Imagine someone who doesn’t know you and your company yet, visits your website for the first time and buys one of your products straight away. That would be the dream scenario, right?
Unfortunately, things don’t always go so smoothly. Customers getting distracted during the buying process. This is a well-known problem in online retail.
Users come to your site and leave after a few seconds or minutes without having bought anything. It’s important to remember that not all visitors who land on your website are automatically at the same point in the buying cycle.
Importance of remarketing and retargeting your visitors
For first-time visitors, the current average website conversion rate is around 2%, which means that 98% of potential customers leave without making a purchase. If visitors are further along in the buying cycle, products can even be added to the shopping cart before they change their mind and leave the site.
Still, all of these visitors have a common interest in what you’re offering on your site, no matter what stage they’re in, so it’s important to keep these customers in mind.
And how do I do that, you ask yourself? Through remarketing! Addressing the user again to remind them of your offer. We explain what this method is all about and how it differs from classic retargeting.
The terms remarketing & retargeting are often used synonymously, but there are some differences between the terms. We’ll explain it to you very simply in our article!
Use case: How Amazon uses remarketing
You’ve probably already put a product in your shopping cart on Amazon, but in the end, you left the site without making a purchase. You may have noticed that Amazon immediately sent you an e-mail with the product from your shopping cart that you did not purchase.
What a nice and considerate gesture from the shopping giant, one might think.
But at this point we have to disappoint you: The mail in your mailbox was no coincidence and certainly not an attentive idea of the nice employee who noticed the product in your shopping cart.
That email was the painful remarketing Amazon used to knock on your door to see if you might still want to buy the targeted product – after all, the product made it into your shopping cart.
Remarketing aims to send potential customers a reminder e-mail after a defined interaction – such as typically leaving the shopping cart without buying a product – and thus encourage them to buy or convert. After all, these users already showed tendencies to make a purchase or conversion.
And while you may laugh after this notice and think which people should react to such banal remarketing emails, Amazon has already sent out thousands of emails to shopping cart abandoners and contributed to the conclusion of countless product purchases at this very second.
Remarketing: Increase in sales without additional costs
But Amazon is not the only one that works successfully with targeted remarketing techniques: as early as 2015, more than a quarter of the 1000 top-selling companies worldwide used remarketing – the numbers are now much higher.
Finally, as the most successful remarketing technique, sending emails to cart abandoners not only increases sales but also reduces the chance that a potential customer will seek their purchase or service needs from a competitor. And who likes to support their own competition?
The advantages of remarketing are obvious: Automated e-mails encourage potential customers in their intention to buy and this without additional expenditure. In this way, remarketing campaigns not only increase your sales, but above all your ROI as well – after all, every conversion means more income with no additional expenditure.
Appreciation from customers
Don’t worry: Your customers have no problem with remarketing mails – on the contrary. According to an AgilOne study conducted in English-speaking countries, over 40% of remarketing recipients between the ages of 25 and 34 welcome the attention given to them by remarketing techniques.
In short: remarketing not only effectively increases your sales without an additional advertising budget, but also the appreciation of your customers. A classic win-win situation.
But what is the difference between remarketing and retargeting?
What is the difference between remarketing and retargeting?
The terms remarketing and retargeting are often used interchangeably. But if you pay closer attention, these do not mean the same thing, although they are very similar.
Just like remarketing, retargeting is about addressing website visitors again at a later point in time – mostly via ads. The difference, however, lies in the determination of the two methods.
With retargeting, they address ALL people who have visited your website. It doesn’t matter how long the individual users stayed there and what content they dealt with. As a rule, the same advertisement is played out to all these people.
Remarketing, on the other hand, records what the visitor was specifically interested in on your website. This information makes it possible to address him later in a very targeted manner with an individually adapted advertisement.
For example, if a user has looked at your products in online store, they can then be shown an ad with your best products. If he has already put something in the shopping cart when he visits the website, you can show him this product again – for example in combination with a discount code.
Which method you use depends on the individual situation. Of course, you can use both ways just as well, since they can complement each other very well.
Create awareness with your interested audience with retargeting, and then use remarketing to engage customers in the latter stages of the buying cycle.
Another important difference between remarketing and retargeting
The difference between the two methods lies in the strategy used. Both aim to reach previous visitors to your shop and ultimately guide them back to your website.
Retargeting uses cookies to place advertisements such as Google Ads with potential customers. Remarketing, on the other hand, is based on email marketing.
This means that e-mail addresses are collected and potential customers are informed that there is still something in their shopping cart and that they can purchase it at a discount.
Retargeting: What you need to know
You’ve probably had the feeling that you’re being followed by an advertisement: once you’ve clicked on a website and bang, the corresponding advertisement is suddenly everywhere.
