Tip: Campaign effectiveness goes up when you provide multiple opportunities for a prospect to buy, and even more so when you don’t repeat yourself. By sequencing ads, you can lead or follow prospects through their decision cycle in ways that favor your product or service.

If you're an e-commerce site catering to businesses and consumers, producing leads and generating sales is your bread and butter. For Polaroid2Go.com, a photo imaging e-commerce site, an important target audience is small businesses in vertical industries like construction, insurance, medical/healthcare and education. Recently, the company instituted an interactive campaign using incentive/loyalty program banners served sequentially to targeted and retargeted prospects. Prospects are taken to the website from a first-level banner ad where they see the camera at full price. On subsequent encounters outside the website, they see the ad with a price discount. While the technology allows for any number of offers in sequence, Polaroid decided on just two ads for this campaign.

Targeting worked great for Polaroid2Go.com, and retargeting worked even better. Overall, only 7 percent of all the banner impressions were delivered to retargeted prospects, yet they produced more than 25 percent of the campaign's sales and 50 percent of the campaign's revenue.

Polaroid2Go.com's business is not unusual in that it typically requires multiple contacts before a transaction will take place. That's one reason why both targeting and retargeting were important components of this successful campaign. Prospects could be converted with retargeting banners only after they have already been served with first-contact advertising, which can be seen as prospect-creating groundwork to be done by other high reach advertising components.