98% of Visitors Never Return. Facebook Retargeting Gets Them Back

How Any Business Can Capture Customers Through Facebook

Would you like to know how many of your website visitors are on Facebook? Regardless of your industry Facebook retargeting (also called remarketing by Google) will answer that question. Better yet, you can then display ads to those visitors who have not taken action and exclude the ones that have.

Before you dive into how this works consider this, 95% of people don’t buy on their first visit to your website so you need a strategy to bring your lost visitors back. Retargeting has been known to increase the recapture rate of visitors by up to 30%!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you’ll have a Facebook account. Like most people you’ve probably wondered how those ads on your timeline, sidebar and mobile phone can be so accurate and how do you end up with so many products related to your browsing history?

The answer is Facebook retargeting, and it’s one of the easiest ways to increase the ROI of your online advertising spend. We’re sharing some of the secrets we use for our clients so you can see how Facebook retargeting could work for you, and how to leverage this powerful tactic to re-engage your target market.

What is retargeting?

In a nutshell retargeting brings visitors back to your website and turns them into buyers.

Retargeting is a form of marketing that shows users advertisements who have previously viewed your content. It is a great way to keep up engagement with an audience who have shown an interest in your products or services. You can use this technique to keep an audience engaged and deliver highly targeted advertising to people that have already shown an interest in what you do.

A variety of content providers and social networks now offer retargeting with the major players being Google and Facebook, while companies such as Twitter and Yahoo are rolling out their retargeting offerings as well.

The whole point of all this is to stay top of mind for people who have already shown enough interest to visit your website. These potential customers are far more likely to convert to actual customers than those who are targeted via simple demographics (such as age, sex, location, interests etc). Chances are you have already paid to get them to your website so the last thing you want to do is lose them now!

How does retargeting work on Facebook?

Facebook has a variety of what it calls “Custom Audiences” available to marketers who build their Facebook advertising using the Power Editor or Ads Manager.

Custom audiences can be created from a list (i.e. a customer phone number list or opt in email list) or by using a “Custom Audience Pixel”.

A user who accesses a specific webpage will download this pixel, which lets Facebook’s servers know that you’ve been there. The content owner then can serve paid ads to visitors of the site.

e.g. You visit the Content First website and read an article on the blog such as this one about Facebook retargeting. Your computer downloads a piece of data which let’s Facebook know that you’ve been here. We can then get Facebook to deliver an ad based on the content of the article you were reading, such as Facebook retargeting services.

You then realise the power of retargeting and book in a free strategy session so we can access if it’s a good fit for your business.

Retargeting is a very powerful form of advertising – with a wide variety of uses in your sales funnel. Here are some of our favourite ways to use Facebook Retargeting to increase your ROI.

Once you have retargeting set up on Facebook it doesn’t cost you anything to display your ads, you’re only charged when people click on your ad. Given they are already aware of your brand they are already warm.

12 Damn Good Reasons To Retarget Your Websites Visitors

1. Build Awareness of Your Brand: Simply by keeping your logo and brand name at top of a customer’s mind, you increase the likelihood of a future action. It takes around 7 times for someone to remember your advertisement. Repetition is the key, just don’t overdo it and appear desperate.
   
