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People often joke about search engines and social media platforms ‘listening’ to smartphone conversations to deliver personalized ads. Picture this: you explore a website or check out an ecommerce brand, and suddenly, sponsored ads from those brands (or similar ones) appear in your feeds, awaiting your clicks. It’s not wizardry; it’s a proven digital marketing strategy called ecommerce retargeting that turns casual browsing into targeted opportunities.
eCommerce success requires time. However, it can be achieved by having an alignment across your company. This includes effectively communicating a clear message to your audience. Retargeting helps maximize this effort.
Exploring Retargeting in an eCommerce Situation
eCommerce retargeting is a powerful marketing technique that any brand can use, even in the B2B sector. It is also known as remarketing. Retargeting is different from regular ad targeting. It delivers customized ads to users who have already shown interest. Regular ad targeting, on the other hand, targets users who meet specific criteria.
In other words, it’s a strategy designed to push ‘warm’ leads further down the marketing funnel, as they are already aware of your eCommerce brand and what you sell. They just need further convincing.
eCommerce retargeting campaigns can also have a profound effect. Brands can use eCommerce remarketing and retargeting to stay memorable to visitors. This can happen even after the visitors leave the website or check out the products. Good ads can bring people back to do something they want by using personalized and relevant messages.
Executing retargeting or remarketing campaigns on social media or paid advertising platforms is not as simple as it sounds. B2B brands have different hoops to jump through than those that would befall a brand following a B2C business model. B2C consumers are usually driven by important nuances like cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and simplicity. Effective, easy-to-digest, and clear eCommerce landing pages like those created by B2C electronics retailer MPB are a great example of this.
However, it’s important to remember that B2B audiences may be looking at brands with more scrutiny. A prospective B2B buyer will be constrained by numerous factors like sector regulations, budgets, integration bottlenecks, and so on, whereas B2C consumers are likely unencumbered by them. Even if such buyers have seen your products before, dispensing the same ads and top-level messaging to prospects will not magically earn their investment.
Depending on your brand, product(s), target sector, audience, and buyer profile/behavior, you will need to think logically and strategically about the best retargeting strategy, particularly if you’re in the B2B terrain.
The guidance below will explore five of the best eCommerce retargeting strategies to help brands maximize return visits and conversions from interested buyers in their pipeline. Read on for tips to make your B2B eCommerce remarketing strategy a revenue-driving machine.
Why Does Retargeting Matter for B2B eCommerce?
B2B eCommerce brands usually have two primary goals when advertising online, namely brand awareness and conversion rates.
Brand Awareness
Bolstering brand awareness is a crucial goal in any eCommerce marketing strategy. Modern buying behaviors and research suggest that the future is increasingly digital, and that extends to include online purchases. High-street retail shops and outlets still have a place in the market, but the realm of eCommerce is poised to grow at an exponentially faster and higher rate, reaching $21.168 billion by 2030 (CAGR of 16.9% from 2023 onwards).
What’s more, in today’s highly competitive and crowded digital marketplace, eCommerce brands are finding it harder to stay top-of-mind. Given the diversity of audiences and segments, making every second count is vital. Retargeting allows your eCommerce brand to remain visible throughout each buyer’s journey, allowing for personalized and relevant communication at scale. With the right retargeting platform, you can segment visitors and serve tailored messaging to nudge them ever closer to that all-important conversion.
Conversion Rates
B2B purchases often involve lengthier sales cycles and longer periods of research and shortlisting. While being seen is an achievement in itself for an eCommerce brand, often that statistic is meaningless if conversions remain nonexistent.
Statistically, retargeting ads are more likely to get clicks and engagement than regular display ads on social media. Looking deeper at this, it’s understandable why; standard display ads target cold audiences, while retargeting audience leads are drastically warmer. As users have already shown some level of interest, retargeting is a way to continue a conversation between your eCommerce brand and potential customers who are considering your product.
Retargeting is a way to reduce cart abandonment on online eCommerce stores, which is statistically high (70% in 2023, the highest for 10 years) given buyers’ propensity to make strategic rather than impulsive decisions.
Retargeting allows brands to send friendly reminders to customers who have not quite converted, but who are invariably close. eCommerce brands can begin open-ended conversations with potential leads who have second-guessed a purchase or perhaps forgotten about it, allowing them to recover these customers provided the products are still of interest.
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How to Execute the Right B2B eCommerce Retargeting Strategy
With the evolving landscape of digital advertising, capturing your audience’s attention (averaging at roughly 8 seconds nowadays) is worth the investment. In order to obtain the quantity and quality of leads your brand needs to maintain its competitive edge, retargeting campaigns need to be well thought-out and executed with precision.
So how can B2B eCommerce brands get the most out of retargeting? Take a look at these four proven strategies worth testing and see how your lead quality and quantity improve:
Leverage Audience Segmentation for Personalization
It’s common for some eCommerce brands to take a spray-and-pay approach, dispensing the same ads, offers, messaging and CTAs to every previous website visitor or social media follower. Too often brands fail to segment audiences down to specific sub-categories, not realizing that you can distribute specific ads to people based on the types of pages/content viewed, products researched, purchase history and more.
