The Power of Remarketing: Low-Cost Touchpoints

Touchpoints. Before the days of digital marketing, they were pretty hard to come by. The only two ways for marketers to create visibility were through spendy advertising campaigns or grassroots promotions. Today, touchpoints are more accessible and affordable than ever. Using a digital tactic called remarketing, you can continually engage potential customers who have already shown interest in your products or services. Read on to learn more.

What Are Touchpoints and Why Do They Matter?

Touchpoints are essentially any instances of contact between you and your customers. If you are seen by a customer, you have created a touchpoint with them. Digital touchpoints include online ads, social media channels, email newsletters, or just about any type of content marketing. There are marketing adages that say it takes 7, 10, or even 13-plus touchpoints to make a sale. Whether they’re true is up for debate, especially online, where customers often know what they’re looking for. Nevertheless, you should always create as many touchpoints for your business as possible to build your brand and drive conversions.

What is Remarketing and How Does it Work?

Remarketing, also called retargeting, is one of the most sophisticated digital strategies around—there is no other medium better for creating touchpoints efficiently and cost-effectively. So, what exactly is remarketing?

The Short Version

  • Someone visits your website, even just for 30 seconds
  • You begin following them around the Internet with your messaging

 The Long Version

If you’ve ever shopped online, you’ve likely experienced a company remarketing to you. Well, now you know the name for it: remarketing! What a coincidence that their ad showed up on your Facebook feed the day after you viewed their page, right? For those who care, here’s how remarketing works behind the scenes:
  • Your developer adds a code to the back-end of your website enabling you to track who visits your website.
  • Unless a visitor is browsing the web in Privacy mode, they are sharing “cookies,” which are messages from their browser to your server about what they are searching for online.
  • Very few people browse in Privacy mode. Most don’t know or care how cookies work, and those who do know that having their cookies on makes for a better browsing experience with faster page load times, auto fill of commonly used personal information and logins, and relevant advertising (a la remarketing).
  • Remarketing is delivered through what we call display networks, Google and Facebook being among the largest of them.
One of the best things about remarketing is its affordability. For $200-$300 per month, small businesses can run a relatively robust remarketing campaign that serves as both a brand builder and conversion tool. Remarketing is a much better investment than traditional display ads, which are higher up the sales funnel (meaning the leads are colder).

Sounds Creepy and Salesy…Are You Sure I Should Do Remarketing?

When clients first learn about remarketing, many are turned off by the idea of “stalking” people on the Internet. The truth is that customers are actually very receptive to remarketing—and why wouldn’t they be? After all, you’re only marketing to them because they have already shown interest in your offerings. CMO.com offers 15 telling stats about remarketing. When retargeted with display ads, customers who have visited your website are 70 percent more likely to return and convert on your website! As is the case with any digital marketing tactic, the key to remarketing is great content. Rather than drilling customers with, “buy this, buy now, buy please,” you want to provide them with engaging content that in many cases might not have a sales message at all. When we develop remarketing campaigns, we focus on creating value. For example, an ad for one of our tourism clients offers “10 great things to do when in town”—much more appealing to a customer than one saying, “Book now.”

Developing a Remarketing Strategy

As a marketing agency, we test our strategies for ourselves so that we can first see what works on our dime instead of on yours. We’ve enjoyed significant success with our own remarketing, which is centered on a video about our agency. The video has received more than 5,000 views in just two months, and the high number helps to intrigue even more people to click. 

Best Foot Forward

Marketing is simply a matter of putting your best foot forward and positioning yourself for customers to convert. The video we mentioned in our own example tells the story of how we’ve helped countless clients do just that and see astounding results. Watch: The Secret Behind Raindrop Marketing’s Success from Raindrop Marketing on Vimeo. By: Jacques Spitzer