What are the best eCommerce remarketing strategies?
When you’re looking at keywords and how they fair in your campaigns, it’s easy to get caught up in converting those keywords.
But it’s not keywords that convert. It’s people.
People are the ones buying your products.
That’s where remarketing comes in.
In this article, we’re going to show you 19 different eCommerce remarketing strategies you can use and also explain why it is so important.
Google AdWords Ecommerce Remarketing
The beauty of this method is that Google creates the remarketing ad based on the same information you used for your Google Shopping Ad.
Meaning, your price, your images, and your product description.
No more having to come up with an ad creative for each step. You can give a laser focus to customers who are already interested in your product.
All you need is to set up the remarketing tag on your website.
I can’t say enough good things about the Shopify app Google Shopping Feed. The developers and the support team will do the installation for you and answer any questions you may have.
Product Catalog – Remarketing Strategies for Ecommerce via Facebook Ads
In addition to the Google Shopping Feed app taking care of your Merchant Feed for Shopping Ads, it will also sync your products with “Facebook Catalog”.
This allows Facebook to grab the needed data to run Dynamic Ads for you, retargeting people who’ve been to your website before.
A sneaky and very effective tactic is to be running Google Shopping ads and then pay less for retargeting to those who have already been to your site via your Google Shopping ad.
What’s even better, eventually you can make a lookalike audience based on the same interests and qualities of your already qualified traffic.
Facebook claims the optimum audience size is around 10k but I’d had clients who see success at as low as 2k!
Ecommerce Remarketing Strategies Using Email to Target Abandoned Carts and More
This one is an e-commerce staple.
When someone signs up for your email list and adds something from your store to their cart but abandons their cart.
This is a huge loss if you don’t have cart recovery systems in place.
Klaviyo makes it easy by having an integrated app with Shopify to sift through subscribers who abandon their cart and follow up with them via email.
The flows are already set up, you simply need to activate them.
Keep in mind, this only works if your customer has subscribed to your email list, so you still need an enticing offer to get them on the list in the first place.
By no means should this be your ONLY method of winning back abandoned carts, but without question, it should be part of your arsenal.
Applying Ecommerce Retargeting Based on YouTube Content Activity
In 2019, YouTube is the 2nd most-visited website in existence, according to Alexa.
People have watched over 50,000 years’ worth of product review videos.
There’s more than enough reason to be using YouTube. When someone goes to your site, you can be retargeting them with a YouTube ad.
You can use this opportunity to give them a discount, tell them the latest deal based on their browsing history, or another incentive.
Even better, you can create ads based on interactions a user has with your YouTube content.
You can take it a step further by creating different variations in the ad based on their activity.
Using Chatbots to Follow Up for Remarketing
Live chat is evolving.
Using a chatbot on your website is now easier than ever. It’s like having a customer service rep that you can program responses with little to no tech skill.
GoBot is a chatbot we’ve used on our client sites.
Some things you can do with a chatbot:
- Recommend products
- Instantly answer customer questions
- Follow up with a return visitor
- Upsell and cross-sell
- Grow your email list with an enticing offer
- Subscribe your customers to messenger
All with no programming experience. You’ll only need to design the flow of conversation within the app.
Chatbots are quickly becoming a must-have if you want to be a Shopify store that keeps the pace with the expectation of excellent customer service.
Retargeting via Facebook Messenger
To give amazing service at a quicker response than email, but the personality of Facebook, but without having a public discussion with your customer.
Facebook Messenger retargeting has had astonishing amounts of success in getting more people to interact with their business.
Olyo ran a study:
“People tend to click more on the contents received via Messenger than on those received by emails. From our tests, we obtained an average of 98% open rate and a 44% click-through rate via Facebook Messenger.”
The three big retargeting contenders were Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and email. And now, Messenger.
Recart makes it fast and efficient to pull your potential customers back into checking out at your site. SmartSuite also does this yet has tons of other features.
