What is Remarketing?
This week, though, we will get into how to use marketing to reinforce the successes of our original marketing efforts. This is all about Remarketing. So, imagine this scenario: One evening, you’re reading an article online, or scrolling through your Facebook feed, and there is that all-knowing ad right in front of you, showing you what you want to buy or what you want to eat or where you want to travel.
Ads that have followed you across digital channels and platforms, and seem to know what you like and what you’re thinking of buying or spending money on. But how do they know?
They know by using a magical tool call remarketing. Remarketing if done correctly can be a game-changer! According to a recent survey, 82% of website visitors will never come back! To understand the basics of remarketing campaigns and how the science of remarketing really works, I’m going to hand it over to Sujoy Golan, head of InMobi’s Global Digital Marketing. And yes, he’s going to talk about cookie logic too. Stay tuned, I’ll be back with more exciting stories at the end of this session!
In today’s world with such a high adoption rate of platforms & social networks like Google & Facebook, we’re always connected either through our laptops or mobile phones. Imagine on a weekend you are enjoying a thrilling IPL match and you suddenly start craving for pizza.
The very next move you make is to order it online from your desktop & get the pizza delivered to you within minutes! Now after a week while, say you’re reading news on a website just before lunchtime, an ad of an attractive pizza slice catches your eye – it’s the very same company you had ordered from the previous week, and now it lures you with a tempting 30% discount! You are quite likely to click on the ad and buy the pizza this time too, and thus increasing your chances of becoming regular and hooked to this specific pizzeria.
For instance, in the pizza example that we discussed, if you ordered a particular type of pizza, say nonveg & cheese crust, the ad you see later would not be of a veg pizza with garlic bread. Likewise, if you visited a popular shopping app & browsed for a particular style of women’s shoes, it would be unlikely that you would be remarketed with men’s shirts for example.
The secret to remarketing is to identify and group your users into particular segments or buckets which we define as remarketing lists and then show them ads tailor-made for them, thus increasing their likelihood of conversion.
Why remarketing is useful?
In the digital space there is a sheer unlimited number of options a consumer can choose from. In today’s world the buyer has a very short attention span and his stickiness or affinity to a particular brand can easily break, if the competition is able to communicate the right messages, more frequently to buyers at the right spaces online.
There are 3 essential areas where remarketing can be extremely powerful:
1) Staying Engaged with your Buyers – The 1st use of remarketing is staying engaged with your buyers. Now consider a situation, when you go online and browse for a new phone either on flipkart or amazon. Even though you don’t buy the phone immediately, you will go through the phone’s specifications, user reviews and price comparisons.
Over the next two weeks whenever you would be surfing online you would see exactly those phones that you saw or added to a wish list. It might happen that you may not buy the phone, you would from time to time consider the option of having that phone in your hand.
Remarketing ads help businesses stay engaged with their buyers. As per an Industry report 96% of visitors leave the site without converting. Also 49% of visitors browse a site 2-4 times before they actually make a purchase!
2) Increasing Brand Awareness – The second purpose of remarketing is increasing your brand’s awareness. Let’s take a scenario. Imagine, you are the marketing manager in a company and the marketing activities in your company have recently increased with thousands of leads coming in.
Till now you were only sending marketing emails to your potential customers manually, but now there is a need to send emails in bulk in an automated fashion. So what do you do? To solve this operational challenge you go online and start researching email marketing tools that will help you send automated emails in bulk. You probably first visit Google and search for “Best Email Marketing Software”, and then you check the top ads and organic listings. Based on your research, you come up with 5 top email marketing tools. However, all of these tools turn out to be too expensive to accommodate in your marketing budget. Hence you decide to put the idea aside for the time being.
Over the next week, you start seeing ads of this specific email marketing tool called MailChimp everywhere when you’re browsing across your phone on facebook or even when you’re browsing through the news. MailChimp is one of the Tools that you had shortlisted in your research, and you DID like the features it presented. MailChimp started remarketing ads to you and is now at the top of your mind.
A week passes by and you keep seeing MailChimp ads on social media and blogs online. In this week you meet up with your line manager and during your discussion he asks you if you have any tools that you found useful for an email service. And invariably you say “MailChimp” even though there were other products you had shortlisted.
