Out of sight, out of mind. Humans have limited attention spans - and it’s only getting worse. In 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. Today, it’s 8.25 seconds.

This has far-reaching ramifications for e-commerce. And, it leads me to today’s topic: retargeting.

Leverage Extensiv's solution for ecommerce success

To deliver an amazing customer experience, you need to engage and re-engage your target customer again and again. Engagement has to happen consistently across multiple platforms, devices and channels.

Read on to learn how you can deliver an amazing customer experience by retargeting the 70-90% of customers that may have forgotten how much they need, or want your products.

Why does customer experience matter?

A consistent customer experience helps your brand take hold in your market. Your brand is important because it’s the only thing that will save your message from being drowned out, over time, by the big players in your market.

46% of companies deliver poor cross-channel, online customer experiences.

Your tone, style and choice of topics you discuss on your blog and social media help to define your brand’s personality. If you’re witty and sarcastic on your Facebook page, but you are professional and stuffy on your blog, it’s going to be difficult for customers to connect with your brand at an emotional level.

Provide the people interacting with your brand with a steady, consistent tone and feeling. You want them to come back for more, instead of feeling confused or unsettled for reasons they can’t really explain.

 

Customer experience | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

Image: Source

 

Why is retargeting a critical aspect of the e-commerce customer journey?

The chart above shows some powerful e-commerce metrics. Even after you’ve fully optimized e-commerce web design, it’s completely normal for more than 70% of your potential customers (the people whose attention you’re slaving away for) to leave your site after reading what you have to say.

Sucks, right? But let’s turn that frown upside down. You can still win! It all comes down to what happens next - what do they see in the hours, days and weeks after bouncing off of your site?

If you can retarget them effectively, you’ll win back some of your abandoned baskets. And, you’ll help to juice your customer lifetime value (CLV).

 

Retargeting for CLV | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

Image: Source

 

How does retargeting work?

Ideally, a customer that leaves your site without purchasing will…

  • See your site prominently listed in the search results for other terms and keywords they’re typing into Google.
  • Like and/or follow your branded Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.
  • Experience targeted advertising through Google’s Display Network, based on the free cookie you gave them during their visit to your site.

The process of reminding them about your products, the ones you know they were already looking at, is known as retargeting. It works by delivering a consistent message that’s hyper-relevant to them, virtually everywhere they look online.

Best Retargeting Platforms

There are multiple channels and platforms for re-engaging a lost customer. Let’s dig a little deeper and find the most effective retargeting platforms for your site.

Facebook

Facebook Plan of Action | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

Facebook feels your struggle. Visitors that arrive at your site after clicking on a Facebook ad, but don’t complete a transaction, can easily be retargeted with the help of Facebook’s pixel.

This is a special cookie that Facebook created to interact with their platform - and if a Facebook user has one of your pixels, Facebook can present them with specialized follow-up ads that you create.

Click here to create a Facebook pixel and decide what it will do.

If you’re unfamiliar with the process of setting up or running Facebook ads to increase sales, I’d like to help you with that too! Here are the steps you should take:

1. Choose an Objective for your ad. This is what you want viewers to do as a result of seeing your ad in their newsfeed.

 

Choosing an Ad objective | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

2. Choose your audience by using Facebook’s targeting features. You can measure its effectiveness by adding a pixel, like the one we talked about earlier. You can see how focused your audience selection is with the help of Facebook’s Audience Definition gauge.

 

Choose your audience | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

 

3. Select placements for your ad on Facebook. For 99% of users, you can let Facebook take care of this with their automatic placement setting.

 

Select placements | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

4. Set a budget and schedule your ads based on the needs of your campaign, and your marketing budget.

 

Budget and schedule | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

5. Select a format for your ads. When they show up in Facebook’s various advertising channels, what information do you want to include, and how do you want it to be displayed?

 

Ad format | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

Congratulations, if you’ve hung with me this far, you have your first Facebook campaign up and running!

Google

 

 

Google’s Display Network uses cookies to understand where a site visitor has been. You can (and should) create audiences in Google AdWords to help maximize the ROI of your product ads. As a result, specific ads will be displayed to individuals that recently visited a particular page of your site.

