Remarketing is a proven advertising technique that targets potential customers who’ve previously engaged with your brand on your website, social media, or another medium. Successful remarketing campaigns have been shown to raise customer engagement by 161% and slash operating costs per order by up to 43%.
However, remarketing isn’t a singular, easily definable advertising approach. From email to social media and video, there are a variety of different ways that remarketing campaigns can influence consumers toward your products and services.
Embark on a journey through the complexities of remarketing strategies as we explain the best practices tailored specifically for your local business. Learn how to harness the full potential of these strategies to maximize conversions and propel your business to new heights of success.
Remarketing channels
Remarketing, in essence, means getting your products back in front of familiar eyes. It involves keeping tabs on who has visited your pages, crafting marketing messages to suit their unique desires, and advertising to them across relevant channels.
There are a number of different pathways you can take to reach interested customers. Some of the most popular platforms for executing remarketing campaigns include:
- Google Ads – Google’s online dominance extends into the advertising sphere, and its Ads platform is perhaps the world’s most utilized remarketing channel. For companies that already advertise on Google, adding a simple remarketing tag to your page’s code allows you to reach 92% of internet users across every site and application. Doing so, however, will increase your advertising costs and decrease your campaign’s focus—unless you organize lists dictating the types of users Google targets. Google Ads also supports search retargeting, enabling advertisers to tailor their campaigns towards users based on their previous search queries, making your ad retargeting efforts even more precise. Learn more about retargeting vs. remarketing in our guide.
- Facebook Ads – Meta, like Google, makes remarketing fairly simple by offering a pre-built block of code (or pixel, as they call it) that you can add to your page to track users after they leave. It also allows you to build out remarketing lists dictating who and who not to target. Unlike Google ads, however—which reach across the net embedding themselves in websites and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)—Facebook ads are contained to the Meta ecosystem.
- Email, social media, and video remarketing – The platform you utilize to remarket to consumers should reflect how they engage with your brand. Email, social media, and video are all popular means of reaching a wide, interested audience. Just be sure not to put all your eggs in one basket, however, as customers generally experience brands across a variety of touchpoints before deciding to make a purchase. Speakeasy of Strength, for instance, has successfully combined a notable Nextdoor presence with educational YouTube videos and opt-in text messaging campaigns (in place of email) to reach potential customers across multiple mediums. Thus, when they engage in remarketing, they should target customers across all of these platforms, as their users could rely on any of them as their primary point of interaction with the brand.
Key remarketing strategies
Aside from remarketing services such as Google and Facebook Ads, there are a variety of other advertising mediums you can use to reach interested consumers. Take a look at how to optimize email, social media, and video remarketing campaigns to engage with your target audience and drive home conversions.
Email remarketing
With nearly 4.5 billion registered accounts as of 2024, email is one of the world’s most utilized and trusted communication platforms. Likewise, it’s a time-tested and proven advertising medium. In fact, 77% of marketers report increasing engagement over the last year.
Prompting browsers to give you their email soon after navigating to your site is an effective way to compile a client list for future remarketing efforts. To sweeten the offer, provide a small discount or other incentive in exchange for the address—studies indicate that 90% of internet users will agree to the deal.
After you have a robust repository of users’ emails, you can utilize them to steer consumers back toward abandoned carts or encourage them to browse new offerings. For maximum effect, be sure to customize your messages for each potential customer—71% of consumers expect it, and 76% will get frustrated if you don’t. For optimal personalization:
- Customize each email with the user’s name, location (if relevant), and other specifics that are pertinent to your goods or services
- Suggest products or services that might interest them—especially if you’ve noticed they’ve previously browsed them
- Offer small discounts to incentivize them to make that final push—specifically if they have an abandoned cart waiting
Social media remarketing
Utilizing Meta’s advertising services and other similar platforms, like Nextdoor Ads, gives you a variety of actionable ways to optimize your social media for remarketing campaigns.
The first step after signing up for a remarketing service is listing out the users you’d like it to target. Choose carefully, as the more you add to the list, the higher your costs will likely be. To choose the consumers most likely to purchase from you, consider:
- Active status – When’s the last time they logged on? Frequent users should be given priority over inactive accounts.
- Demographics – How closely do their age, location, and other specifics reflect your target market?
- Interests – Do they follow celebrities or pages that align with your brand? If so, they should be given extra consideration.
Fortunately, with Nextdoor, 1 in 3 U.S. households use the platform, and 88% of neighbors shop local.
Once you’ve established a list of users to target, you can go about crafting your ads. Many local businesses opt for dynamic ads, which automatically target users with relevant products that they’ve either browsed, abandoned, or are sure to love.
Other marketers, however, choose to create their own ads to resonate more closely with their audience. If you do, be sure to:
- Set a recognizable tone of voice for your brand and stick to it across social media advertising spots
- Use attention-grabbing, high-quality graphics to catch browsers’ eyes as they hastily scroll through their feeds
- Include a Call to Action (CTA) that implores users to explore your site, browse your collection, or purchase a specific product
Real estate agents such as San Jose-based David Giambruno, for example, may want to utilize social media ads to promote a new property that just hit the market. To do so, he should include beautifully shot pictures of the house alongside a succinct description of its location and features. Finally, he should encourage the ad’s readers to book a tour at their earliest convenience.
Video Remarketing
Video streaming now accounts for 65% of all internet traffic. If you’re not already using YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms to remarket to potential customers, you’re missing out on this huge chunk of users.
Video is a diverse creative medium, and what appeals to your customer base may not interest others. Thus, researching your target demographic and catering content to them is essential to success for video remarketing strategies. Nonetheless, there are some general techniques you can utilize to optimize your video ads:
- Make them short – 85% of users prefer videos of 15 seconds or less.
- Make them educational – Two-thirds of internet users watch videos to learn about brands, so include some relevant information about your company.
- Make them quality – 95% of internet users care about the quality of your video production—so, if you’re shooting 144p on a camcorder from the early 2000s, it’s time to invest in an upgrade.
Implementing your remarketing strategy
You’ve decided on the channels you want to optimize for your remarketing strategies. Now, it’s time to put your plan into action and begin reclaiming errant (but interested) customers. To get going, start by:
Segmenting your audience
Carefully deciding who to remarket to is essential for the success of your campaign. You’ll want to divide your potential targets up by consumer behavior and pick users who are:
- Interested – For eCommerce sites, visiting your product pages or adding an item to their basket is a solid indication that a user has a keen interest in your brand. For other types of platforms, track how much time they’ve spent on your site or how many pages they've visited to get an idea of who to target.
- Active – Set a specific benchmark, such as being online in the last week, to decide who to focus your efforts on.
- Relevant – If someone spends a ton of time browsing your site but is located somewhere you don’t operate, they shouldn’t make the cut.
Yorkshire Building Society, for instance, breaks down its potential customer base into segments across a variety of factors. Age, gender, and method of access (mobile versus desktop) all help the company glean key information about its most likely targets. In fact, the company found that females and individuals aged 45-59 were the most responsive to their remarketing campaigns.
Thus, to maximize conversions, Yorkshire Building Society can focus its efforts specifically on this engaged segment. Alternatively, if they feel they’ve overworked or exhausted these demographics, they can adjust their advertising techniques to target consumers who’ve yet to fully embrace their brand.
After dividing your segments and choosing who to target, you can move on to:
Crafting compelling ads
Personalization is critical to success when crafting ads that reflect your remarketing strategies. In fact, 91% of internet users prefer personalized ads.
But ads shouldn’t just be personalized—they should also be unique, compelling, and tell your brand’s story. So, use your established tone and create bespoke visuals (utilizing your products, if relevant) to speak to your audience on a personal level.
Retailers like Party City, for example—a company that caters to customers celebrating special occasions such as birthdays and Halloween—should evoke fun, whimsical, and event-specific messaging to appeal to their primary audiences: excited children and high-spirited celebrators.
Ultimately, however, what works for your customers may not be the same as other local businesses. That’s why it’s best to routinely measure the success of your remarketing strategies and refine them if necessary.
Measuring the success of remarketing
Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is a savvy way to gauge the efficacy of your remarketing strategies.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There are many different KPIs you can keep track of, and depending on the specifics of your local business, some may be more pertinent than others. Nevertheless, three of the most applicable and useful KPIs for judging remarketing strategies include:
- Click-through Rate (CTR) – Your CTR is simply the number of clicks you get on an ad divided by the total number of times it’s shown. Many marketers claim CTR can rise almost 1000% on remarketed ads and, with more clicks, you’ll usually also score a higher…
- Conversion rate – When a user interacts with your ad, buys a product, or takes some other action you deem valuable, it’s considered a conversion. Your conversion rate is your number of conversions divided by total ad interactions over a certain period. Remarketing can result in conversion rates over 200% higher than those of conventional ads, in turn leading to a more effective…
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) – ROAS measures how much money a given ad campaign makes in relation to its cost. To calculate it, simply divide the amount of revenue an ad makes by the amount you invested in it. Remarketing is, in general, a more efficient use of advertising funds, meaning you should see a solid boost to ROAS after implementing your ad campaign.
All these figures should begin to rise soon after starting a campaign. If, however, you don’t see the boost you were expecting, perhaps you need to rework your remarketing strategies.
Adjusting strategies based on data
One key aspect of any remarketing campaign is analyzing your strategy’s performance and assessing it against the goals you’ve set. That’s why it’s essential to choose an advertising platform that allows you to customize your performance benchmarks and easily keep track of your progress, such as Nextdoor Ads Manager.
Robust advertising solutions like Nextdoor Ads Manager let you set your campaign’s budget, bidding rules for marketing space, and the frequency with which different ads are shown. Then, using the insightful analytical data from its reporting dashboard, you can assess your own personal goals for your campaign—whether they be in relation to finance, volume, or other benchmarks. This allows you to easily adjust your campaign to reach any unattained goals—or keep it consistent if it’s performing as you’d like.
Either way, you’ll get a solid sense of your campaign’s health and the Return on Investment (ROI) you're getting from your advertising platform. Notably, calculating has been significantly simplified by Nextdoor’s new Conversion API technologies.
Optimizing remarketing campaigns for higher conversion rates
When crafting a remarketing campaign, one ad alone won’t do. It’s pertinent to make several versions of the same advertisement and gauge your target audience’s reception of them via A/B testing.
A/B testing involves presenting users with two versions of content to see which they like better. For remarketing campaigns, this can mean running two versions of the same ad or creating two landing pages and seeing which garners a higher CTR and more engagement.
Besides A/B testing, there are two more savvy techniques you can use to ensure your targeted users see more relevant ad content:
- Behavioral targeting – This approach involves tracking a user’s browsing activity data to present them with relevant products and services in your targeted ads.
- Dynamic remarketing – Dynamic remarketing works by keeping tabs on the products and services users have viewed on your site and then pushing them later in your remarketed ads.
Remaster your remarketing campaigns with Nextdoor Ads Manager
Remarketing is the process of trying to reach internet users who’ve previously visited your site or interacted with your brand but failed to make a purchase. There are a variety of tools and techniques contemporary advertisers use in their remarketing campaigns. Still, the most effective seek to reach relevant customers with carefully catered messaging and products they know they’ll love.
As shown, poignant remarketing strategies can boost your local business’s performance across a myriad of metrics. So, what are you waiting for? Launch your next remarketing campaign with Nextdoor Ads Manager today.
With Nextdoor Ads Manager, you’ll get a keen sense of who your neighbors (AKA, the consumers in your community) really are. With accurate insight into important demographics such as age, income, gender, and more, you’ll be able to craft carefully targeted, effective ads that appeal to your burgeoning fans and result in more conversions.
Sign up for Nextdoor Ads Manager to reach the inquisitive, economically empowered market segment that doesn’t use Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok—your engagement rate will thank you later.
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