Retargeting And Omnichannel Personalization: the Winning Combo

How retailers can drive traffic and increase sales this holiday season

This just in: US consumers spent $19.62 billion online over the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in 2017. That’s 15% more than they did during the same timeframe the year prior.

So, what can you do to get a bigger piece of the pie this holiday season?

There are two important marketing trends you need to leverage:

1. Omnichannel personalization, which delivers personalized content, offers, or interactions across all customer touchpoints.According to a research by BCG, brands that create personalized experiences for customers are seeing revenue increase by 6% to 10%.

   In addition, 52% of marketers consider personalization fundamental to their online marketing strategy.

2.  Retargeting/remarketing, which is a cookie-based technology that allows you to “follow” your visitors all over the web after they’ve visited your website.

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As a marketer, you can’t afford to overlook the effectiveness of remarketing:

• Retargeted ads have 10x the click-through rate compared to display ads.
• Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert.
• Retargeted customers are 3x more likely to click on your ads than people who have never interacted with your business.

Now, what if you can combine the power of these two trends to supercharge your sales this holiday season?

You can choose from a variety of personalization strategies and retargeting methods based on your business and audience.

In this article, we’ll first look at the various types of retargeting tactics. Then we’ll show you the different kinds of personalization strategies you can apply to those remarketing methods.

You can then mix-and-match to decide on the right channel and the appropriate messaging to optimize your results:

Retargeting/remarketing methods

• On-site retargeting: Also known as “exit intent,” it shows visitors a message such as an opt-in, a special offer, or a product recommendation when their behaviors indicate that they’re about to leave the site.
• Social media retargeting: When you place a tracking pixel on your web pages, the social media platform will “know” to serve a specific ad to the visitor based on the segmentation criteria you set up for the ad. You can also use Facebook Dynamic Ads to serve ads of a specific product to visitors who recently showed interest in the item.
• Email marketing: Send subscribers specific content or offers that are relevant to them based on recent purchases or browsing behaviors.
• Google Adwords: Similar to Facebook retargeting, you can serve remarketing ads to people who have recently visited your website or specific product pages by using Google AdWord’s remarketing features.
• Snail mail: Don’t forget the old but gold; you can deliver the same targeted message or offer to your customers by sending a postcard.

Omnichannel personalization strategies

• Recommend products based on customers’ past purchases, searches, or browsing behaviors.
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• If you have a gift selector or quiz on your website, you can show products based on the results.
• Deliver targeted content that’s most relevant to your customers’ preferences and behaviors.
• Promote in-store specials or in-store pick-up if you have a physical store at the customer’s location.
• Add urgency, such as a limited time offer or limited quantity, to ads about an item that a customer has shown interest in.
• Send cart abandonment reminder about products in the visitor’s cart. You can combine this with a special offer to help increase conversion.
• Use in-app promotion to deliver a relevant offer when customers are in your store, using geo-fencing technology.

Powering up retargeting with personalization is the key to online retail success

When you layer customer data on retargeting technologies, you’ll reach the right people in the right place at the right time with the right message; the winning formula for online marketing success.

The foundation of making this strategy work for you is a robust customer data management system and personalization software so you have the right information to optimize your ROI.