Using Analytics to Measure the Success of Your Ecommerce Retargeting Strategies Campaign
Analytics are necessary to track what’s working and what’s not working in
your store. Ecommerce remarketing strategies are no different.
If you’re not using UTM tags to your ad traffic, it’s probably not getting categorized correctly in Google Analytics.
When you build an ad, there’s usually a place for extra URL parameters. The destination is the same, but Google Analytics categorizes the data based on your parameters.
For example, if you were building an ad on Facebook, could you use the following to categorize traffic:
utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=campaign_name&utm_content=your_content_name
You can start to see the power of this once you begin to remarket from different sources and see what leads to the most sales.
Google has a builder that makes it rather simple to create UTM tags to your links.
A/B Testing to Find the Most Effective Ecommerce Remarketing Strategies Ad for a Particular Demographic
Google Analytics makes it easy to determine what e-commerce retargeting strategies campaign is the best to win your customers back.
According to their help article:
“Analytics randomly assigns each of your users to one of 100 buckets. For any given user, the User Bucket dimension (values 1 to 100) indicates the bucket to which the user has been assigned.
By including a User Bucket condition in audience definitions, you can create multiple audiences that are identical in composition except for their User Bucket values. You can then compare the effects of different campaigns on identical audiences.
For example, you might create two remarketing audiences that share the same Age, Gender, and City but are differentiated by User Bucket. You can then run a different version of your remarketing campaign for each audience to see which version is most effective.”
This allows you to pour more of your marketing dollars into the remarketing campaign that works best and stop wasting effort with the losing campaign.
Retarget with Promos and Discounts That Aren’t on Your Shopify Store
Customers are savvy. They know how to shop around for coupons that are common on your site. Basically, they know when you’re actually throwing them a bone versus feeding them the scraps that everyone else gets.
By offering a unique coupon code or discount that is unique to the customer, you can pique their interest that they are really getting a good deal on your products.
Not only does this get you the sale, but it wins the trust and feels far more personal.
Retarget to Existing Customers Based on Their Interests
Targeting your potential customers based on their interests seems like an obvious decision. But what’s even better is making the ads cater to their interest or even interest level.
Being able to determine how far along someone is in the buying process and equally importantly what they are shopping for.
Using Google Analytics and Google Ads, you can create targeted segments based on the viewing behavior of your products. That way, for example, you can target based on interest (what they look at) and interest level (time spent on the page).
If you want a hassle-free way to target your customers based on their interests, Facebook Pixel is your friend.
Using Facebook Pixel and Facebook Catalog, you can easily turn your browsers into buyers.
From Facebook, “After you create a catalog, you can create ads and shopping experiences that pull information from your catalog to show people your items. For example, you can use your catalog to run dynamic ads”
The setup can be complicated if done manually, that’s why we suggest using Google Shopping Feed.
Google Shopping Feed makes it easy to automatically create a catalog based on your Shopify inventory.
When a potential customer views a product, the Facebook Pixel fires off and records the user’s action. If they have a Facebook account logged in, it marks them for retargeting of that item.
The ad creative is easy to set up since you can use dynamic fields to make your ad text.
Target Consumers Who Viewed Promotion but Didn’t Add to Cart
If a visitor to your site doesn’t buy an item, but there is a limited-time promotion, you can retarget them with the limited-time promotion, again, giving them the urgency to buy before the promotion ends.
This is effective around holidays where purchases increase, giving the visitor urgency to complete their purchase in time for the event.
Customize Email Retargeting Campaigns for Those Who Abandon Their Carts
With Klaviyo, you can target your customers based on what they actually bought. For example, you can sell complementary products after the sale or offer follow-up assistance.
For potential customers, you can re-target them based on what they looked at on your website and how they interact with your emails.
Setting up email sequences based on these behaviors seems daunting but there are pre-loaded Klaviyo “flows” that are available when integrating Shopify with Klaviyo.
All you have to do is activate them. I’d recommend you customize them a bit to suit your brand’s voice and to differentiate yourself from other Shopify stores.
