What Is Remarketing

What is Remarketing

Remarketing is a marketing tactic that targets people who have previously engaged with your organization.

The most popular medium of remarketing is through ads. But it can also be done through email and messaging/chat bots.

How Remarketing Works

Have you ever browsed websites like Lazada or Galleon or MNLGrowkits then went back to Facebook only to see some of the products you were looking at show up as ads?

That’s remarketing at work.

You visited their website, browsed a few pages, but did not buy anything. You closed the browser. Hours later you opened Facebook. After a few scrolls, you see the items you were looking at show up there on your feed.

Why Is Remarketing Important

Using remarketing is one of the ways to achieve a higher ROI on ad spend because you are targeting people who are either engaged or interested with you already.

You’re not advertising to people who haven’t heard about you.

You already know they are engaged or interested because they went the extra action of clicking to your website — whatever marketing channel they came from (e.g. paid ads, organic, social, etc.). And if you’re using some advanced remarketing tactics (e.g. basing it on actions like add to cart instead of a simple page view), you can really create a targeted remarketing campaign.

Contrast that with how most marketers advertise today — they target ads based on demographics and location information.

In this type of advertising, people may or may not know you. Also, they may not be in the right stage of the buyer’s journey.

That is the reason why you spend a lot of money in this type of advertising (vs remarketing) because it’s a hit or miss.

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

– John Wanamaker

Don’t take this the wrong way.

Cold traffic advertising is also a viable tactic provided that you know what you’re doing. What that simply means is once you get the cold traffic, don’t expect them to buy right away.

You create remarketing campaigns to move them down the funnel — to make them take action like adding items to the cart, downloading stuff, checking out, or an actual purchase.

Should You Use Remarketing?

Most of the time, eCommerce stores utilize remarketing to promote their products with the goal of you purchasing one of their products.

But non-eCommerce stores can definitely greatly benefit by using remarketing.

Remarketing can be implemented in many ways. It does not have to be a “purchase” type of ad. It can be educational in nature (i.e. brand building)

For example, you can create remarketing ads for your most popular blog posts. Let’s say you are writing about a series on remarketing. To maximize readership, you remarket blog post 2 to the people who read blog post 1. Then, once you finish writing blog post 3, you remarket that to people who read blog post 2.

This way, your ads have a higher chance of better performance because you already know the people you are targeting are not only interested in that topic, but also know they actually read them.

So, if I were to implement one, I will be remarketing my 10 Commandments for Effective Digital Marketing. Or, I can also group the topics of my 1-Minute Marketing Videos (1MMVs) and remarket those.

Remarketing via Email

Like I said, you can do this via email too.

Instead of ads, you create an email (or a series). This is sent after the person performs a certain action or trigger.

For eCommerce stores, the most common is the cart abandonment email. Here’s how that works.

When you add some items to the cart but did not purchase, you get an email from them a few hours later reminding you to complete your order.

The trigger in this case is the non-completion of the purchase after adding one or more items in their shopping cart.

Another example is a “how can we help” email. The trigger would be when the person visits the knowledge base section of your website.

After their last session, you send them an email asking if they found what they were looking for. And that they can simply reply to this email if they have further questions.

This can then be supplemented with ads that display the same message (i.e. complete your order), but will show up on Facebook or on Google.

The only requirement for you to implement this is an email marketing software that allows you to integrate with others (or if you have a full marketing automation suite).

So, What Will You Do Next

I already shared how to do this in my post about how to create a lead nurturing campaign. The idea and the process is similar.n

Remarketing campaigns — whether done via email or ads — can increase your ROI. A simple cart abandonment email campaign can generate additional revenues by as much as 20%.

Since you are already using tools like an email marketing software or AdWords or Facebook Ads, it’s worth investing a couple of hours to set this up. It takes minimal work but the rewards are exponential.

What Is Organic Traffic

What Is Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is a source of traffic that comes from search engines like Google and Bing.

It is one of the default sources of traffic your website gets. If you’re not familiar, below is a list of the default channel groupings as recorded by Google Analytics:

  1. Organic
  2. Direct
  3. Referral
  4. Social
  5. Paid
  6. Email
  7. Others

Where does organic traffic come from?

Organic traffic comes from searches from search engines that leads to your website.

For example, when people type “email marketing statistics 2018” in Google, several results show up.

Google Search Email Marketing Statistics 2018

When people click on one of those searches — assuming it’s a post from your website — that’s when your analytics software records that specific traffic as an organic traffic.

Why is organic traffic important to digital marketers?

There are over 3.5 billion searches on Google per day. And that’s still growing.

And in the Philippines, there are over 67 million internet users. Imagine what a tiny slice of that traffic can bring for your organization.

Remember that the typical online conversion path starts with traffic. The traffic then become leads, then eventually customers.

All things being equal, the higher your website traffic, the more leads you can convert. And with more leads, you have more opportunities to sell to them.

Best Type of Traffic

Organic traffic is free.

In most cases, has both the highest conversion rates and return on investment. Assuming you continue to create quality content and not “game” the system, your organic traffic will just keep growing. These are the reasons why organic traffic is the holy grail of digital marketers.

Getting there, however, is another story. It is a mid- to long-term play — at least 6 months before you see some significant results. There is a lot of work involved. The only proven way to increase your organic traffic is to create content.

So, what are you waiting for?

Email Marketing Isn’t Limited to Newsletters

Email Marketing Isn't Limited to Newsletters

There is more to email marketing than newsletters. If this is the first time you’re hearing this, then great. You can easily make changes to your email marketing strategy.

There are 12 different types of emails you can send as a marketer. A newsletter is only one of them. So, if this is all you have, you’re only harnessing less than 10% of email marketing true potential.

1MMV 032 - Email Marketing Isn’t Limited to Newsletters

In addition, it is important to note that your newsletter may not actually be a newsletter. If it is ridden with content about your products/services, then that is not a newsletter.

You might think that this is just a play on words, but trust me, it’s not.

It is how global and successful organizations differentiate the marketing emails they send.

What does this mean for you?

Email marketing is not limited to newsletters.

If you believe that product/service discounts in your email marketing are the only content you can send, then you have to start looking outside your own organization and industry.

Subscribe to newsletters of other organizations. If they have email courses, enroll in one. Download some white papers or eBooks. See if they have some lead nurturing emails after that.

Study them. Analyze them. What do you like? What do you don’t like?

Lastly, and the most important one when doing this exercise, look at it from the perspective of the user in that specific context.

Don’t wear your marketer hat; otherwise, this will make you look at the wrong things.

Oftentimes, as marketers, we are enamored by what we see other marketers do. But we will never know for sure if they are bringing in results.

Just ask yourself, do you trust the quality of a brand that is always on sale?

(You have a couple of brands in your head right now, huh?)

While you may see a spike in revenues after a sale, do that long enough and you’ll train your customers to stop buying at regular prices.

You’ll end up having to discount over and over in order to reach the same revenue level. This is the same tactic used by majority of organizations — one of which I wrote about before. The company is now closed.

Do you want to follow in their footsteps? Or would you rather be different and have a better chance of being successful?