Have you ever left a website without making a purchase, only to find the same brand advertised on another site later? Have you ever placed an item in an online shopping cart without clicking ‘buy’ and then received an email reminding you of your uncompleted purchase?
These are examples of remarketing and retargeting, respectively. In the huge, complex, and crowded online cosmos, these marketing technologies enable firms to target warm prospects and existing consumers with personalized messages based on user action.
After all, good advertising is more than simply getting your brand in front of the right people; it’s also about providing them with the appropriate information at the right moment. Remarketing and retargeting strategies for small businesses are not only effective for e-commerce enterprises or large corporations, but they may also deliver outstanding results for small, locally owned businesses. What’s the difference between remarketing and retargeting? Is one of these strategies better suited to local businesses than the other?
Remarketing vs. Retargeting: What is the difference?
If you start Google to figure out what the difference is between remarketing and retargeting, you’re likely to wind even more puzzled than before. Unfortunately, there is a lot of contradicting information flying around. Some sources suggest that the terms remarketing and retargeting are absolutely interchangeable; others believe that they are different methods with the same goals; and still another contends that they are unique marketing tactics with entirely different objectives.
So, which one is it?
Remarketing is often used as an umbrella term for both remarketing and retargeting. Google is partly to blame for this, as its Google Ads remarketing capabilities contain both remarketing and retargeting tactics. This has contributed to the blurring of the definitions over time.
To make things simpler, below are the most common definitions of each strategy:
Distinguishing Remarketing from Retargeting in Digital Marketing
Remarketing is the practice of using email to re-engage with customers or audiences that have previously expressed interest in or conducted business with your company.
The term retargeting refers to the delivery of paid online and display adverts based on a user’s activity on your website or social media accounts.
When it comes to marketing goals, retargeting focuses on bringing back previous visitors to your site or social media platforms in order to convert them into customers. Remarketing, on the other hand, focuses on re-engaging current consumers and increasing customer lifetime value.
One of the simplest ways to think about the different uses for these tactics is that retargeting is more focused on moving your audience that hasn’t yet become customers down the path to purchase, whereas remarketing focuses on reconnecting with people who have already bought something from you (or have made it onto your email list).
Maximizing Engagement: Data-Driven Remarketing and Retargeting Strategies
In terms of similarities, remarketing and retargeting are both lead nurturing methods designed to complement a comprehensive customer lifecycle marketing strategy. By deliberately employing both of these strategies, you may target audiences that are already familiar with your brand, engage those who are most likely to make a purchase, and increase long-term brand recognition and awareness.
Both remarketing and retargeting capitalize on the enormous opportunities provided by the ability to collect and analyze data about user activity online. These techniques go beyond ordinary advertising, which involves putting your brand out there and hoping that it sticks with some individuals.
They even go beyond targeted advertising, which is when you identify a certain target market that is most likely to be interested in what you have to offer and then advertise in locations where you believe they would spend time.
The power of remarketing and retargeting is that you are not only reaching out to your target demographic; you are doing so in a way that is tailored to each individual’s location in the sales funnel, when they are most likely to respond to your message.
What is remarketing?
Now that we’ve covered the similarities and distinctions between remarketing and retargeting, let’s take a closer look at what each phrase means. To be clear, we’re defining the concept of remarketing as re-engaging customers via email, rather than the broader phrase that encompasses both remarketing and retargeting activities.
As a small business owner, you’re probably familiar with email marketing as a low-cost, high-impact marketing technique. After all, 64% of small businesses utilize email marketing to connect with their clients. Furthermore, four out of every five marketers choose email marketing over social media marketing.
Enhancing Email Marketing with Remarketing Strategies
Email marketing is undeniably effective, but what if you could take it a step further? What if you could utilize email to re-engage clients with personalized communications based on where they are in their purchasing journey?
When using remarketing tactics, you can take advantage of the ability to collect user activity data. By tracking their previous purchase behavior or actions on your website, you can utilize this method to re-engage past or present customers.
Examples of remarketing emails are:
- Contacting users who abandoned their shopping cart
- Promoting products based on a customer’s previous purchases
- Sending emails following a purchase.
- Contacting people to remind them of things on their wishlist.
Remarketing, unlike retargeting, requires an email list. However, by leveraging the power of collected data, remarketing can help make your existing email list even more valuable.
How does remarketing work?
You may design your remarketing campaigns using two basic tools: pixels and lists.
Pixels for remarketing are pieces of code that can trace a user’s trip across your website, providing vital information about your consumers’ purchasing behavior. You can use this information to customize the emails you send to various users. For example, pixels can determine which consumers have products on their wish-list. It allows you to give them targeted reminders about the product they are contemplating purchasing.
