Guest column: Remarketing and its significance for brands

Guest column: Remarketing and its significance for brands

Remarketing

MUMBAI: Remarketing is a smart marketing strategy that enables brands to identify and target those specific customers who have visited the brands’ website but may not have made an immediate inquiry or purchase. They do, however, present an opportunity for a possible conversion, as they have already shown interest in the products and services by visiting the website. Remarketing also includes reaching out to the existing customers and retaining them by promoting various offers. It is a widely used strategy and one of the most popular ones in e-commerce today.

For this, brands would have to place a remarketing tag on their website. Though it is possible to place these tags on each and every page of their website, it makes more sense to have these tags placed on certain specific pages to target a specific type of customers. For instance, the customers who have abandoned their carts, the ones who have saved the products for later or have had any sort of interaction with the website qualify better for retargeting, as compared to others. When the customers visit these pages, which have the remarketing tag, a cookie will be placed in their browser. This cookie will trigger the ads and display them on other sites where they browse.

Brands can go a step further by using techniques such as dynamic remarketing and dynamic creative optimisation (DCO). Dynamic remarketing lets them dynamically target the customers as they browse the internet. Dynamically retargeted ads show content based on a customer's profile, such as the product that has been viewed or added to the cart.

DCO lets one dynamically change the elements of the ad creatives such as image, price, product description and call to action. It can also switch the ad copy that is being displayed. This increases the chances of customers zeroing in on that particular brand during the time of purchase, increasing the conversion rates.

In addition to dynamic retargeting and DCO, there are various other techniques for retargeting. One can use cross-device retargeting, which enables displaying the ads to a specific user across multiple digital devices such as mobiles, tablets, laptops and desktops. It enables brands to retarget an ad on one device, knowing that the customer has seen an ad or visited their site on another device. Multi-channel retargeting can also be used for displaying ads via different channels like banner, video or text.

Advertisers, however, have to be cautious. Retargeting involves the use of consumers’ data and, hence, advertisers have to consider the legal policies and data privacy regulations applicable in various regions across the globe. Thanks to recent developments, data privacy regulations are getting even more stringent in the European Union (EU) and this will affect the way and extent of retargeting that can be done in this region. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is all set to change the previous regulations and will impose more restrictions on companies for using the personal data without the consent of consumers residing in the EU. This can make the situation a bit tricky for advertisers. Brands will have to work their way around this cautiously.

Remarketing has multiple advantages which will help to boost up the marketing strategy. For instance, a majority of the website visitors leave without converting. But these are valuable customers for the business, and letting them go is a huge blunder. This is where remarketing comes in. It lets brands follow these potential customers on other sites and re-engage with them. Remarketing lets brands display highly relevant ads to an interested audience.

Instead of delivering ads to everyone, retargeting lets brands show ads only to the people for whom it is sensible. This actually helps to retain money in models like CPM, which are most commonly used. Also, remarketing is one of the best ways for customer retention. Acquiring new customers is always nice. But, it is important to bear in mind that it is also 7 times costlier than retaining the ones who are already aware of the brand.

Remarketing also helps to create a better brand awareness and brand recall. On an average, one only gets a fraction of a second of the customers’ attention span. It is difficult to make an impact on their minds in such a tiny sliver of time. Therefore, it is crucial that brands retarget them in order to create lasting impressions in their minds. This increases the chances of them coming back to them while actually making the purchase and directly reflects on the brands’ conversion rates. It increases the campaign effectiveness and can also improve the RoI.

Remarketing helps to target the visitors to a brand’s competitor sites as well. The ads are displayed when the customers are still in their search phase of the purchase cycle. The remarketing ads will be shown to the customers when they search a particular keyword. This also includes people who may visit a brand’s competitors’ websites that have returned results relevant to that brand’s products and services.

Retargeting is a largely beneficial marketing technique and it is highly recommended that brands employ this in order to obtain the array advantages it brings along. This is a simple technique but offers multi-fold returns.

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The author of the article is founder and CEO of Vertoz. The views expressed here are strictly his own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.

 

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