April 2015 - Retaily

Top Retargeting Strategy Involves Site and Product Modification

Many companies think that they can just rely on retargeting services to reach site visitors in the hopes of increasing their sales conversion. While retargeting will certainly help – this is provided your site is getting enough volume traffic on a daily basis and that that the retargeting strategy is suited for your type of industry. Retargeting will not work for all industries. Hence the top retargeting strategy must encompass your entire site experience along with the products and services that you offer.

Take A Step Back

Businesses are encouraged to take a step back to see whether their own site and products are in need of modification and improvements. As products and services are constantly being improved, many businesses that did not respond to change fast enough risk being left behind.

Make Time To Evaluate

Are you making the time to look at your own products and services – whether they still remain relevant to the current market demand. Or do you need to make some serious changes?

Check, Compare And Change

Depending on the type of products or service that you offer, you will need to check and make comparison in terms of pricing, affordability, practicality and see which direction the market is going. Some may prefer to chart their own course while other businesses are analyzing their own site and products while bench marking with their competitors’. It’s imperative to make the changes quickly as the consumer market is changes rapidly.

Some of the top remarketing and retargeting providers out there may just be showing generic ads to customers. Retaily aims to change that by offering a more purposeful dynamic retargeting service which is currently available for merchants using Shopify and InstanteStore.

Be More Versatile

By knowing what your customers are looking for and how they want their products to be, you can then make the necessary changes to what you’re currently offering. This will need to reflect in your website look and product range. Offering products that will capture the consumer market requires innovation as well as insight into consumer behavior. Your business can either grow further or shrink faster depending on how versatile you are in making the necessary decision and changes.

Choose Your Customer Base Wisely

You can’t win them all. So you will need to choose your customer base wisely. If your site is getting a lot of traffic, please make sure that it’s able to load fast and is mobile friendly while ensuring the online shopping experience is quick and easy. Targeting more premium customers? Make sure your site reflects a sense of elegance, luxury and that it looks and works well across all devices.

The folks at Volvo certainly made the necessary changes to their Volvo SUV XC90 to cater to the growing demand for luxury vehicles in China. They basically had the front passenger seat removed, did away with the 3rd row in the car (which made it more spacious) and added in a luxurious storage, ottoman, work table, television area turning it into a first class seat. Did I mention that the cup holder is also temperature controlled? Needless to say, the Chinese were very interested and I won’t be surprised that it’ll get snapped up since having a chauffeur in China is quite common. Check out the short video below :

Mobile Friendly Emails Are Crucial

With so many people now preferring to access their emails via their mobiles instead of using desktops or laptops, businesses need to make sure that emails sent out are mobile friendly. Since mobile screens are smaller and people tend to be more impatient, you would want to ensure that your message gets read and understood in the shortest time possible. What do I mean by mobile friendly emails?

Straight To The Point Titles

If you’re offering a discount or free shipping, please state it clearly as concise as possible in the title. Try looking at your emails from your mobile device. You’ll notice that the email title can only show around 5 to 6 words. If your title is anything longer, it will be truncated or not shown unless the viewer chooses to view the email in landscape view. Most of the time, people read their emails in portrait mode.

Keep The Content Short

Limit your email content to only a few sentences with easy to read fonts. If the font is too small, it gets too annoying to read as one has to pinch and squint at the mobile screen. Make sure the spaces between each sentence and each word is formatted properly for easy reading. If possible, try to convey your email message in a few sentences.

Optimize Your Images

If you’re going to include any image(s) in your email, please make sure that they are optimized for mobile viewing. If the image is too big and heavy, it will take too long to load on a mobile device (not to mention it eats away at your mobile data plan). You want the email to load fast when it’s opened on a mobile.

Personalized Contact Details

People who are interested to reply your emails will want to reach someone at a personal level. You may want to tweak your email signature with your name, designation and contact details clearly for customers to reach you easily.

Realistic Frequency

You don’t want to keep emailing consumers every day. They’ll just treat it as spam. Once a week or fortnightly would be realistic.

So the take away is that your emails need to cater to consumers who are now accessing their emails via their mobile devices. It needs to capture their attention long enough for them to read through quickly with a good CTA (Call To Action).

Emails needs to be short, sweet, straight to the point with images that are light for faster loading. With so many emails landing in one’s inbox daily, you don’t want your emails to be tagged as spam either. You want to stand a chance to keep in touch with consumers in order to pitch to them and not put them off.

