A Starter’s Guide to Retargeting

Customer Retargeting

Whether you already have an eCommerce set up and running or are looking for effective ways to help your client retain more customers in the near future, retargeting can help your cause to a great effect. According to Business2Community, 72% of online shoppers are likely to abandon their carts without completing their purchase, while 70% of retargeted website visitors are likely to convert into customers after the fact.
Customer retargeting shouldn’t be seen as unnecessary spam content aimed at users who aren’t interested in your products. It is an effective and revenue-generating marketing strategy worthy of your time and resource investment since customers can be insecure in their decision-making processes and require a slight nudge in the direction of the checkout button. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how customer retargeting can be used to retain leads through Pinterest as a prime example of the UGC platform with native ad optimization built into it.

The Basics of Customer Retargeting

Let’s start with the basics of retargeting in order to better understand the process behind it. Any ad, marketing content, PPC or other forms of advertisement are likely to attract a sizable crowd to your products or services. However, not every click will turn into a customer, hence the need to “retarget” the same user in a more efficient way and steer them into the purchase decision.
This process is based on browser cookies and allows you to easily detect which users visited which parts of your website in order for you to better target the ads suited to their interests. Cookie data can then be combined with writing tools such as Evernote with the goals of writing and editing more personalized ads for retargeted customers. Think of millennials who search for the latest smartphones only to be greeted with personalized ads centered on the newest phones released on the market.
Retargeting is a user-friendly and effective way to maximize your profit margins and minimize your bounce rates as a result. In terms of Pinterest, this is an on-platform process that utilizes back end users’ browsing data to help you pinpoint which ads to display for which types of users, making the retargeting strategy simpler and easier to track.

Reign BuddyPress Theme

Business Advantages of Customer Retargeting

It’s worth noting the benefits of customer retargeting to better understand why you should care about the process in the first place. After all, if the initial salvo of content marketing, social media aads, and email newsletters don’t convert a user into a customer, why bother with retargeting? As we’ve mentioned, potential customers are often on the fence about whether or not to purchase a product or a service online.
Using their cookie (aka browsing) data to your advantage will help you to better understand their wants and needs in terms of digital purchases. This, in turn, can be used to create added incentives in the retargeting content for their benefit, such as time-limited discounts, bundled items, coupons to share with friends, etc. In terms of concrete benefits for you, customer retargeting will bring several noteworthy items to your table, including the following:

  • Valuable user data in terms of purchase habits
  • Differentiation of your brand from the competition
  • Higher brand awareness and industry authority
  • Increase in sales and revenue
  • Increase in lead generation

Do You Think You Understand Your Customers’ Psychology?

Why use Pinterest for Customer Retargeting?

Customer Retargeting

Now that we have a clearer idea of what customer retargeting represents, why should you care about it in the context of Pinterest? Pinterest is a social, user-generated content (UGC) platform dedicated to visual media. Users share original and third-party content and “pin” their favorite pieces into user-generated boards, thus collecting related content into digestible groups. Pinterest is an especially relevant platform for customer retargeting if you are in the eCommerce or SEO niches due to its abundance of tracking and UGC data.
Any action taken by individual users adds up to the grander big data resource available for marketers to use when it comes to audience targeting. Coupled with platforms you can write very engaging retargeting content based on personal customer expectations to a great effect. With that said, let’s take a look at several ways in which Pinterest allows marketers to retarget customers:

  • Cold and Warm Audiences

When it comes to Pinterest audiences, you will typically work with two types of users – cold and warm, which are self-explanatory. Cold audiences will traditionally come into contact with your brand for the first time once they spot an ad on their Pinterest feeds, making these users potential retargeting targets for future ad campaigns. Warm audiences are those which already came into contact with your brand but decided against making a purchase or subscribing to your newsletter, making them ideal for retargeting purposes.
You can warm up cold audiences through Pinterest tags (similar to hashtags, as seen on Twitter and Instagram) and engagement with your pins (saved, opened or shared posts). This data can be used for retargeting, giving you a much better idea of what types of content and messages work best for the customer profile you aim to attract with your products or services.

  • Targeting Interest

The first way in which you can retarget your audience is through common interests. Pinterest, as the name suggests, revolves around categorizing content into “interest” categories, thus allowing users and marketers to separate content into easily-understandable niches.
For example, you can target “art”, “design”, and “creative” interests with your graphic design-centric ads, ensuring that they appear native and not-at-all out of place in your potential customer’s newsfeeds. This will ensure that retargeted audiences see your content while also eliminating any eyes who may not be interested in your products or services whatsoever, guaranteeing higher conversion rates for your content.

  • Targeting Keywords

You may be familiar with keyword targeting as a means of increasing your links’ SEO ranking on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Targeting keywords on Pinterest works much in the same way but is localized to the platform itself. Keywords typically consist of several words and form a phrase that will likely be used by users to search for relevant posts on Pinterest.
Continuing the trend from our previous point, if your graphic design business offers a wide range of services, your keyword selection can look like this: “graphic design project”, “poster graphic design”, “vector art graphic design”, etc. The platform will allow you to extrapolate user data in terms of commonly-used keywords and help you implement those exact words into your retargeting content in order to achieve greater sales success.

  • Targeting Emails

If you work with an existing customer base and have access to an extensive mailing list of your own, Pinterest can help you retarget relevant leads quite easily. The platform will allow you to upload your mailing list and compare it to existing Pinterest profiles, cross-referencing which users are on both lists. In turn, the extrapolated data can be used to effectively retarget customers which may be interested in your products or services but are unlikely to return to your original eCommerce storefront or website.
It’s worth noting that the final list created by Pinterest will be marginally smaller than your initial input due to the elimination of irrelevant leads without access to the website. However, this type of ad retargeting can help your brand build its reputation on Pinterest, generate sales and retain potential leads through user-friendly native advertisement which is more than enough to warrant its viability.

Retarget the Interest (Conclusion)

Given the modern nature of Pinterest and its focus on multimedia and UGC, it’s easy to see its appeal as a potential retargeting venue for your business. Make good use of its user-generated data and find creative ways to connect it to your potential leads in order to find the right approach in your content marketing strategy going forward. With that in mind, let us know about your experiences with Pinterest and what methods you’ve used to achieve success on the platform!

Author Bio: 

Angela Baker is a self-driven specialist who is currently working as a content manager at PickTheWriter company and is trying to improve herself and her blogging career. She is always seeking to discover new ways for personal and professional growth and is convinced that it’s always important to broaden horizons. That’s why Angela develops and improves her skills throughout the writing process to help to inspire people. Also, she writes for LiveInspiredMagazine, rounding out her professional writing career.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest

Newsletter

Get tips, product updates, and discounts straight to your inbox.

Hidden

Name
Privacy(Required)
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.