates, send automatic emails with the action links.

Final thoughts

To sum up, retargeting can help turn the data of potential customers into an action advertising strategy. Retargeting delivers information about the desired products that consumers are interested in. It may not cause frustration to customers and also help store owners to take the chance to convert these web surfers to their customers.