In today’s article, we start from this tool to introduce the concept of remarketing. How many times has it happened that a user visits your site, browses the products in the shop, perhaps even adding some to the cart, but then, in the end, closes the page without having purchased anything?
Probably often, much more often than you would like. But how to notice it? Thanks to CRM, of course. But knowing the percentage of users who visit your ecommerce without buying anything becomes useless if you don’t think of a way to retrace their steps. And this is where remarketing comes into play, a marketing strategy designed to “recover” users who, for whatever reason, have not generated conversions on the site.
Remarketing is a commercial strategy that focuses on an exact and restricted target: potential customers who have already visited the site without buying anything. The simple fact that they have visited the site is a symptom of interest in the commercial sector and the products sold by your e-commerce. They are trying to re-attract these potential customers and can therefore easily translate into a winning strategy for growing business. But how to do it? An excellent remarketing strategy starts with monitoring site visitors and their browsing actions. Thanks to the CRM above, this is possible, even if things have changed this year.
As of January 1, 2022, Google has stopped supporting so-called third-party cookies. This change affects and influences various sectors, including remarketing. Until last year, the manager of an e-commerce site was able to keep track of a large number of data on each user:
Thanks to cookies, strings of code were automatically installed on the user’s PC when the latter accepted the Privacy and Cookies Policy. These “tokens” were of fundamental importance for remarketing. Has it ever happened to you that, after visiting a famous clothing brand site, you are shown advertisements for that same site or brand wherever you browse? If the answer is yes, you have been dealing with a remarketing strategy that uses cookies.
But things have changed now, as Google pushes for more web user privacy. If before, a sort of “silent assent” was sufficient to track their customers, now explicit consent is required. The user must accept the profiling cookies by clicking a specific button. Otherwise, it will not be possible to monitor her actions. This change risks heavily penalizing remarketing strategies, which will have to adapt and use a statistical approach. The success of a remarketing campaign will therefore depend on the skill of those who manage it.
Even after saying goodbye to third-party cookies, remarketing can still be a handy tool for your e-commerce. It allows you to contact your potential customers outside your site’s platform. Several channels can be used for remarketing: Google, Facebook, Instagram, and e-mails. Let’s see them.
A great tool offered by Google for remarketing is Google Ads, thanks to which it is possible to create audience lists through the pixel provided by Google Analytics. The latter behaves like a cookie and can, therefore, detect with great precision the users who have abandoned your site before buying something. With this data in hand, you can create groups of audiences, divided, for example, based on how far they have gone in the purchase process before abandoning it.
In this sense, the most exciting group is represented by the users who have come closest to buying, that is, those who have added products to the cart but have not bought. Starting from these groups, numerous types of ad hoc ads can then be published, according to the methods offered by Ads: ads on the search network, ads on the display network, and the discovery network. Each audience list will have a dedicated strategy to attract them back to your site.
By adding the Facebook pixel to your site, it is possible to show advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, taking advantage of the popularity of the two social networks to sponsor your business. Through the Business Manager, the management control panel of your Facebook page, you can create customized audiences based on their behavior on your site. Similar to what was said previously, starting from these audiences, you can study specific strategies for each of them.
The alternative to the previous solutions is to contact potential customers “personally” by sending an email inviting them to return to the site. This strategy has proved particularly effective in cases of cart abandonment. Worldwide, it is estimated that over 70% of carts are filled and abandoned before making a purchase. A remarketing strategy aimed at this type of user can make you recover customers, at least in part. According to research by SaleCycle, the e-mails received within an hour have a success rate of 6.33% since, after the first 24 hours, it drops to 1.74%.