EPISODE 59 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: REMARKETING ADS 10
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
There's a Facebook group, the Australian finance podcast She's On The Money. Yesterday, I saw a post pop up and thought damn, they are on to us marketers.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
The post read, "Online shopping hack. Leave the item in the cart and wait 24 hours. If there's a discount or a freebie, it will be emailed to you or shown in an ad to nudge you across the line. Takes some patience, but often worthwhile."
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And this is a prime example of effective remarketing or retargeting. This episode focuses mainly on e-commerce businesses, but these same concepts can be taken and implemented for service-based businesses, particularly if your call to action is to book an appointment or a free consultation.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Welcome to the Boom Your Biz podcast, a podcast for the movers, the shakers and even bigger action takers in business. I'm your host, Sonya McIntyre-Reid and each week, I'll be exploring the question of what really makes businesses and organizations thrive? I'm on a mission to educate, empower and inspire business owners and myself along the way.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
As a marketer, this is the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to getting people on the fence over the line to purchase. It can often result in a crazy return on ad spend, and it's a starting point for all of our advertising campaigns. I'm talking about remarketing or retargeting.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
You see, the hard work has already been done. The person is at what we call the bottom of the funnel. The people you're sending these ads or emails to are already familiar with you. They've been to your site and gone as far as entering their details at the check out. But for whatever reason, they've abandoned the cart and not completed the purchase.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
There's a million reasons this could happen, but some common ones are that they got distracted, they're waiting for the next pay day, or even the internet dropping out. So even if you have a really small budget, this is where to start with your ads if you're managing to drive traffic to your site by other means. And look guys, honestly, $5 per day can be enough for these kind of campaigns.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Let me take you through how we actually do it. Now, this is going to be quite top level, but it will give you the information to go away and Google the bits and pieces that you need to implement. So I'm going to take you through the tech and also the concepts on making it happen as well.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
There are three common mechanisms to make remarketing magic. Let's start with the free one. So number one is through email. Part abandonment email campaigns are a great way to put email retargeting to work for e-commerce brands. Typically, these campaigns focus on specific products that the consumer was looking at, and this information is pulled directly into the email. So a little bit of AI happening, it's awesome.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
These work best if the email is sent between two and 24 hours after the person has abandoned the cart, and the goal is to entice people back with an offer like free shipping. So any little incentives that you can add to get them back over the line is perfect.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So popular email software, such as Klaviyo and MailChimp have tutorials on how you can do this automatically. I also believe Shopify has some great in-built tools you can explore as well. Just search for the platform your site is built on, plus your email software that you're using, and reach out to the support team for remarketing help with those emails.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Look, if in doubt, seriously, reach out to your email software support team. God knows, we pay enough for these tools so make the most of the support services that come along with them. They will be itching to really just help you make use of their systems because they know that they're going to keep you longer as the customer. So seriously, it's so overlooked by so many businesses. Just reach out to them for free.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Number two is Facebook or Instagram advertising. This is my absolute favorite. Basically, it is the same concept as the email reminder, but it's an ad that comes across Facebook and Instagram in their audience network.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
There are a few techie things you need to make sure you have in place to make this work. So bear with me as I list them off, and this will help you get all those bits and pieces in place before setting up these ads.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So the first is ensuring that the Facebook pixel is set up correctly on your website. And guys, I do not care what type of business you have. For the love of God, please make sure you've got the Facebook pixel on your website, even if you're not planning on doing ads. Now it's still collecting audience data for you to use down the track.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And I cannot believe the amount of marketing agencies that are selling Facebook ads as a service, but don't have the pixel on their website. I feel like that's saying a lot.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
You also need to make sure that your domain has been verified for the new iOS updates and ensure that the appropriate events are set up with the pixel, including view content, add to cart and purchase. If you're a service-based business story, you'll be able to do this for things like sign-up forms and contact forms.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Finally, you'll need to have your product catalog set up and linked to the business manager and to your ad account. So do not just be going and pressing promote and boosts on posts. This is actually in the backend of the Facebook business manager. Just type in business.facebook.com, and it'll soon tell you whether or not you have an account set up.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So now that techie stuff is out of the way, you'll need to jump into the ads manager and create an ad with the objective of catalog sales. So this is not going to work unless you've done that tech stuff I mentioned previously.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So when you get the ad to the ad set level, Facebook has made life easy and there will be the option to target an audience that has added the product to the cart, but not purchased. Make sure you don't keep this default on 180 days, because that will mean that someone will be spammed with abandoned cart ads for months. And that's just annoying and you're wasting money.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
I like to keep it going for an absolute maximum of around 10 days, but this can vary depending on the price point of your product. So if it's a high ticket product or you're selling a car or something like that, longer than 10 days is fine, but if it's a t-shirt or something small, seven days is more than adequate.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So Facebook will actually pull the information on the product they put in their cart. So the consumer shopping on your website, the information on what products they were looking at and what products they added to their cart and show that person the ads for this specific product. How cool is that?