 

Google ads | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

This is incredibly valuable because, based on their activity on your site, you know which specific products are of interest to them. You aren’t selling them on your entire catalog, but something they were already tempted to buy before.

AdRoll

AdRoll | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

Another advertising exchange that’s important to have in your marketing war chest is AdRoll. It’s specifically designed to help marketers retarget customers online across multiple platforms.

One of the reasons I recommend them is because of how they price their advertising - allowing for efficient, automated bidding for the perfect ad-slot at the lowest price possible. No matter where your customer goes online, AdRoll will be there to slip your ad into view.

Perfect Audience

Perfect Audience | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

Perfect Audience is another popular remarketing platform. It has better email integration than the other platforms.

You can read a full comparison of all the retargeting platforms here.

Retargeting Customers at the Top of Your Funnel

The funnel below offers a perfect illustration of how you should structure your online marketing. Retargeting should be customized, based on where your customer is in the marketing funnel.

Funnel remarketing | Retargeting: How To Create A Unified Customer Experience

At the top of your funnel, you need to trade free information that is of interest to your audience in return for their contact information. This establishes a way to communicate that doesn’t involve random (expensive) advertising - instead, you can send them a helpful message on-demand, right to their inbox.

Action Steps for Customers at the Top of Your Funnel

  • Your goal is to get them to sign-up for your marketing list and provide valid contact information.
  • Use an offer to entice your visitor to provide you with contact information - an exclusive guide or industry insights.
  • Your message needs to be that your visitor will learn more by interacting with your brand.

Retargeting Customers In the Middle of Your Funnel

Now that you have their contact information, it’s time to give them the information necessary to add your product to their cart. This shouldn’t be spammy, but it should be direct. How do you nudge them in the right direction?

“The first reflex shouldn’t usually be to give a discount though because you’ll often find that price is not the thing that’s preventing somebody from buying right now.

When you do abandonment surveys, you see it’s usually decision-making things.”

-Sam Mallikarjunan

Re-engage them by providing them with the decision-making tools (surveys, customer reviews, statistics, etc.) they need to confidently add your product to their cart.

Action Steps for Customers in the Middle of Your Funnel

  • Your goal is to get them to add your product to their online cart.
  • Gently pitch them with a subtle close that builds on the information you’ve provided them.
  • Focus your message on how your products will make their life better.
  • Avoid discounting at this stage. Focus on decision-making language.

Retargeting Customers at the Bottom of Your Funnel

This is where you turn up the heat. The customer is already on your mailing list, and you’ve given them the information necessary to purchase. Why are they still straddling the fence?

It’s time to push them into the checkout line. You can accomplish this by presenting these customers with time-sensitive offers that force them to make a decision. And, if that’s not enough, remind them of what they’ll miss out on by presenting customer testimonials and reviews.

You need them to be thinking: “This product is going to make my life better. If I wait, I’ll spend more for a product that I really want / need.”

Action Items for Customers at the Bottom of Your Funnel

  • Offer them a time-sensitive bonus or discount.
  • Message them directly with customer testimonials, examples of people like them enjoying the product and 3rd party reviews.

Retargeting Previous Customers

If a customer has already purchased from your store, it’s time to score that repeat sale. Deliver a great customer experience by offering prior customers exclusive discounts on products that compliment the items they’ve recently purchased.

By retaining just 5% of your customers, you can increase your e-commerce sales by 25%! When a customer makes a repeat purchase, they’re improving your site’s average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

This single e-commerce metric decides whether or not you can...

  • ...afford to invest in more expensive advertising campaigns that improve brand recognition.
  • ...lower your prices to really take it to the competition.
  • ...increase the quality and size of your customer service team.

Drive Revenue by Providing a Unified Customer Experience

The higher your CLV, as a result of repeat shoppers, the more aggressive you can be in delivering the customer experience your shoppers deserve - shutting out the competition.

Ready to put all of this new information into action? Sign up with Extensiv today to start retargeting customers with a consistent omnichannel marketing strategy.

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