Dynamic Retargeting Compared to Basic Retargeting Ad Services

Many businesses are now turning to retargeting ads service providers to help bring back sales from customers who had previously visited their website. However, one needs to know the difference between basic retargeting ads as compared to personalized or dynamic retargeting ads.

The basic ones will usually show a generic ad offering a simple discount for first time shoppers.

The purpose of offering dynamic retargeting is to remind the consumer of the actual product(s) that they had recently viewed but had not purchased from the website.

Now before you start moaning and groaning thinking that your product ads will spam the living daylights out of your customers’ browsers, know that your retargeting provider would have advised you to tweak your ad display frequency to be more realistic.

Have A Realistic Time Span

Because some customers may not want to purchase your products straight away. So there could be a lapse time of a few weeks or months before you want to jog their memory. The system needs to be smart enough to know whether the customer has already purchased the product from your store or not during that time frame.

Target New And Returning Customers

There also needs to be a clear distinction between customers who have made a purchase from your store compared to those who have not made any purchase at all but have only visited your site.

For instance, you may want to offer a general discount for those who have previously bought from your store to encourage them to visit again to purchase other items. Those that have not made any purchase would be shown the dynamic retargeting ads based on what they had viewed from your store.

And if they had actually reached the checkout page without completing the order, your dynamic retargeting ad may even throw in free shipping or a special discount just for that product that they left in the checkout cart.

With Retaily, you don’t have to worry about all this work as the software will take care of this for you.

Cross Device Retargeting

With mobile ads on the rise these days, it will come as no surprise that retargeting will be done across devices as consumers tend to switch from desktop to tablets and mobile phones. The end result is to try to encourage them to complete the sale order on any of the devices.

This way of doing marketing will increase as more consumers use their mobiles to browse and shop online. And with mobile penetration being higher compared to desktop penetration, retargeting needs to be more fluid and dynamic making it easier and faster to remind consumers of their product interest and to help them make the purchase.

Retargeting Campaign – Know What Consumers Really Want

Holidays & Seasons

What makes our whole year so interesting and fun is the fact that the season keeps changing (Yay! Spring is here!) not to mention that we have a whole long list of holidays, celebrations and wonderful occasions to enjoy. Businesses who are planning their retargeting campaign need to take these holiday weekends and seasons into consideration.

As different countries observe different public holidays, there’s bound to be some general holidays that everyone will observe (Hint : Labor Day is on the 1st of May but for USA, it falls on the first Monday of September). Long weekend = more time for holiday shopping / vacation!

What Are Consumers Looking For?

While you may want to offer either a good discount off your store’s products or throw in free shipping or free gifts for customers who didn’t close the sale after visiting your site, you may want to take a step back and think through on what consumers were actually looking for when they visited your site.

Was it to do price comparison? Or were they were looking for a very specific product? That will depend on which page they landed in first. Your retargeting provider should be able to let you know your customer’s trail (from the first page that they landed on to the products that they were looking at and where the trail stops – did they leave at the product page, checkout page, etc).

You will need to consider all these factors to offer those customers a deal that majority won’t be able to say ‘no’ to. Perhaps a different offer price leading to the holiday weekend? Would you plan to give the final sale offer on the holiday itself?

A Game Of Hide & Seek

That’s why it’s important to know what consumers are looking for and what they actually want when you plan out your retargeting campaign along with the duration of the campaign. It’s like a game of hide and seek when it comes to figuring out what your visitors were looking for and what they actually wanted to buy from you. Was the product out of stock??

You also don’t want your retargeting campaign to run too long sounding like a broken record. Neither do you want to offer it forever. Have a realistic timeline in place based on seasons and specific holiday occasions.

Ride The Holiday Wave

At the end of the day, you want to make money but you also want to offer your customers a good shopping experience that they can remember as being pleasant, value for money and worth recommending to their other friends. The holiday seasons are just the tip of the iceberg.

You could consider Retaily which is currently free for merchants who are using Shopify and InstanteStore and see the difference of using a dynamic retargeting service provider who knows what you need for your business.

And since it’s Good Friday and Easter Sunday, guess what businesses are offering to capture the different market segments this weekend? Check out this short clip by Marks & Spencer :