This is a classic case of remarketing where the ads are designed, in content and frequency, to enhance brand recall. No wonder then that in a recent study it was found that 43% of companies used remarketing for online brand awareness and recognition. Remarketing increases brand recall for users who may have otherwise forgotten about the brand completely.
3) Increasing Conversions – The third purpose of remarketing is to assist in converting those online customers who might have left the purchase process incomplete.
Let us revisit the example where you’re going to an online store like flipkart or myntra and looking at the shoes collection. As you keep browsing through several shoes, one of them really catches your eye. This is a particular Nike Shoe with a new technology where users can slide into the shoes and don’t need to tie the laces. These shoes are priced at Rs.10,000 which you feel is too expensive a price point.
As you consider the price you are thinking that it was priced less, at say 5,000, then you would have definitely purchased it. This impulse of interest, provokes you into adding these Nike shoes to your shopping cart, even though you may never end up buying it. By adding the shoes to your cart, FlipKart now knows that you’re among those rare visitors who spent more than 10 seconds on that page and actually added a shoe to the cart.
Now consider that you are in the marketing team of FlipKart, and you create a group of users who have added this shoe to their cart in the last 60 days, your list of users is 1500. To attract such users and nudge them to purchase the shoes, you create a new summer sale offer, where these shoes have a flat 25% discount, now priced at Rs.6,000. When this message is conveyed to the 1500 in an email it really appeals to them.
Many of these users are likely to open this email and some of them are likely to go ahead and purchase the shoe. An industry research report shows that 54% of companies who send emails to abandoned cart customers see an increase in their revenues.
How does remarketing work?
You saw some of the advantages and applications of remarketing. Now let us understand how remarketing actually works – how do you ensure that you target the right person with the right ad?
Let’s look at an example: Raj is a fitness expert & loves running in order to stay fit. He wants to buy running shoes, so he goes online and searches on Google Search, where he finds a set of Text Ads and also Google Shopping Ads in front of him. He clicks on one of the Google Shopping Ads for a pair of Nike shoes and lands directly on the product page of the ecommerce store, where he sees the shoes priced at Rs.4,000. He checks the reviews of the shoes and finally adds the shoe to his Cart. He thinks for some time and realizes that the price of the shoes is too high, and maybe he would come and buy the shoe later.
In this entire journey let us now look at what was happening at the backend.
- The eCommerce website currently has remarketing campaigns which are targeted all visitors who have added products to their cart.
- When Raj enters the eCommerce site and performs a particular action, in this case – adding a product to a cart, Google drops a cookie into Raj’s browser.
- This cookie is simply a few lines of code, which contain the information that Raj added a product to his shopping cart. Now Raj’s browser contains this cookie which also gives Google the same information.
- After this, when Raj starts browsing across the internet, reading through blogs and articles, Google servers identify Raj as someone who went to the eCommerce site & added a product to cart and finally starts showing him shoe ads of the respective eCommerce site.
Similarly, consider a situation when Raj has the eCommerce site’s app installed on his phone. In this alternate situation he added the shoe into his cart from the app. The app has a similar tracking ID which then follows Raj on Mobile display networks and Facebook, where he is then remarketed with the eCommerce site’s sports shoes ads.
Once it is established that a user has taken a certain action using the cookie or tracking code in the app, the same user can be shown ads related to that action.
This entire process of remarketing can be set up by the following ways:
● Adding Google Analytics/Adwords Remarketing code to your website or app
● Adding Facebook Pixel to your website or app
● Using an independent remarketing tool like AdRoll or Criteo
● Adding a Google or Facebook SDK to your Mobile App
We’ll be discussing each of these methods of remarketing in the coming sessions of this remarketing module.
Summary: Understanding Remarketing
Sujoy Golan is a rockstar, isn’t he? And now I’m sure you find yourself looking for a pizza online. So what did we really learn here?
We heard about the 3 marketing goals for which remarketing is used and about the eCommerce industry that leverages this method to their advantage:
No 1- Staying Engaged with Your Buyers,
No2- Increasing Brand Awareness and
No3 – Increasing Conversions.
We also learned how remarketing actually works and how it targets the right person with right ads. Next time around, we’ll do a deep dive into remarketing, trying to figure out the important components of a remarketing campaigns and how to set up remarketing campaigns on Google & Facebook. Until then, happy pizza!
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