As the name suggests, remarketing is simply the practice of marketing your business to a certain audience again.

This is important because quite naturally, people do not usually buy a product or subscribe to a given school of thought after just one encounter.

It takes a certain amount of interaction and shared experiences before you start to consider anyone a friend, not just an acquaintance and in the same vein, your prospects need to understand your product and trust your brand before they can become paying customers and loyal users.

A simple way to foster this understanding is to expose your business or product to them over and over, via remarketing. Not to say that you should expend unlimited resources on a prospect even when they’re showing no interest. Rather, work towards creating awareness, encouraging engagement, and then remarketing to the engaged users for a better chance of conversion.

In practice, this will:

• Eliminate uninterested parties
• Highlight the ones who are interested or at least curious
• Help you figure out which people you should spend your time working with, and exactly what you should offer them while trying to convert them into regular users and paying customers

“Custom printer company Storkie Express found that dynamic remarketing campaigns yielded conversion rates 203% higher than regular display ads.”

How to use remarketing to dramatically increase conversion rates for your business:

According to WordStream, an online advertising agency, “conversion rates actually increase the more users see an ad within remarketing campaigns. It’s true that click-through rates decline over time, but those people who do click on your ad, after having seen it a few times already, become twice as likely to convert.”

Your goal with remarketing is to get a precise and highly targeted audience so that when they finally engage with your content or offers, they already understand your brand and are likely to convert – which in turn will lead to a lower cost per click for you, as the algorithms that serve ads will interpret yours as highly relevant and therefore show them more and charge you less.

“On Facebook, Quality Score (or “Relevance Score” as they call it) is even more important! A 1% increase in Post Engagement (people liking, commenting, or clicking on your promoted posts) results in an average 5% reduction in cost per engagement.”

The first step in creating your remarketing funnel is to find a foot in the door with your potential customers. This means crafting a message that will capture their attention, and then offering them a reason to opt-in to your marketing, so to speak.

Free samples in exchange for contact information, online competitions where the audience needs to take a specific action to be eligible, asking targeted questions for them to answer, and even encouraging them to comment something as simple as an emoji are all ways in which you can identify the engaged users in your audience.

Once you have those people identified, you can then decide how to remarket to them in a way that is most relevant and most likely to convert.

For instance, if you run a competition to win a free sample of your product, you’ll have more participants than winners, giving you a clearly defined list of potential buyers for that specific product. Following up by offering them a “consolation” deal or discount is highly likely to convert because you already know that this specific group of people is in fact interested in the product.

Another example is offering a product upgrade to someone who has already purchased something – car accessories to go with a new car, cooking utensils or ingredients to go with a new cookbook, popular apps to go with a new iPhone, and so on.

As you can see, remarketing is a step by step process that requires you to know exactly where you are with your prospects. Even though you wouldn’t want to overwhelm a new customer with a high commitment product (maybe in terms of price or operational expertise), you also want to make sure that your existing customers do not go looking elsewhere for product upgrades that you can easily provide.

And if you’re worried about your clients getting sick of hearing from you, here’s why you shouldn’t be:

A research study by Hubspot found that 77% of the people surveyed would prefer to use an ad-filtering program than a complete ad-block.

Most people do not mind being served ads, as long as they are relevant to their interests. Knowing which marketing message to serve to which segment of your audience is key, and you can use a remarketing strategy to track your customer behavior so that you can easily know:

• Who is engaging
• What stage of the conversion process they have reached, and
• Which part of your marketing message they are responding to.

Keeping track of your prospects in this way will help you to avoid serving mismatched ads to your customer segments, or showing repetitive ads to people who have already converted.

A good remarketing strategy with a reliable tracking system will empower you to know where to focus your energy – some people are just not your audience and that’s okay, the faster you can eliminate them, the better you can focus on the people who actually need your services.

Secondly, the conversion or purchase decision is a step by step process that requires research and you can help your prospects make the decision by sending relevant and highly targeted marketing messages which will foster brand awareness and keep you at the top of their mind when they are finally ready to make the purchase.

Personal conversations are the best remarketing channel for converting your leads:

Ultimately, the most important and highest converting form of remarketing is one-on-one conversation.

After all the sales messages have been sent, after interest has been expressed, great reviews have been shared and likes and comments have been earned, most customers still wonder, “Will this product or service work for me?”

This is where you can come in with one-on-one conversations fostered by social media engagements to address the specific questions or issues posed by individual leads, to reassure them that your business is suited to their unique personal situations, and to help them understand how they can get the most benefit out of the product or service you are offering.

Not only will this help you dispel any doubts or fears and remove all the barriers to conversion, but it will also highlight the specific concerns that your prospective clients have and help you address them preemptively in your subsequent marketing messages and product iterations.