Don’t forget about retargeting!
There are a LOT of little concepts an entrepreneur needs to be aware of… and sometimes, it can get pretty overwhelming.
This is especially true when you’re wearing all the hats yourself.
It’s VERY easy to get caught up in making products, networking, and getting sales, all of which are full-time jobs that must be done.
When you’re stuck in that rut, you’ll most likely forget about one of the easiest, and most useful approaches; Re-targeting.
What is retargeting?
Re-targeting is the process of re-engaging old leads, or leads who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase yet.
It’s a really straight-forward type of thing.
Often, you’ll get so caught up in finding new clients that you forget about the ones who have been sitting in your contact list doing nothing for 6 months.
OR, you’ll put a ton of effort into getting people to your site, looking at your products, putting them in a cart, but when they end up not converting… you just consider them a lost cause and forget about them.
Re-targeting helps you engage with these people and turn them into conversions.
Why is retargeting so beneficial?
Why worry about people who are inactive, or who aren’t willing to make a purchase?
Think of it this way, which lead is more hot… someone who has never seen or heard of you before, or someone who has actively went out of their way to engage with you before?
Sure, the person who accidentally clicked on your site from Google may not be a very hot lead… but what about the person who was putting items into their cart, and then forgot to click the buy button because their kids were lighting the house on fire?
Sounds pretty hot to me… see what I did there? Yay puns 🙂
Re-targeting isn’t just limited to people who abandon their cart though. It can be used to capture leads when they visit your site and try to leave, re-engage people who used to be really interested in your business, or even feed people targeted ads for your products when they’re searching the internet.
According to retargeter.com, only about 2% of traffic coverts on their first visit… so you need a way to get your offers in front of people more than once.
How to start retargeting
Re-targeting can be done in many ways, but we’ll go over a few of the major approaches so you can get a better understanding of retargeting, and how to get started.
- Abandoned cart emails
This one is huge because anyone who goes through the hassle of putting products into their shopping cart is VERY close to being ready to make a purchase. Sending them an email reminding them to follow-through is an easy way to increase your conversions.
- Exit pop-ups
Have you ever tried to leave a website just to get hit with a popup that grabs your attention? This is a last-ditch effort to try to capture a lead or keep someone exposed to your content. It may be annoying sometimes, but it works. Offering to give something away to someone, or sending them down a rabbit-hole can be the difference between them being gone forever, or becoming a conversion.
- Segmenting inactive contacts
Sometimes people subscribe to a newsletter, read a few of your emails (or none of them), and then get busy and just kind of ignore you. These people had to put in effort to get onto your contact list, so there’s a decent chance that you can get them re-engaged.
Some people are just lost causes, but you can easily segment your disengaged contacts, and then put the inactive contacts in an email marketing campaign that’s designed to get them back. If you can’t get them back, you can always get them out of your system to avoid clogging it up with people who simply aren’t interested.
- Suggesting similar products
Netflix and Amazon are great examples of this method.
When you watch a show, Netflix will recommend similar shows to you to keep you engaged.
On the e-commerce side of it, when you try to make a purchase on amazon, they’ll suggest other products that go along with the one you originally wanted, and they even make it easy to just click one button to add all of them to your cart.
- Retargeting with paid ads
All of us have searched for something online, and then proceeded to get blasted with ads for similar products and services immediately afterwards.Google knows what we want, and there are even retargeting services that are specifically designed to feed people your ads after they’ve been to your site.There are probably more methods of retargeting that I’m missing, but this should get the gears turning in your head, and remind you that you don’t have to just forget about the people who’ve already been exposed to you. You can retarget constantly and increase your conversions with very little effort, and very little cost.