Defining clear remarketing lists and customer segments, before then showing relevant display and social ads tailored to their demonstrated interests and behaviors, is a solid way to achieve that personalization goal. Statistically, this type of messaging converts far more effectively.
Consider retargeting ads with specific product images or incentives to help customers complete purchases they have abandoned. Alternatively, cross-sell product recommendations based on their previous research or interest. Or, perhaps try both.
Time Post-Visit Email Remarketing
Display ads are a proven strategy to get your brand immediately in front of visitors and, for those who are already familiar with it, help them remember who you are.
However, email retargeting enables more detailed, tailored messaging directly between yourself and consumers after they leave your site. It’s not just about what you say, but when.
The key is to time emails and follow-ups thoughtfully, aligning text, offers, and CTAs to each buyer’s unique stage in the marketing funnel, in the same way as delivering retargeting display ads. Email offers and follow-ups should be carefully coordinated with other marketing channels and campaigns to avoid message saturation.
Suggest a 1-3 day follow-up for site visitors who did not convert, reminding them of offers and incentivizing them to return. Afterwards, another email series some 7-14 days later focused on educating and addressing common questions or concerns can be a good reminder. Down the line, perhaps 30 or so days later, re-engagement offers with new content, discounts, or bundles, can keep your brand firmly at the top of your B2B prospects’ minds
Increase Conversions With Cross-Device Retargeting
Cross-device remarketing should be a standard, go-to solution for eCommerce brands in 2024. Omnichannel marketing strategies are nothing new, but it’s surprising how many B2B eCommerce brands still dedicate overwhelming amounts of resources, budget, and effort to single siloed devices, as well as platforms. Using three or more channels is reported to increase order rates by up to 494%, according to Omnisend.
Any paid advertising strategy should undoubtedly follow a mobile-first approach, as mobile devices are what the vast majority of potential prospects are using when perusing potential eCommerce brands. Optimizing eCommerce webpages for mobile responsiveness and mobile-first indexing is, therefore, paramount to achieving a positive, memorable, and enriching user experience. The same should extend to any retargeting ads on mobile-friendly advertising platforms where potential customers could be lying in wait.
However, it would be incredibly naive to ignore potential prospects that use desktops and tablets, so efforts should be made to execute immersive, dynamic retargeting ads viewable on all potential devices. Messaging should always be coordinated and consistent with each user at each stage of their buying journey, inclusive of all potential devices.
Don’t Forget Retargeting Beyond Paid Ads
The final B2B remarketing strategy emphasizes the need for diverse and strategic omnichannel marketing activities encompassing more than just paid advertising.
Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and others offer highly granular advertising solutions with built-in analytics and user-friendly campaign generation features. However, ignoring other solutions like Google, Bing, YouTube, and other paid advertising platforms is severely limiting your campaign potential. Each paid ad platform is an individual piece of an overall marketing puzzle.
What’s more, paid advertising campaigns themselves aren’t the only solution to achieving qualified prospects and opening up sales conversations. A healthy mixture of PPC (pay-per-click) display ads, search ads and video or image ads on an array of platforms, coupled with strategic email advertising, website SEO, offline marketing, and more, will prove pivotal in helping reinforce your brand messaging and product offers.
Successful eCommerce remarketing incorporates a mixture of specific data-driven activities focused on common audience segments and their pain points. Whatever platforms and channels you utilize in your B2B remarketing strategy, the data you uncover should always influence how you proceed and execute future campaigns. Spending all of your marketing budget on paid ads alone means that fewer opportunities exist post-campaign, which is why it’s crucial to tie campaigns together for maximum impact.
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Golden Rules for eCommerce Remarketing
It’s impossible to write exactly how a B2B retargeting campaign should look. Each strategy and campaign should be bespoke to each eCommerce brand and its respective audience. However, if you’re new to this terrain or are looking for ways to make your campaigns more interactive or effective, remember these golden rules:
- Familiarize yourself with each funnel stage (top, middle, and bottom) and group your website visitors into each category. Provide them with relevant content and messaging that suits their individual needs at each stage.
- Create and tailor specific landing pages and advertising content to past visitors, formulating more direct CTAs for those who are further along the marketing funnel.
- Customize ads for each target audience on each advertising platform you use, and evaluate their effectiveness. A/B test different ad types native to each platform, and assess the granular data to uncover which is most effective.
- Don’t limit your B2B remarketing efforts to one or two platforms – run different creative on multiple platforms based on which are likeliest to garner responses, engagement, and conversations.
- Continuously measure the impact of your retargeting campaigns and analyze metrics scrutinously. Objectively evaluate each campaign’s successes and failures, and analyze the metrics that matter so you can refine and optimize them.
Experience the Magic of eCommerce Retargeting
It’s clear that we should not overlook or take retargeting lightly. Businesses that have successful retargeting results have planned their remarketing strategy well and understand the needs of their B2B audience(s). Make remarketing a top priority for your online store. This will help you attract new customers and stay competitive in the crowded digital landscape.