Retarget Visitors Who Saw an Older Product but Missed New or Updated Products
Have a new product out that customers might like? What about a newer model of a product that a customer viewed but did not buy?
You can set up your retargeting to zero in on these potential customers. You can also apply this method to people who viewed out-of-stock items to let them know you now have the item back in stock.
As suppliers change out product lines, it’s necessary to keep track of interest levels of products that get discontinued. That way, you can know what newer products to market to that audience.
Offer Customers Who Abandon Cart an Alternative Payment Method
For whatever reason, if someone does not check out, you should give them an alternative way to do so.
According to Baymard Institute, in 2019, 17% of over 4,200 customers answered “I didn’t trust the site with my credit card information” as the reason for cart abandonment. 6% said, “There weren’t enough payment methods.”
What does this mean? If you aren’t offering multiple ways to pay, you are missing out big time.
It’s hard to know what payment method a customer is preferring, but having an ad that retargets customers mentioning the new and different ways they can pay isn’t a bad idea.
Retarget Potential Customers Who Have Completed “Mini Conversions or Tripwire Sales”
The further along in the buying process, the better chances you can sell to a customer.
In fact, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70 percent. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20 percent.
This means the more small steps you can get your potential customers with their actions to say “Yes, I’m interested!” the better.
Perhaps it’s a sample pack. Or a free + shipping offer. Or, maybe, a buyer’s guide and a discount.
Anything you can do to get them to signify their level of interest, the better. Because then you know what kind of marketing you should retarget them with.
Retarget Your Ads to Forum Participants or Site Members
This one isn’t technically retargeting but it is a great way to show your brand and offerings where your visitors may already hang out online.
Google for forums related to your industry or niche and see if they offer advertising. It’s a way to reach an audience that may not have found out about you otherwise.
Reddit also has an advertising platform that has evolved and marketed itself as the advertising platform for “reaching influential communities.”
Retarget Any “Likes” Your Brand Page on Facebook
Facebook has the option to let you target people who have liked your page. This helps you gauge their interest and walk with them along in the buyer journey.
By advertising to your followers, you can find out what specifically they are interested in once they go to your site and start browsing. From there, Facebook can do the rest and retarget them based on their activity.
Retarget Your Ads to Meet a Specific Demographic
Do you know your store’s customer avatars? Each industry has a different set of customers that purchase products.
Not everyone who buys your product is buying it for the same reason or purpose, as counter-intuitive as that sounds.
Let’s say you’re selling pool pumps for swimming pools. Are you selling to contractors? Resellers? Pool owners? Hotels?
Once you start investigating who your potential customer is, you can better tailor your marketing (and eCommerce remarketing strategies) and laser in on the most opportune buyer.
Retarget Visitors Based Upon Their Entry Page
The internet is a distracting place. A user could click on your ad and end up browsing around for different items or leave the site altogether.
What gained their interest in the first place? Remind them by retargeting them with what they originally clicked on.
Combining Your Ecommerce Remarketing Strategies
Think that setting up remarketing all sounds a little daunting? Want something in one dashboard where you view your ad spend data all in one place? You might want to give Adroll a try.
Adroll is a mix of software and a team that knows their stuff.
It’s still worth using the Google Remarketing network, but Adroll will cover new ground on the web, as well as advertise on Facebook for you. This helps consolidate some of the ad management of multiple sites.
They have a post-paid option so there’s no need to sink money into the platform before you see traffic.
At the end of the day, you have to test and see what works for your store.
Traffic Is Great, But…
It doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t have a site that converts.
That’s why we built Shoptimized™, the best converting Shopify theme.
The Shoptimized™ theme has a design that converts, drawing your customer’s attention to marketable benefits as to why they should be buying from you.
This makes achieving this type of powerful change into your business incredibly easy.
Check out the Shoptimized™ theme and start converting those remarketing visitors to gain an edge on your competition and get customers to trust your brand time and time again.
