As a marketer, you know that your main job is to connect the right product to the right customer. It doesn’t matter if you are trying to increase your company's brand awareness, sell more swimming pools, or get more registrations for your latest online course about cooking. It boils down to connecting the right person to the right solution. Simple in theory, but much more complex in reality.
If you’ve been in a digital marketing for a while, the chances are that you had been using lead scoring and personas to understand your customer base better. Lead scoring is important for selecting the right leads to be contacted by your sales department and personas for getting a better understanding of your ideal customers. Needless to say, content personalization combined with personas is the ultimate marketing weapon!
Why Should I Bother with Retargeting?
Knowing your customer base as much as possible is the first step in the digital marketing puzzle. However, your ideal group of customers will always be just a group. They will tend to behave in a similar way and have more or less common patterns, but they are still unique individuals. So, even if you try to address them all, you will never get the same reaction from each of them. Never!
Furthermore, there will always be some other factors that will influence your campaign results. For example, someone could be on holiday at the time you send them an email or they could be busy ensuring their upcoming wedding is the best wedding ever. All these kinds of potential reasons may affect your campaign message in some way and lower the conversion rate. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are not interested in your product or service, they just might be too busy at that moment!
So, if you want to increase your campaign’s conversion rate as much as possible, retargeting your customers is the way to go. In Kentico 10, this can be easily achieved when creating email campaigns.
But before I continue further, let me emphasize what retargeting is not: It is not spamming your whole customer group with repetitive emails. It is exactly the opposite: each subsequent campaign email is sent to an increasingly unique group of your customers.
Let’s Retarget!
Retargeting can be approached from many different angles and used in endless ways. It is up to you how you leverage it and how much you use its potential.
Let’s say that you own a business that sells outdoor drones. After years of research and tests, your development team is happy to introduce this new and unique product: An amphibious selfie drone that can take selfies above and under water!
As you have a decent base of subscribers subscribed to your general newsletter, you decide to create an email campaign as an addition to your main campaign to promote your new drone. Your main campaign’s objective (conversion) will be the purchase of the drone.
The first campaign email is quite straightforward and is aimed at all your subscribers subscribed to your general newsletter. In Kentico 10, you are allowed to add only contact groups as the recipients of the email campaign. So, you need to create a condition-based contact group first and then set it as a recipient of the email campaign. The macro rule for the contact group is very simple:
Contact is subscribed to the specified newsletter
You ensure that the email body contains the correct UTM tagged link leading to your landing page (so you can track the campaign), set the contact group as a recipient of the campaign email…
…and send it.
When done, you decide to wait one week. Then you check the campaign results in the Campaigns application and find out that some purchases were made through the email campaign, indeed! However, their number is much lower than the open rate of the email. This is because not everyone clicked the link in the email. Therefore, it’s time to retarget those subscribers!
You decide to offer a 10% discount to those that opened the email but didn’t click the link and haven’t bought the drone, yet. You create a new condition-based contact group that will contain those specific subscribers (contacts). You use the following set of macro rules to select the right candidates:
Contact has opened the specified marketing email
AND
Contact has not purchased the specified product
AND
Contact has not clicked a link in marketing email
This way, you can target those that were curious enough to open the first email but didn’t click the link (didn’t visit the landing page) and therefore didn’t have a chance to buy the drone.
So, let’s create a second campaign email, set the newly created contact group as its recipient and send it!
Once again, you wait one week and then go back to the Campaigns application to check the campaign results. You find out that some of the retargeted subscribers did buy the drone! But you still think that the campaign could do better. Therefore, you decide to retarget those that clicked the link in the second email but didn’t buy the drone and offer them a time-limited 20% discount. You create another condition-based contact group (using a similar set of macro rules as in the previous one), set it as a recipient of the third campaign email and send it.
After a week, you check the campaign results once again. And you can see that a part of your retargeted subscribers really did purchase the drones!
Be Creative and Leverage Retargeting!
Retargeting is a great way to increase your revenue and improve your sales. Its main purpose is to focus on those that took the first step but didn’t follow through. You can encourage them to continue in the buying process by offering them something special, as they might need just a little nudge to finish the purchase (or any other campaign conversion).
You can also focus on those that didn’t take any action at all and try to approach them with a different offer. However, it is much easier to focus on those that already took the first step as there is a big chance they need very little to become your happy customers.
Have you used retargeting before? Let us know in the comments!