Creating Effective Remarketing Lists for Targeted Outreach
Remarketing lists are organized lists of clients who visit your website and indicate where they are in the purchasing process. You may select to group people into various distinct segments, such as:
- Customers who have abandoned their shopping carts
- First-time purchases.
- Frequent customers
- Customers with an expired subscription.
- Visitors with items on their wish-list or favorites.
You can send separate emails to each group on this list based on their specific site behavior.
For example, consider the type of email you may send to each of the aforementioned consumer categories:
- Customers that have abandoned their shopping carts: Cart reminder email
- First-time purchase: Thank you note email.
- Frequent customers: Promotions, related items, or upselling emails
- Customers with expiring subscriptions: Email including a subscription reminder
- Visitors with things on their wish list or favorites: Sale alert email
Automating and Optimizing Remarketing Emails for Success
Your remarketing campaign can be totally automated, which means that emails are automatically sent to the correct users at the proper time.
When using this method, make sure you follow email remarketing best practices. Otherwise, your efforts may drive clients away rather than renewing their relationship with the company.
When seeking to reconnect with old clients, keep your message brief and offer them an intriguing incentive. However, be mindful of overusing this strategy, as it is easy to upset clients with repetitive emails. Instead of sending an email just for the sake of it, plan a comprehensive campaign strategy that will remind customers of your brand at key points in their customer journey.
Finally, it is essential to keep your remarketing emails simple. It’s easy to complicate the style of your emails, but simple, clean emails are just as successful, if not more so, than those with ornate designs.
What is retargeting?
While remarketing goes out to former or existing customers via email, retargeting seeks to locate those who are aware of your brand but have not yet made a purchase. With this information, digital adverts can be displayed to warm leads as they browse other websites.
This method allows you to target people who have visited your website or social media accounts online or display adverts based on the nature of their internet activity. When users visit your site, a pixel is used to track their activities and display adverts tailored to them. The real kicker here is that the advertising you display to these people appear on other websites, allowing you to reach them even after they have left your brand’s website.
As you can expect, this can be an extremely powerful tool. Retargeting allows you to advertise to people who are already familiar with your brand while they browse millions of different websites.
Retargeting does not demand that you have a potential customer’s email address or that they visit your site more than once. If you’ve ever visited a website and then saw an advertisement for the same brand while scrolling through Facebook or surfing the internet, you’ve witnessed retargeting firsthand.
How does retargeting work?
Pixels are used in both retargeting and remarketing. However, these pixels track users’ off-site actions. So, while remarketing focuses on your audience’s on-site actions, retargeting shows adverts to your visitors when they are elsewhere on the internet. This can assist ensure that your customer remembers your brand and raises the likelihood that they will consider it when they are ready to make a purchase related to what you offer.
Ad exchange networks are used to enable retargeting. The Google Display Network is the largest of the exchange networks. It enables you to contact your visitors while they browse millions of websites, applications, and Google-owned properties such as YouTube. Another significant network is Facebook’s demographic Network, which allows you to display ads to your target demographic across some of the world’s most popular social media platforms, such as Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger.
Understanding Retargeting Pixels and Ad Network Pricing Models
When you sign up for any of the ad networks, you will be issued a retargeting pixel tailored to your website. These pixels are short lines of code that follow your visitors’ activities even after they leave your website. When users visit a site that belongs to the ad network you signed up for, the network can determine which types of advertising to display depending on the user’s previous browsing activity.
Digital advertisements can be great marketing tools, but they are not free. The most typical pricing models are cost-per-mille (CPM) and pay-per-click (PPC). You pay for how many times your ad appears in the former. In the latter, you pay based on how many times your ad is clicked on.
Is remarketing or retargeting better for local businesses?
There is no one-size-fits-all plan for small business marketing campaigns; the best strategy for your brand will be determined by your targeted goals. However, both remarketing and retargeting methods can help local businesses re-engage existing consumers and acquire new ones.
Email marketing is perfect for local businesses looking to nurture leads and increase conversions. Email remarketing campaigns allow you to tailor your email communications to each customer’s activity and position in the sales funnel.
Maximizing ROI for Small Businesses with Retargeting and Geo-Targeting
Retargeting is also an effective technique for small businesses because it may assist lower marketing expenses. It ensures that you’re getting warm leads, and modify advertising depending on user action.
Local companies have the added benefit of combining retargeting with geo-targeting, which limits adverts to those in your target demographic who live in a specified geographic location. By combining these two techniques, you can be confident that your advertising spend is being used to target only the most qualified leads.
Is it time for your business to launch a comprehensive digital advertising campaign?
Remarketing and retargeting are useful marketing tactics for reaching the right people at the appropriate time. They can help you increase sales, establish brand recognition, and allow your company to expand. At Digi Tech Resource Group, LLC, our team of marketing specialists is solely dedicated to the marketing needs of local businesses. When you work with us, you can be confident that you will get meaningful outcomes at each stage of the client journey.