Retargeting resimplified
In theory, it sounds like a cinch to identify people who have abandoned purchases on your site and retarget them across the web to get them to come back and complete the purchase. In practice, executing this tactic is a giant pain.
First, there's the notion of tagging the purchase process on your website with pixel tags from your favorite half dozen behavioral networks. Then you have the educated guessing associated with figuring out why a particular shopper might have abandoned his online shopping cart in the first place. Was the site slow that day? Did the prospect find a better price somewhere else at the last second? Or maybe the shopper was over the limit on his credit card? It's tough to find a message that is appropriate for all folks who abort purchases.
I find a better first foray into retargeting is to take a giant step back and acknowledge a few simple facts:
- Getting prospects to an e-commerce site is hard.
- It's probably easier to convert someone who has visited your site than someone plucked randomly from the internet ether.
- Rather than guess at why someone left your site without purchasing (and end up being wrong), it's probably more effective simply to acknowledge they've already been to the site and incentivize them.
In other words, a message that says something to the effect of, "Thanks for visiting us. Here's a code for 10 percent off on your next visit" will do the job nicely. Once you show conversion lift with this simple tactic, then you can look into refining a retargeting program to handle specific segments with varying messages.
You will see lift, and you don't have to customize messages and define behaviors for every single reason why someone might have visited and left without buying.
