Turning opportunities into transactions with advanced remarketing

By Richard Mullins, director at Acceleration

Remarketing has emerged as one of the most important disciplines for marketers to master if they are to optimise their digital marketing spent. This tactic allows marketers to focus much of their energy and budgets on customers who are more likely to convert by serving them with content that is relevant to their interests and behaviour.

The benefit is that companies can focus their efforts on selling something to the customer that they may be interested in rather than targeting the user with a generic messaging. As a simple example, a company can easily target someone who searched its Website for a “product” with an advert for the product on a promotion when they are surfing.

This sort of basic remarketing is fairly simple to do and the technology has been available for years. Many marketers are already benefitting from this form of remarketing, however are now ready to take it to the next level, where it can exponentially enhance their ability to convert customers.

The next step up for marketers is to look at ways of tracking users across multiple devices and multiple campaigns and touch points, so that they can gain a more complete view of the user’s behaviour and interests. Armed with this understanding of the customer, they can begin to tailor content to the customer’s needs. Tracking customers at this deep level and then serving up the right content at the right time is a fairly complex endeavour.

Companies will need to be prepared to invest in tools to get it right, a challenge complicated by the fact that few agencies and companies have the technical and business skills to manage the processes and technologies that underpin sophisticated remarketing. These tools and processes must enable them to design and execute tests, segment their audiences, and target content precisely across multiple channels and devices. The key objective is to drive quicker more effective conversion and ultimately Return On Investment.

Research and testing is a core component of the program, as marketers need to enable content and context in real time. The ability to quickly and continually execute multiple A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT) is critical to measure the effectiveness of content and conversion of the various channels.

These tests will arm them with the understanding they need to segment audiences, personalise content and target it in an automated process. Marketers can use insights from MVT to optimise landing pages, content, forms, promotions, and technical decisions to improve relevance of their content to different users.

This is hard work, but to engage effectively with fickle and demanding online customers, marketers must be able to deliver relevant, even personalised content to users. The benefits will shine through in massively improved conversion rates and lower costs for customer acquisition and better return on investments made.