Friends and a Remarketing Strategy: Both are Good to Have

Frodo has Sam in The Lord of the Rings. Ted has Marshall in How I Met Your Mother. And you can never go wrong with Charlie Brown and Snoopy from Peanuts. What am I talking about? Best friends, of course. And while Frodo, Ted and Charlie have their best buds, they have other friends, too. And the way Ted talks to Marshall is going to be very different from the way he talks to Marshall’s wife, Lily. You can use this same analogy to figure out how to use remarketing effectively without crossing a line – or worse, coming across as creepy.

First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what remarketing is. The most common type of remarketing is retargeted ads, a form of online advertising that targets consumers based upon their previous internet activity. You’ve probably seen this if you’ve ever searched for, say, season three of How I Met Your Mother on Amazon. Before you order it, you get distracted by a Facebook post about the latest cat video, so you click over to Buzzfeed, where you start seeing ads for the complete box set of How I Met Your Mother all over the site. Boom. Retargeted ads.

Another example of remarketing would be adding customers to a drip campaign based on their activity on your website. You might also send a customer a reminder email if they navigated away from your website, but left an item in their shopping cart.

So, back to the best friend analogy. Your interaction with your best friend is going to be very different from your interaction with someone you just met last week at the dog park. And both of those will be different from your interactions with a friend from college who you only talk to a few times a year. For example, you might text your best friend every morning as you get to work. If you did that to your friend from college who you hadn’t spoken to in six months, they would probably be pretty creeped out.

Back to retargeting. How “in your face” you are with your remarketing will depend on your industry and the type of interaction your customer triggers to be added to a remarketing campaign. You can afford to be pushier with your “best friend” customers.

Someone who puts an item in their cart is one step away from buying – add them to an email campaign reminding them to complete their purchase!

But what about a customer who interacted with you six months ago (your “friend from college,” from our friend analogy), but hasn’t visited since. Your messaging and interaction with them is going to be dramatically different. You might add them to a drip campaign to work on converting them from inactive to active and then back to being a customer. Work on turning them into a closer friend, but don’t creep them out.

Of course, your business will determine the way you market it. Say you’re a jewelry store. If a man comes to your website searching for engagement rings, you don’t want to spoil his surprise by starting to serve ads to his internet browser. If his fiancée-to-be gets on his computer and starts seeing ads for diamond rings, then, well, the game is afoot. Instead, you might consider serving general ads for your jewelry store to keep your business subtly top-of-mind.

Aside from not ruining customers’ big moments, your business may have other things to consider when it comes to remarketing campaigns. For instance, if you’re in the healthcare industry, you wouldn’t want to start serving someone advertising for an embarrassing health condition after they visited your website seeking treatment or advice.

There are a ton of tools and tactics to help you as you plan your remarketing strategy. Feeling overwhelmed? Drop us a line. We’d be glad to help you plan your campaigns so you can reach your best friends AND that guy you just met at the dog park.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022