How Personalized Retargeting Drives Conversions and Loyalty

Digital marketing is not only about driving traffic to your website. You need to convert visitors into customers and build customer loyalty.

97 out of 100 visitors will leave an average e-commerce store without converting. This is where retargeting comes into the picture. Using retargeting, you can display relevant ads to visitors and re-attract them to your site. But it’s important to personalize the messages we show. Luckily, most retargeting platforms make that possible. We can even display to them the products they were checking out in our store.

Personalized retargeting is a must have for all stores – not only in the online world. Think about it: in a physical store, employees do the same. When you try to find the perfect pair of shoes and you already tried 10 of them and you’re tired and not sure what you want, they won’t let you leave without the perfect shoes. Instead, they include a personalized, in-person retargeting: “How about giving another try to the first one? I think it looked amazing on you.”

You basically need to do the same while using retargeting – either its onsite or offsite retargeting.

What’s the difference?

Offsite retargeting: Today’s most popular pay-per-click platforms, Facebook and Google AdWords, provide high-tech offsite retargeting (or remarketing) solutions with advanced targeting options. Both of them allow you to show specific ads to past visitors, including highly-targeted ads for visitors who have visited the cart page on your website. It is a powerful way to remind your visitors about the items they have abandoned, while they are browsing the Internet outside of your website and social channels.

Onsite retargeting: Onsite retargeting is designed for re-marketing to visitors before they leave your site. Like Facebook and Google re-marketing ads, you get a second chance to recover abandoning visitors. However, unlike traditional re-marketing, your offer is displayed while your visitors are still on your own site.

Now let’s see the most effective techniques to display personalized retargeting messages that drive conversions and loyalty.

How do you use retargeting to drive conversions and loyalty?

Retarget visitors who leave without buying

The main goal of retargeting is to get visitors who left without purchasing back to your site. You can easily achieve that by segmenting your audiences into several re-marketing lists.

You can create re-marketing lists for each product category in your store. This kind of list building will help you to personalize your re-marketing ads, since now you know what they are interested in.

In many cases, visitors leave without buying because of the unexpected or high costs. Those people who visited your product pages already showed some interest in your products, so it’s worth considering to retargeting them while offering free shipping or a discount like ShopBop did in the example below.

Retarget customers within a certain time period

If you sell products that customers are likely to re-purchase within a certain time period – for example, contact lenses – you can create a re-marketing list for them. Ask yourself: How long does the product usually last? If it lasts for 30 days, then create two re-marketing lists:

• One list for customers who have purchased in the last 30 days,
• One list for customers who have purchased in the last 60 days.

Then, create a custom combination list and target customers who probably need to reorder the products. They will probably be even grateful for the reminder.

Save cart abandonment

Decreasing the cart abandonment rate is an important goal for every online store. One of the most effective ways to save cart abandoners is to display an onsite retargeting message to them.

As people click-hop through sites, they can easily forget that they signed up for an offer, and they can also forget that they put an item in their cart. That’s why a simple notification can work well in some cases. But you can improve your results by providing an extra incentive like in the example below.

Promote VIP offers to your customers

If you would like to get more repeat customers, it’s worth taking the time to retarget customers. Offering exclusive and VIP offers to them is a great strategy to increase conversion rate. For example, you can reward them by offering a loyalty discount.

Create re-marketing lists that only contains your existing customers, then create special ads for them.

Promote complementary products

Your existing customers are more likely to be interested in complementary products you offer than new ones, so you should cross-sell to them using retargeting ads.

Create a re-marketing list of visitors who purchased a specific product and promote a product to them that’s related to the one that has been bought already.

Use third-party data for enhanced personalization

When trying to create a better experience on your site and provide more enhanced personalization, integrating third-party data can be extremely powerful. Third-party data is the information that is purchased from data aggregators. Using third-party data you can gain better insights into your customer’s past purchases, interests and more. There are many providers selling a wide variety of data around the world, so look around and choose the one that fits best for your company.

Retargeting can be extremely effective to drive more conversions to your online store, and also to build customer loyalty. Not only because you get a second chance to connect with your visitors, but also because you can create relevant messages for them. It might take some time to create as many different audiences and messages as needed, but believe me, it’s worth it.

Try to craft more creative and more personalized retargeting messages. Don’t forget that the more customized they are, the more effective they will be.

About Csaba Zajdo

Csaba Zajdo is an e-commerce specialist, founder of OptiMonk and several other projects specializing in conversion. OptiMonk is an award-winning onsite retargeting platform, which helps small and medium-sized businesses leverage the power of onsite retargeting. If it has to do with conversion optimization and eCommerce, Csaba is interested. He’s always looking for the best and brightest and he’s constantly on the lookout for game-changing solutions. Csaba has been involved with web marketing including search, lead generation, e-commerce, CRO, PPC, and analytics for over 10 years. He is also a frequent presenter at seminars and conferences.