Why Retargeting matters and 4 considerations for your own campaigns

CRM systems like Marketo have come a long way from its single channel engagement beginnings.  Digital retargeting is one of my favorite features, allowing the sensitive marketer to expand their message across more channels and connect with their customers like never before.  Pocket protectors on while I geek out on why retargeting is so important and provide tips on how to structure your own campaigns for success.

For today’s discussion, I’m mostly referring to Marketing Automation functionality, like what you find in Marketo connected to a CRM system like salesforce.  These platforms are expanding their impact by extending the number of stages marketers can build in to their multi-channel engagement strategy known as retargeting or realtime personalization.  Huh?  See Figure 1 for a schematic of how this works. 

So what?  More stages,

Imagine a one touch marketing campaign.  You visit a car dealership web site and they post a $1,000 discount for people who come in for a test drive in the next 4 days at a location close to the zip code you entered.  Now extend that to two channels: The same retailer sends an email to you check out their newest inventory.  After you open the email, you visit their site.  When you visit their site, a widget (pop up ad) appears on the side navigation that features the specific car you clicked on in the email and a great discount offer.  

Now imagine the same email triggered an ad in your facebook feed with the car you looked at, and an offer if you provide your contact information and agree to come in for a test drive.

In each case, the dealership made an offer to attract new customers.  In the 2 touch model, the message in the initial email channel was reinforced in a 2^nd channel for only those who showed positive intent by clicking on the email.  In the third case, the same customer was forced to give their information (and permission to be contacted) to be eligible for the offer. 

Means More influence.

Retargeting is effective in driving behavior because it extends your message across more channels and beyond a single interaction.  This has multiple benefits including:

• the more exposure you have to a message, the more chance it has to influence you
• diffusing the message between multiple channels reduces the risk of channel fatigue and channel bias
• Basing the 2^nd stage experience on actions taken in the first enables a more personalized and targeted user experience

Retargeting is also efficient in managing your contact strategy. 

·         it allows the marketer to focus efforts and expensive offers on a smaller population of customers who have taken some action or shown some interest

·         It automates the list upload for 2^nd (and 3^rd) tier experiences AND the capture of actions and form fills in the downstream experiences into the CRM system.  This automation is important both because it eliminates manual list transfers and because it allows the marketing message to stay with a customer immediately after they take an action, rather than waiting for a batch list upload hours later. 

4 things to consider when building your own Retargeting campaigns

OK, so you’ve got a viable CRM and marketing automation platform and you are ready to up your retargeting game. 

1.  Set your end game: If you are going to go through the trouble of creating a multi-stage experience, it should coordinate in a way to best achieve a specific outcome.  Do you want to drive awareness, capture contact information, or make the sale.  Setting target KPI’s on a few measures will help frame the type of experience (and budget) needed.  For example, if Im a B2B service provider and wanted a campaign to capture new prospects, I might start with a paid display ad offering a free whitepaper in exchange for name, email and company size and industry info.  For those who download the website, I can retarget an offer if they visit my site and instruct my sales team to focus attention on those contacts who also visited the website. 
2.  Make it personal: Depending on how you structure the initial experiences, you can capture important details about a prospect that drive personalization of your messaging and improve relevance.  Consider your bank knows you clicked on a banner ad for their airline miles card.  Instead of teeing up a generic ad in your facebook feed of all their products, they post pictures of beautiful beaches with a 40,000 mile new customer offer.  And when you call in to discuss your existing card, the agent shares relevant benefits of the mileage card over your current card.
3.  Know when to Hug and know when to Wrestle: Depending on your end game (see #1), you will need to craft an experience series that best delivers on the objective.  In cases where the goal is simply awareness, you can use retargeting like a blanket to wrap around high potential customers with all of the branding and benefit reinforcement possible.  If the goal requires greater customer engagement, say scheduling an appointment with a sales agent, you will need to get more involved in eliciting response through the experience.
4.  Use free channels but invest in paid: One of the great things about retargeting is that you can create widgets that pop up for visitors to your own website without having to pay media fees.  This is an excellent start and should be leveraged as much as possible.  That said, not everyone you want to reach visits your website - that’s why you need to retarget in the first place!  In many cases, marketers are looking to expand their reach to the channels where their customers are and are in a mindset to consider their product.  For these situations, retargeting gets some help from intermediaries like AdBridge to ensure the lists are shared with the social channel, and any actions or information captured is shared back with the company CRM. 

Its hard to stay one step ahead of the game.  But retargeting makes it possible to create multi-staged experiences that expand the marketers reach while also improving personalization and efficiency.