Up to 98 percent of online visitors leave a website without making contact, filling out a form or taking any action. While this high number can seem like a frightening reality, the truth is that you really need to win people over long before they make the decision to choose your company over others. If you run a small legal, optometric, dental, or other practice or business, you need an effective way of drawing this traffic back “into the fold”, where your website users can convert from casual visitors to leads and eventually to happy paying clients. Retargeting is the answer to increase your conversion rate.
Site-based retargeting is one approach. Other methods include email, search, and CRM retargeting. Many of these retargeting methods, if not all, are being ignored by small businesses and practices, leaving money on the table.
Visitors to your website may spend several minutes reading your informative and entertaining content and your call to action. They may even leave a friendly comment. They just don’t call your office, click the link to subscribe to your newsletter, download your free expert guide telling them how much they need your services, or set up a free consultation through a web form.
What is Retargeting?
The on-site retargeting technique involves tagging your website or mobile app visitors with a small snippet of anonymous code called a cookie. The newly-implanted code follows your visitors around the internet, places online ads for your business on sites they visit subsequently, and keeps your name in front of your bounced visitors. That’s effective Top Of Mind Awareness.
How does on-site Retargeting work?
First, you place a few lines of code, often referred to as a pixel, onto your website. Invisible to your visitors, the pixel won’t affect your site’s performance. It drops a cookie onto the visitor’s web browser, where it records the visit to your website without leaving any information behind that might violate the user’s privacy.
When that visitor leaves your website and goes to look at another, the cookie tips off your online marketing agency (us if you already work with our team :). The platform we’re using springs immediately into action checking the new website for available ad space and making a real-time bid for it. If the bid succeeds, we secure the space and place your ad onto it before the website is fully loaded on your target’s browser.
Why use Retargeting?
This technique can dramatically increase the ROI on your online marketing budget by re-engaging potential clients (patients) who would otherwise have been “lost” (remember the dreadful truth that 98% leave your website without taking any action).
So, not only does an effective retargeting strategy benefit your business, but your prospective clients get something out of it, too.
As a web user yourself, you know that online ads aren’t going away. Wouldn’t you rather see ads for products and services you are genuinely interested in, and not a random barrage of offers about which you couldn’t care less?
Pixels and cookies in action: how an optometrist increased the number of new patients from his marketing campaigns
Meet Jonathan M., O.D. in Baltimore, MD. His practice runs Google paid search ads targeted at his local community, to gain visibility among people searching for eye care related solutions and services.
These campaigns bring in hundreds of people flocking to their website every month, but only a handful ever turned up in their waiting room. That was before the practice implemented Retargeting.
Upon the recommendation of his web marketing agency, Jonathan decided to retarget those hundreds of visitors using the method described above. As before, most visitors to the practice’s website leave the site after digesting the information and move on to look at other local optometrists’ websites, browse their latest smartphone, and maybe buy a new blender (after being retargeted by Amazon ! 🙂
Only this time, when they visit those sites, or use apps on their smartphone, they see ads for Jonathan’s practice out of the corner of their eye. Day after day, they are reminded of his name, brand, and eye care services.
Eventually, some of these people re-engage with Jonathan’s practice because of the Top of Mind Awareness these retargeting techniques generated.
The number of new patients calling the practice increased four-fold after 3 months of running the Retargeting campaign.
The same principle could be applied to your small business, whether you offer legal services, dentistry, real estate, or tree surgery. And Retargeting can be used for all types of marketing strategies, including social media, email marketing, or any method of bringing potential customers to your web pages.
Is Remarketing the same thing?
While often used interchangeably with “retargeting”, remarketing is somewhat different as it involves email campaigns to re-engage customers in their inbox.
Picture an email sent to re-engage website visitors who have abandoned their online shopping process on an e-commerce website.
Can you really do marketing without Retargeting?
Technically speaking, of course, you can 🙂 It would be like shutting down your website every month after hitting a certain number of web visitors and leads generated, before re-starting the next month.
Given the low cost of ad spend necessary to run effective Retargeting campaigns, why would any business owner not do Retargeting? The actual ad spend necessary each month to effectively retarget will depend on the number of new visitors coming to your site. With that being said, many small businesses and practices spend less than $150 each month effectively retargeting people who previously expressed an interest in their “offer”, and bringing a significant number back to re-engage and become new clients or patients.
Are you running effective Retargeting campaigns? If not, ask us about our unique OmniTargeting system.
