The digital landscape is an ever-evolving form of advertising that allows brands to continually get smarter with their online targeted advertising. One aspect that has continued to evolve is personalized retargeting, from both visitors to your site as well as new opportunities with CRM. The goal of retargeting is to drive an already interested or informed consumer back to your site to convert an action. This can be a process that, depending on the industry, can be both short-term as well as a long-term commitment that takes both testing as well as optimization to perfect.
Evolution of Personalized Retargeting
Over the years, many innovations have enhanced this process, such as personalized dynamic retargeting with messages of recent products you have viewed on a brand’s site. When it first came out, this technology changed the way many in the industry utilized retargeting, but there were watch outs as well. Hiccups, such as targeting those who may have already made a purchase on your site, or not setting correct frequency caps (which could lead to someone seeing an add upwards of 200+ times), turned a positive form of messaging into one that just annoyed the consumer.
Adhering to an Omnichannel Strategy
As programmatic ad buying and multi-screen advertising capabilities have continued to evolve, the need to segment out these remarketing tactics has become more and more important. Things like recency to the client site, the behaviors taken on site, past purchasers, and the length of time before you should be following up, have become more and more important.
Tools to Optimize a Personalized Retargeting Strategy
One thing that has helped build out these segments is the ability to utilize CRM data in a digital environment, outside of just your typical email marketing. This has allowed advertisers to break out certain audiences, like those who just downloaded a white paper or filled out a form for more information vs. those made a purchase two days ago or sixty days ago. All of these users should be marketed to, but also the messaging to each of them should be much different. This is where segmentation is really more important than ever before.
Things like recency allow you to serve a different message to someone who looked at a product three hours ago than to someone who looked ninety days ago. An example of this would be someone looking for baby clothes. Within that three-hour window, remarketing this user could focus heavily on what they were looking for in terms of the specific product, but also potentially similar products or coupon codes. Ninety days later, this audience is still very important, but now their retargeted messaging should focus on the future, and potentially show them ads for products for babies in the 6-9 month age range, to drive conversion.
Retargeting Based on Shopper Persona
Advertisers have also started to look at behavior on site, as well as past purchasers, to allow them to make smarter decisions. Behaviors on site—such as putting something in a shopping cart vs. someone who just showed some interest and clicked on social button—are very different, and that personalized retargeting message needs to align with that consumer. Past purchasers are also a key audience, as consumer retention is just as important as growth. With new products and technology expanding, there is consistently a new shiny object being shown to consumers. Keeping a customer long term should be the goal of every company. The idea of past purchasers allows you to potentially send an ad with accessories to for the product they just purchased, or message the user again in six months, when they may need to upgrade the product they had purchased previously.
As you can see, the digital advertising space is something that is still constantly evolving. With this evolution comes the need for segmentation, and delivery of a personalized message to your key audiences is something that is becoming more and more realistic. However, the need to be smart with the messaging and think about this long term is more important than ever.