2. Generate Interest in Your Product or Service: Serve advertisements with images about a specific product that they viewed or liked.
3. Driving Mailing List Opt-Ins: Has someone has visited your website but hasn’t opted into your mailing list yet? Use retargeting combined with an enticing lead magnet to generate more opt-ins.
4. Marketing To Your Opt-Ins: Your visitors might have already opted into your email list, but you don’t want to annoy them with loads of spam, yet you still want to remain top of mind. Utilise include/exclude lists and deliver a targeted message to their Facebook feed, in preparation for the next action in your marketing funnel.
5. Follow Up Advertisements: A customer visited a page for a product or service but didn’t convert to a sale. Perhaps they weren’t interested, or maybe they weren’t ready to purchase right then and need a reminder (This happened to me last week on Betabrands website and retargeting pulled me back in to buy). Now is the perfect time to deliver a targeted ad (Maybe even with an enticement to purchase right now) and secure the sale before its too late!
6. Up-Selling Accessories or Upgrades: Success, the customer has purchased from you – but there are ways of getting repeat business from the customer. Perhaps they’ve purchased some mountaintop accommodation from you for the winter school holidays. Now is the perfect time to advertise lift passes and ski hire. You could even partner with a local business to cross-sell their tours to your custom audience.
7. Driving Traffic to Other Website Content: Perhaps you’ve written a great new article on your website and you want the world to know about it. They’ve been to your website before, so chances are they’ll be interested again. Let them know with a link to your content in the newsfeed.
8. Increasing Likes On Your Facebook Page: They’ve visited your website, but they aren’t a fan of you on Facebook yet. A customer who has already visited before is far more likely to click “like” than one who doesn’t know who you are. Even better – you’ll have more chance of showing up on their newsfeed organically if they like your page.
9. Promoting Your Upcoming Event: Got an event coming up? People who have already shown an interest in your brand will be far more interested in attending. Use retargeting to promote the event to previous visitors to your website.
10. Promote a Facebook Offer: Facebook allows the creation of special discount and promotion coupons. Customers claim an offer, receive an email of how to redeem it and it is posted on their timeline and friends news feeds. Retargeting is the perfect way to promote a special deal to the customers who are most likely to appreciate and use it.
11. Increase Followers on Other Social Media Channels: This might fit into the “naughty” section as Facebook isn’t a fan of promoting other social media channels, but you can use this as a way of increasing likes, follows and plusses on other channels such as Twitter, Google +, Pinterest etc.
12. Increase Your Reviews: Use retargeting to drive customers to review sites such as Tripadvisor, Yelp etc. Just remember that it is against these sites Terms & Conditions to incentivise positive reviews in any way.

Retargeting Best Practices

The more personalised you make a users experience the more likely they are to have increased confidence that your product or service is a good fit.

Just imagine that you are in the market for a business security system. You’re browsing a security website looking at commercial alarms with access control points. You need to do some more research before you feel confident to make a call and leave the website. That night a facebook ad displays showing the same company you were looking at earlier however the ad is for a special on a home security system. This makes you think these guys are focused on home alarms and not a good fit for your business. Retargeting fail.

Setup your custom audiences and retargeting so the right message is shown to the right person. This should direct them to a dedicated landing page with a lead magnet to encourage them to take action.

There is literally almost no limit to the number of uses for retargeted advertising on Facebook. We’ll be updating this page with more and more ideas as we come up with them.

5 Retargeting Traps for Rookies

Of course it’s not all smooth sailing, with internet experts Moz outlining some potential challenges facing marketers who utilise retargeting:

1. Retargeting ads yet another channel for your marketing strategy. You need to spend the time to ensure that any ads fit within the larger goals of your campaign and do not impact on existing advertising.
2. Retargeting allows you to think outside of the box. Lower prices, the ability to change things on the fly and ability to utilise graphics allows you to run quirkier campaigns that you might not get away with on traditional media to larger users. Just remember (and to quote Spiderman’s Uncle Ben), “with great power, comes great responsibility”.
3. Don’t overdo it. While retargeting does allow the ability to repeat your message, and this is a good thing, there is also too much of a good thing – where advertising becomes annoying or creepy. You’ll need to use common sense here, and keep an eye on customer feedback in your social media channels.
4. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Retargeting is a long-term commitment. It takes a little while to build up a decent audience for smaller businesses with low traffic, and as with any funnel, it will potentially take multiple calls to action to convert a customer – but it should be cheaper and easier than with customers who have not visited your site in the past. Keep at it, and you’ll be happy that you did. Once it’s up and running expect a snowball effect as your audience (and ROI) grows and grows.
5. Expect to make mistakes early on. Retargeting isn’t a case of turning it on and leaving it. You’ll put the conversion pixels on the wrong page, find out that some copy works better than others and a wide range of other mistakes through trial and error. Once you’ve got everything working though – it will be worth the effort.

Get Started With Facebook Retargeting Now:

Retargeting isn’t exactly straightforward, but when you get it right it is worth the effort. More of your online advertising spend ends up targeted towards customers who are more likely to convert and costs per click should end up cheaper. All in all this should result in a considerably higher ROI and a larger amount of leads for your sales and marketing funnel.

As with any marketing techniques, Facebook retargeting should be part of a wider online marketing and content creation strategy and will generate better results the longer you run it. For some they might prefer the do it yourself approach of doing the work in house, while other small businesses might not have the resources to experiment in the Facebook back end or creative horsepower to design the ads and landing pages.

If you would like to discuss if Facebook retargeting is right for your business, book in for a free strategy session to see if and how I can help you to achieve results with Facebook retargeting using our proven strategies. To book in click the button below and select a time that suits you.