Are you aware that about 90-98% of all website visitors don't convert? Getting a slew of traffic to visit your site and check out your services is a great thing - but it doesn't do much if none of that traffic generates sales. Retargeting is a marketing technique that can help you stay connected to bounced traffic, recreating chances for you to turn visitors into customers. With the complex customer journeys and long sales cycles that exist today, creating numerous touch points with your prospects is essential to maximizing your ROI.

Retargeting has been a hot topic in the World of advertising and marketing for the last couple of years. As a solution that enables brands and companies to interact with individuals who have already shown interest in their websites, retargeting goes beyond PPC and traditional online advertising by taking customer involvement to a new level. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that retargeting is a guaranteed method for success. In fact, a lot of companies learn that failing to retarget correctly can leave them with complete campaign failure.

There are a number of ways that you can sabotage your own retargeting campaign, but the most significant one relates to the way you interact with users in your retargeting pool - specifically after they convert.

Retargeting Current Customers

As effective and useful as retargeting is for brands and businesses, most customers don't appreciate being bombarded with advertisements everywhere they go. This is one of the reasons why many companies need to find a good balance between useful retargeting and retargeting too much. If there's one thing that's even more annoying than seeing the same ad fifty times a day from the same company - it's continuing to see that ad after you've completed your purchase.

Placing a singular line of code into your "thanks for buying" or post-conversion page is enough to remove your customers from the segment of unconverted users in your pool, ensuring that you don't become an annoying entity, ruining their browsing experience. A burn code, or burn pixel can be used to un-tag the users in your retargeting pool that have made a purchase that they can stop receiving the same advertisements. In addition to not being incredibly annoying, you get the benefit of saving some extra cash too - why waste impressions on people who have already converted, when you could be getting brand new customers.

Converted users can still be a part of your retargeting campaign in some circumstances, but you shouldn't be asking them to complete the same action twice in a short period of time. No advert is going to convince your customer to buy the same shoes they just bought all over again! Once your targeted users have become customers, you will have an opportunity to re-target them with new ads. Instead of showing them the benefits of something they've already bought, you can cross-sell, upsell, or even offer referral discounts with brand new ads!

Give Your Converted Users a Segment of Their Own

Just as the best retargeting campaigns focus on addressing individuals according to their particular phase in the sales funnel, if you want to stay on your users' radar after they have converted, you need to give them their very own form of retargeting or remarketing.

One of the things you'll find as a business owner or marketing expert is that even when you're doing things right, and your users are converting - this doesn't mean that your job is done. Retargeting isn't a concept that is restricted to finding new business, and it can be quite effective in retaining existing clients, developing brand loyalty, and promoting upsell or cross-sell campaigns. If you want to get the most out of retargeting, however, you need to know how to segment your campaigns and serve creatives that are geared towards a specific segment of your customer base.

Once your campaign has successfully transformed a visitor into a customer, you can move that buyer into a brand new segment for your campaign which focuses on upsell and cross-sell messaging. For example, based on the purchase history of a customer, there may be an additional package or complementary product that they would find useful. Perhaps your consumer bought the "basic" package, and in a while you'd like to tempt them into upgrading to "premium"?

Conversion rates and CTRs can be as much as 3-5% higher when you use your campaigns for upsells, and if you're not adjusting your methods to suit your existing clients, you could be missing out on further valuable conversions. You don't have to give up on your visitors once they become customers - but if you want success you will need to reposition them in your retargeting campaign.