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And the product will follow them around the internet. Again, this is a great opportunity to give them an incentive to purchase such as free shipping or an extra goodie thrown in. A small discount can also work really well. I've seen the return on ad spend on these kinds of ads be up to 120. So that means you put $1 in and get $120 back. Pretty darn cool, right? I love this stuff.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So the third one is through Google remarketing ads. Google is kind of like Facebook's unsexy older brother. I don't love remarketing on Google as much, but I've seen some companies do it particularly well. Mecca Cosmetica is one of them. I highly recommend you go to the Mecca website, add some products to the cart, pretend that you're going to check out, but get out of it before you actually enter your payment details and see what happens. If you don't have an ad blocker on, you'll be stalked everywhere by those particular products, and you may even receive a follow-up email from them to see this whole concept in work.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Another company I noticed this morning as I've been shopping around for a new desk that does this particularly well. Gosh, what are they called? They are Temple and Webster. They are doing some fantastic Google remarketing campaigns as well. So even just go and have a look at some products in the Temple and Webster website, and then go and see the ads that follow you around. Again, make sure you don't have an ad blocker on because this will not work.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
All right. So back to the Google ads. This is where it gets a little bit more confusing. There are three core ways you can use Google free marketing. That's through display ads, shopping ads and YouTube. Through the e-commerce ads, I would focus on dynamic display remarketing.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Dynamic remarketing campaign show your previous website visitors, tailored and more personal ads based on the products or services they viewed on your website. These campaigns provide you with extra settings and reports specifically for reaching previous website visitors.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Again, like with the Facebook ads, there's a fair bit of tech stuff involved, and honestly, I recommend you go learn the nitty gritty of it. So Google is your best friend in this situation, or see a professional such as our agency, Linchpin, just to get that tech stuff set up for you.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And I'll level with you guys. I don't do this tech set-up myself anymore. I actually have a guy as part of our team. I call my analytics guru and he makes sure all of these bells and whistles are set up on the backend. So I can just jump in and set up the ad campaigns and not worry that it's not tracking properly because he's the pro at it.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
First up, you will need a product or service feed. So this feed includes all of your products and services along with details about each item, the unique ID, price, image, and more. This is kind of like your product catalog that you use with the Facebook advertising side of things, and these details are then pulled from your feed into the dynamic ads. You'll upload your feed to the business data section of your shared library, unless you're a retailer, which I've kind of been touching on mostly.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So if you are an e-commerce business, you will upload this product feed to the Google merchant center. You'll then need to add a tag with custom parameters. This is the equivalent to the Facebook pixel. So adding the dynamic remarketing tag with custom parameters to all pages of your site will make sure that you have visitor remarketing lists and associates them to the unique IDs in the feed.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So this is just like the back end of how it actually works. It's all very, very clever. And again, kind of like Facebook, you'll find these tag audiences in the section of your shared library in Google ads.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And then from there, you'll be able to jump into the Google ads and set up a new campaign. Click on settings, additional settings, and then dynamic ads to explore that more. I should say at this point that remarketing isn't limited to just those who have been on your website. You can also remarket to anyone who, for example, has engaged with your Facebook or Instagram accounts, or has even viewed a video of yours on YouTube.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
In Facebook, you can see all of these amazing remarketing opportunities in the audiences section of the business manager. It is one of my favorite tools to play around with, and they're constantly adding new ways to retarget people, which is awesome. It's kind of like a snowball effect, right? So someone might like an Instagram post and then you can remarket to them with an ad and then drive them to your website and then get them on your mailing list to continue marketing to them.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And that's why it's very hard in the early days if you've got a brand new business to actually get that momentum happening because we don't already have an audience to work with that we can keep remarketing to and grow from there.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
But once you do have that. Sorry, guys. I have two very over-enthusiastic sausage dogs and whenever someone walks past the house, they just have to say hello. So excuse the barking there.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
Let me just back into this remarketing side of things. As I said, it's not just limited to people that visited your website. There's a ton of tools to play with.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
YouTube is another option that you can work with. So this is owned by Google and remarketing is great to drive people away from a video to your website to take the action you desire. You can show personalized ads to millions of viewers across YouTube and partner sites based on their past interactions with your videos or YouTube channel. This is known as video remarketing.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
So by reinforcing your message with people who have already seen your videos or channel, you're more likely to succeed in increasing your return on investment. And I must say, this is where a lot of novices fall down with their advertising. They will essentially boost a post or promote a post that reached someone once, and there's no follow-up or sort of ad sales funnel where they've got that remarketing happening and advertising to them based on their behavior.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And I think that personalized form of advertising is what makes digital so, so powerful. It's not something that can be achieved with radio ads or TV ads or newspaper ads. They're just blasting a sales message with no follow-up.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And remember, if you also have remarketing set up on Google display in Facebook, this loop of you following them around, remaining top of mind happens, and that is where this incredible return on ad spend can occur. Honestly, I geek out about remarketing so much. I love it. It is so fantastic and powerful tool to use.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
The best way to start with this is to dive into concepts I've just explained. If you're an e-commerce business, start with email remarketing and abandoned cart ads. And look, this could just be on Facebook and through your email marketing software to begin with. Google does get a little bit more complicated.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
And if you're putting out content on YouTube, look at some remarketing ads to drive people to your website and actually get them away from the YouTube platform.
Sonya McIntyre-Reid:
That is my advice to you for starting out. I will drop some notes in on the podcast website as well with all of the terms that I've spoken about in case you do want a bit of a list to go off and check what you need to Google to get all of these bits and pieces set up. Happy advertising.