Digital marketers have been using remarketing and retargeting strategies for years. They’re an effective way to drive sales and build brand awareness with a highly targeted online marketing strategy. Let’s dive deeper into these concepts and take a look at how they can level up your online advertising strategies.
Most businesses employ online advertising through one or all of the following: search advertising, display advertising, retargeting, and remarketing. Social media platforms and Google are the most common retargeting ad networks.
The concept of remarketing and retargeting is simple: typically 96%-98% of website visitors leave without converting—these tactics help you connect with them.
Remarketing and Retargeting: What’s the Difference?
Remarketing is the re-engagement of customers through email marketing. A common use case is to remind shoppers about abandoned carts with the goal of quick sales conversion. The key to remarketing is that the user must be identifiable via contact information, specifically email.
Retargeting tactics serve digital ads to a narrow target audience of people who have been cookied by a visit to your company’s website. Common retargeting networks are Facebook and Google.
Marketers often use these terms interchangeably. However, they do refer to two different tactical approaches.
Companies that employ remarketing strategies are able to leverage email as a tactic to engage with known visitors after they consume content on their website. These timely messages quickly re-engage the prospect and ultimately result in higher conversions. The reason remarketing campaigns work is because they narrowly target those who have already shown interest. The campaigns are served at the right time via email.
The Difference Between Search, Display, & Retargeting Ads & Remarketing
Audience selection is the primary differentiator between these four types of online marketing strategies. Think of these strategies as a funnel.
At the top of the funnel, casting the broadest net, is search advertising. Search advertising will enable prospects to become aware of your brand based upon their online searches.
Display advertising is the next step in the funnel, more narrowly targeting an audience based on your ideal buyer persona.
The next stage in the funnel is retargeting, designed to target those with implied interest to complete convert to known contacts in your database.
Finally, the bottom of the funnel is remarketing, designed to target those with explicitly expressed interest to complete the final stage of the journey—sales conversion. Ultimately, all 4 steps should be part of the online advertising mix.
- Search Advertising: People see these ads (commonly known as Pay-Per-Click [PPC]) when they search for keywords that brands are bidding for on search engines.
- Display Advertising: Display ads target audiences based on selected criteria that indicate a buyer profile (eg, geography, demographics, digital behavior).
- Retargeting: Serves ads only to those who have visited your website. Website visits are indicative of a high level of interest and a more likely conversion.
- Remarketing: Sends custom, timely, one-to-one emails to known contacts who have completed an action on your website.
5 Quick Stats on the Value of Retargeting
- Data reports up to 150% increase in conversion rates with retargeted ads
- Retargeted ads earn a CTR 10 times higher than other display ads
- B2B retargeting performs 400% better than B2C retargeting based on cost per impression
- On average, people visit a site 9.5 times before they convert to a sale
- Remarketing simulates repeat website traffic 300% better than non-personalized ads
Generating Known Customer Data to Enable Remarketing & Retargeting
Remarketing and retargeting require a mechanism to create a target audience. Here are 3 common ways to track and built target remarketing audiences.
Retargeting Pixel
Pixel-based retargeting cookies the visitor’s browser to enable you to follow anonymous visitors around the internet to serve your ad. This is how both Google and Facebook work. Retargeting begins immediately upon site exit through this tracking method.
Retargeting & Remarketing Lists
Upload a list of target prospects for remarketing or retargeting campaigns. For remarketing, you upload a list and then deliver an email or a sequence of reengagement emails. Retargeting uses list uploads to deliver off-site impressions to a narrowly defined audience.
You can also use list uploads to manually create target audiences in Facebook custom audience. Then, you can build lookalike audiences on Facebook from these list uploads.
Brief Media uses this list uploading tactic for audience extension programs. Through the OnPoint Extend program, Brief can ensure off-network retargeted impressions are delivered to the ideal audience on display networks and Facebook.
Remarketing & Retargeting Through Brief’s Database
Brief Media offers advanced remarketing and retargeting opportunities.
Through remarketing and retargeting, Brief Media can serve your message to those who engage with content in your campaign across networks where they spend their time, including social media and email.
Our industry-leading database allows us to focus on taking remarketing strategies to the next level. Brief Media has the only gated website in veterinary medicine, which means one important thing for your remarketing campaigns: the most up-to-date and reliable data.
Brief Media is the only media company in veterinary medicine that can retarget and remarket based on behavior because of the Brief Gateway (the requirement for each visitor to sign-in during each web session to access content).
This eliminates reliance upon cookie-ing of anonymous visitors, and instead, allows for advanced buildouts of user profiles and history, enabling you to very narrowly target and retarget the Brief audience.
Brief’s retargeting and remarketing programs work together to serve web-based ads and trigger emails for well-timed targeting and prompt automated outreach.
Email-Based Remarketing Case Study
Campaign Goal: To cross-promote nurturing content and to educate the Brief audience.
Step 1: Drive Traffic Through Broad Promotion
We used email, social media, and newsletter placements to drive traffic to a free top-of-funnel article across multiple digital channels.
Step 2: Create Engaged Audience Segment to Retarget
Brief’s OnPoint Database automatically created a custom audience of prospects who engaged with the free article to remarket with a quiz.
Step 3: Promptly Send A Retargeted Email
Via the OnPoint platform, we then sent an automated email to the target audience, offering the quiz.
Results
| Retargeting Campaign | Benchmark | |
| Email Open Rate | 40% | 22.2% |
| Clickthrough Rate | 46.7% | 8.3% |
If you’re interested in learning more about how Brief Media can help you with your remarketing and retargeting efforts, reach out. We welcome the opportunity to support your marketing initiatives in the veterinary space.