Digital Media News

Getting new traffic to your site is one thing, but creating customers out of that traffic is an entirely different proposition. As little as 2% of visitors to a website will actually become customers or take some sort of action towards a purchase, so how can advertising entice the remaining 98% to become customers? With retargeting that's how.

What is retargeting?

Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses a small snippet of code to 'follow' your audience around the Web. Here's how it works: a small piece of code is placed on your website. The code is unnoticeable and won’t affect your site’s performance. Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops a browser cookie. Later, when your cookied visitors browse the Web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know to serve ads, ensuring that they are served only to people who have previously visited your site.

People desert websites for various reasons. If you’re lucky, they’ll come back to finish what they started; if you’re unlucky, they will forget all about it. ‘Abandoners’ can be hot prospects, andcompanies often invest a lot of time and moneyon retargeting (paid media) and remarketing (sending a series of abandonment recovery emails), to persuade consumers to re-visit their purchases.

Here are some techniques from the world of psychology that you canincorporate into your remarketing or retargeting campaigns, to stimulate the ‘buy’ button in your visitors’ brains.

1. Foot in the Door Technique

Sometimes visitors abandon because they are not ready to buy yet, i.e. some shoppers like to add items to their carts over several visits before they check out.Although these visitors may convert later, you can reinforce their decision to buy from you by using the Foot in the Door technique.The principle behind the technique is this: Make a small request of your customer (a micro-conversion) first, such as asking them to join a mailing list orcreate a wish list for future purchases. If they agree to your first request, they will be more likely to respond to your next and bigger request.

Psychologists theorize that the technique works due to the human’s tendency to feel indebted to someone after they’ve had some level of interaction with that person.

If you could keep your brand in front of prospects long after they’ve visited your website, wouldn’t you jump at the chance? Oh course you would. Ad retargeting gives you that opportunity—anywhere your prospects travel online, and it has proven to be an effective way to entice digital window shoppers back toa website.

So what is retargeting?

To put it simply, ad retargeting serves display advertisements to Web users after they have left an advertiser’s website. For instance, you’re on bestbuy.com looking at laptops. You leave the site and visit another website and are shown a display ad for bestbuy.com. That is retargeting in action.

The idea is that a user who initially visits your website is a warm lead, and is likely to make a purchase. An effective retargeted ad will hopefully get that user back and convince him or her to make a purchase.