The old brick and mortar model is dead. Customers don’t drive around town to find your physical store, nor do they look in the yellow pages. Traditional online and digital ads are growing extinct by the minute.
The typical customer journey starts with an email or seeing a social media post, progresses to a mobile browsing session, and finally ends with an interactive ecommerce chatbot conversation.
The secret sauce is to understand the various channels like the back of your hand, and to remarket your product to the same customer. There are multiple touchpoints in a typical customer’s journey that weren’t even around a few years ago.
How do you keep up with all the new ways to convert ecommerce shoppers? You have to develop remarketing systems that will scale with your business.
Here are the top 5 remarketing tips to scale your ecommerce business.
Let’s dive in.
1. Don’t Rely Solely on Social Ads
Social ads are an important way to convert leads, that’s true. But they won’t help you scale your efforts to get customers into your remarketing funnel. Paid campaigns will only get you so far. You need organic traction and organic engagement.
What we’re talking about is re-engaging with the website visitor who has already bought into your brand. But they just keep on shopping, running out of time, or switching devices.
A good strategy to fuel your remarketing engine does not rely on social ads but on organic reach. It is way better to target existing online audiences that consume content regularly. For that, you need to work with an influencer.
How do you work with influencers?
I’m glad you asked.
2. Maximize Your Reach by Using Influencers
Influencers who have tens of thousands of followers on social media channels or blogs and can promote your product to those followers through a trusted voice. What they do is essentially provide a landing page that introduces customers to your product.
Studies show that 70% of millennial consumers are influenced by their peers, and 30% of consumers trust non-celebrity bloggers. So what you can do is to work with influencers who have a significant audience size (10-200k followers) to reach vast amounts of people at once.
Here is an example from Michelle Phan. She gets over a million view on each of her videos and has over 9 million followers.
Source: YouTube
The good news is that once an influencer promotes your product once, its really easy to target the same audience again. All they have to do is to post more content about your product and voila! The same people (i.e. their followers) view it, and have a chance to engage with it and visit your site.
What if you wanted to systematically target your ideal audience? Could you do that with an influencer as well?
I’m glad you asked.
Let’s take a look.
3. Leverage Influencer Audience Data
You can and should leverage your influencers’ audience data for remarketing purposes. There are a few different ways to do that. One way is to use an influencer tool like Lumanu that displays all of the data on the influencer’s audience already.
Source: www.lumanu.com
Use a tool like Lumanu to find out the genders, ages, and geographical locations of an influencer’s audience. The great thing is that this information is already displayed for each influencer so you can pick them based on their audience.
What if you already have an influencer you’re working with and you want to test this before scaling? How do you find more information about their audience? By using Facebook custom audiences.
Have your influencer create a Facebook custom audience that is made up of their existing audience and share it with your ad account. This will provide you all the information that you need. Here is a tutorial you can read on the subject.
Facebook custom audiences work for Facebook, Instagram, and for blogs (via Facebook pixel).
So have your influencer create their audience and share it with you.
So now you have an influencer in place, and you have the data you need. How do you make sure that the buyer will enter the customer journey and purchase your product?
By setting up multiple touch points.
4. Focus on Cross-Channel Promotion
Multiple touch points are critical. 75% of consumers buy after 3-5 touchpoints with a brand. And today, consumers take an average of 6 touch points. This trend holds true with brand influencer content. The best way to achieve this is through cross-channel promotion along with multiple posts re-enforcing your products.
One really good example of this is the campaign that Mercedes Benz did. The car company hired a “dog influencer” by the name of Loki. Loki is a beautiful Husky dog that also has over 1.5 million followers on Instagram. He’s living the high dog life, that’s for sure.
Mercedes Benz hired Loki and his owner Kelly Lund to post content on Instagram. The post linked back to a YouTube video showing Kelly driving the car and Loki running after it. It was an absolutely gorgeous video.
Source: YouTube
The 360 degree YouTube videos generated over 250,000 views and helped the car company reach a younger audience that they couldn’t have targeted on their own.
5. Provide Incentives
The last piece of the puzzle is how you pay your influencers. Use incentives in a creative way to maximize your remarketing and retargeting efforts.
For example, you can create custom coupon codes that the influencer could offer their audiences for online and in-store redemption (if you have a physical location). Use unique links to track the results of each campaign or even each influencer, to see what works and what you need to change for next time.
One famous example is the influencer campaign that the Swedish watchmaker Daniel Wellington ran. The brand hired a group of influencers and each one offered a coupon code for the company’s watch products. The campaign increased the brand’s profits by 214% between 2014 and 2015.
Source: Instagram
Recap
The average journey that a customer takes on an e-commerce site from discovery to purchase has significantly evolved in the last few years. And that’s why your marketing should follow suit.
Use remarketing strategies to create multiple touchpoints on the buyer’s journey and organically target engaged audiences online.
Here are the tips that we covered:
1. Limit the use of social ads, focus on more organic traffic instead to successfully scale your remarketing efforts.
2. Use influencers to maximize your reach by targeting their audiences.
3. Leverage influencer audience data by using an influencer tool or Facebook custom audiences
4. Focus on cross-channel promotion to increase profits.
5. Offer incentives for your audiences to help your campaigns go viral.
Now, remember, the glue that holds all of your remarketing together is consistency. You need to have a consistent brand message along the entire customer journey. This means that the customer should receive the same vibe from your brand on every touch point. Otherwise, your remarketing efforts will only confuse your audience.
Make sure to work with influencers who are an authentic – ones who have built an engaged audience made up of real followers. This will ensure the long-term success of your remarketing strategy.