You are certainly aware that this cannot be a coincidence – companies use this so-called retargeting technique much more often to remind themselves of potential customers who have already shown interest in the products or services offered but have not completed a purchase.
Retargeting (mistakenly declared as remarketing by Google) works through the Google AdWords display network. This means that in order to launch a retargeting campaign, you need ad banners in different formats. These banner ads are ultimately delivered to those customers that you define: such as customers who have visited your website or customers who have viewed specific product pages.
But how does Google know which customers have viewed your defined pages? This works using cookies. Cookies are small files that work like marker traps. Anyone who visits the page you have specified will be automatically pinned and tagged in the file. Tagged people get to see your ad banners on Google and Google partner sites.
In contrast to remarketing, retargeting incurs additional advertising costs. If you want to use retargeting, you should plan an advertising budget that corresponds to the scope of the retargeting.
But beware, a large retargeting budget does not automatically mean effective retargeting campaigns. As with other AdWords campaigns, a careless technique can also throw large sums of money into the wind with retargeting campaigns.
In addition, retargeting harbors the risk of being perceived as annoying and irrelevant, especially if it is used too frequently. A study by InSkin Media found that negative perceptions such as these mainly occur when retargeting ads are placed too frequently. On the other hand, ads that were seen only 3 times were often perceived by users as helpful, relevant, and positive. Negative associations with retargeting are also often recorded by the older generation.
If you want to use retargeting effectively, you should keep these facts in mind and tailor your retargeting campaigns accordingly. In general, it makes sense to analyze the data and results of your remarketing campaigns in order to increase effectiveness based on these insights.
This is important to keep in mind when retargeting
Both approaches hold different potentials, and opportunities, but also obstacles to be overcome, which we will now take a closer look at.
The obstacles or difficulties with retargeting lie in the frequency of appearance. If the customer keeps showing up the same ad on multiple pages, it can be annoying, but it can also blind you. The information that is to be conveyed in this way no longer penetrates the targeted customer. Therefore, variety is required here.
Challenges of remarketing
The biggest enemy of remarketing is probably the spam folder. If your emails end up there, the measure is considered to have failed. So you have to get your potential customers to whitelist you first.
In addition, also make sure to avoid typical terms such as “buy” and “subscribe” because spam filters react to them. If this has already happened, it is important to arouse interest in the subject line, e.g. by promising free shipping.
Now we have learned that remarketing and retargeting are not one and the same. But do you really have to choose between them?
Remarketing vs retargeting: Which one is better?
Whether remarketing or retargeting: You have to assess for yourself which tactic for closing a sale works better for your company or if in doubt, test it out. Ideally, you should use a combination of both to get potential customers to make a purchase as efficiently as possible.
Note that both techniques can harbor challenges: While you need the email addresses of your customers and a way of unique identifiers such as a customer account for remarketing, the additional advertising budget is a factor of retargeting that should not be underestimated.
As you can see, the choice of the right technology for re-establishing contact with potential customers depends heavily on your individual company situation. Competent advice from a professional can help you to eliminate uncertainties and choose the right strategy for you. The AdWords agency will be happy to help you with your choice.
What to choose: Remarketing or retargeting?
Both measures have their raison d’être and can also be used in parallel. In principle, both have the same target group – namely visitors to your website without making a purchase, but both achieve a different effect. Both methods are applied at different points in the buying cycle.
Remarketing is more effective when products have already been placed in the shopping cart. Retargeting focuses on consumers who aren’t that far in the buying cycle, but who have still expressed interest.
Both online marketing approaches complement each other very well. With retargeting, you can increase your awareness and then use remarketing to give the final push in the final stages of the buying cycle.
Although a lot is now automated in both areas, constant monitoring and optimization should not be underestimated.
Creating remarketing lists: How to proceed
If you know your target group exactly, it is much easier to address them in a targeted manner. The most powerful element of remarketing is therefore the remarketing lists.
This allows you to divide website visitors into different groups according to their usage behavior and interests and then target them with different ads. You create the respective target group lists accordingly via your Google Analytics account.
Think about which users you want to group and how they should be addressed in the remarketing process. You can also use the drop-down menu to specify the conditions under which users should be added to this list. You can also define how long the selected visitors should remain in the list.
Conclusion
Especially when people encounter a new, unfamiliar brand and have not yet had the opportunity to build trust with it, we prefer to wait before making a purchase. However, there is a risk that we will forget what is on offer – after all, the Internet is full of information, products, and services – and the likelihood of being distracted by something else is high.
Remarketing is a good remedy here. With targeted ads, you as a company can ensure that your offer is remembered and that former visitors come back to your website.
Please keep in mind, however, that both remarketing and retargeting must be constantly monitored and optimized. Over time, you’ll quickly learn what works best for you and your business.