How it works

Much like in the story of Hansel and Gretel, embedded cookies on a website can be used to track a visitor’s movements towards a house made of sweets. Only this time, the activity is recorded, and this information can then be analysed to understand buyer behaviour.

Most people don’t buy on their first visit, so advertising can then be targeted at these people, and those who did buy something can then be shown other products that they might be interested in also buying – just as any decent personal shopper would do.

Retargeting

Understanding how people buy on a specific website or in a specific field is the key to e-commerce success. And re-targeting is the key to understanding this behaviour. So how can re-targeting be used to boost a website’s popularity and sales?

• If you see that visitors are buying more having followed a link to a coupon, you can make similar offers to attract new customers.
• Most potential customers will visit a number of sites before making a purchase, you can remind them of yours by pushing your ad to other sites – and social media – to remind them of you.
• You can tailor-make offers to previous visitors – for example, if someone abandoned their shopping cart, or visited your site on a number of occasions, you can target them with a special deal to bring them back and buy from you.

How to do it

A good retargeting platform will let you set segments, looking at demographics, behaviour etc. so that you can really tailor-make your advertising to increase traffic, leads and conversions.

Some things that you should consider include:

• Don’t overkill – if someone sees your ad too often, they will stop taking notice of it or potentially hide it
• Make it relevant – For example, someone puts skate shoes in their cart, don’t show them tennis balls, show them skate boards.

Retargeting is a useful tool for businesses to bring back previous visitors, and help to engage with potential customers by showing an understanding of what they are after. By having the right visitors to your site, you can spend your marketing budget more wisely and get more bang for your buck.

Here’s a brief breakdown of how to get the most out of your landing pages.

• A good-looking landing page can entice customers, but looks are meaningless if the landing page doesn’t fulfil its purpose of guiding customers towards making a purchase. Its important to emphasise the value of what you’re selling and describe what the prospect will get in return.
• Generating leads relies on potential customers taking the time to fill in a form. If the form is short it should be placed high up on the page, so it can be reached without too much scrolling. A link to a form should be treated the same way.
• Make it obvious that the form is separate from the rest on the page by using a different colour scheme or surrounding it in a box. Experiment with different templates until you find one that’s easy to read and pleasing on the eye.
• Longer forms are less likely to be filled out, but provide more information about leads. If you are seeking as many leads as possible, it is best to keep forms short and sweet by only asking questions that are important to your business.
• Avoid adding URLs to other websites too soon, prospects could be directed away, forever.
• Use A/B testing to gain accurate feedback on your landing page.

Keeping customers engaged requires your landing page to guide them towards the right place at the right time. The more sources you have for bringing in traffic, such as banner ads, email, or social media pages, the better. Having a specialised landing page for each campaign/promotion makes it easier for customers to determine what actions to take on your page. Head to this article for more information on lead generation or contact Marketa for help making your next landing page run smoothly.

One area which is developing quickly is the use of marketing automation – a software platform which allows us to automate and therefore streamline your marketing efforts, as well as giving you measurable data which means that you can tell exactly what is, and what isn’t working. Marketing automation gives you the chance to offer a personalised service to your customers, but with minimal time spent.

Marketing automation helps you to carry out the following easily and quickly, giving you the extra time for coming up with great marketing ideas:

• Email marketing
• Generating leads
• Personalization of your website
• Creating landing pages
• Customer retention
• Customer segmentation
• Cross-channel marketing campaigns
• Nurturing and scoring of leads
• Cross-sell and up-sell
• ROI measuring

As your business grows, carrying out all of these tasks, whilst trying to maintain a good relationship with all of your customers becomes time consuming and costly, and this is where marketing automation comes in.

How Does It Work?

Marketing automation runs alongside your current marketing team, giving them the chance to work on the important stuff and leave the boring, time consuming part of their job to the automation process.

Marketing automation will:

• Engage with, identify and track online customers individually
• Filter leads according to interest and engagement
• Prioritize customers from a list according to their likelihood to buy
• Give useful, measurable data about individual marketing campaigns

It isn’t just about sending out automated emails. The technology has moved on a lot since the beginnings and marketing automation now works across all of the internet channels, from email to social media.

For Sales Teams

As well as being a useful tool for the marketing team in a business, marketing automation is also extremely useful to the sales team. “How’s that?”, I hear you cry. Well,

• The sales team can get prioritized leads so that those with a higher likelihood of converting to a sale become available first.
• Leads can be sorted into groups with different definitions, allowing for different sales approaches.
• Through more specific marketing, potential customers are better informed and this (should) make selling easier.
• Marketing automation gives better insight into the sales funnel giving the sales team a better chance at selling.

It is clear to see that marketing automation can be used to give your business’s sales and marketing efforts a real boost. So much so, that soon you won’t be able to understand how you lived without it. When run alongside a good team, marketing automation will become a core tool in the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts.