Subtle retargeting methods to avoid annoying your customers Share via

With the retargeting approach, brands can either stay at the top of the mind of their audience or infuriate them with a barrage of display ads. It is for the marketers and the brands to decide how they want to use their retargeting campaigns. Retargeting works pretty well to bump up your sales and increase awareness among shoppers, but for that to happen, marketers will have to put the customer experience above short-term vanity KPIs. This blog will suggest top points that any marketers should consider not to creep out the consumers with non-stop retargeting advertisements. Here is how retargeting can be done subtly.

Focus on context

How many times does this happen that you were looking for a fashion product, and then that ad starts showing on the news website while you are reading a current affairs piece? As a marketer, you should understand that delivering your ads to potential consumers without any context can irritate the customer and may create a negative impression about your brands in the shopper’s mind. Research has found that showing ads without context repeatedly to consumers can make them feel that the brands are following them. The whole experience may result in the user blocking your advertisements forever by using ad blockers and may look for the same products from different brands. On the other hand, if you focus more on displaying your ads with a context, it will help you to keep the brand on the top of the shopper’s mind and will help you to increase sales.

Be mindful of your retargeting frequency

Do you follow the more, the merrier approach in retargeting? As a brand marketer, do you think the more times the shopper is exposed to your advertisements, the more likely they will remember you and shop from you? If yes, you cannot be more wrong. Multiple pieces of research conducted by top digital marketing firms found that shoppers do not like seeing the same ads repeatedly, and a generous frequency of servings tends to put them off. Marketers should go by the general studies that suggest people do not like watching retargeting ads more than five times. Once that threshold is reached, you run the risk of annoying your potential customers. Hence, marketers should put a frequency cap or impression cap to stop targeting the consumers exposed to your campaigns a pre-specified number of times. It will ensure that your potential target audience will get a break from incessant retargeting, and you as a brand will save money by limiting your retargeting spending.

Provide option to opt-out  

The whole idea behind retargeting is to keep your brand on the top of the mind of the potential shoppers and eventually make them buy the products. But what happens when you have been retargeting your consumer’s hundreds of times? They get fed up with your tactics and negatively perceive your organization. Therefore, marketers could allow the users to opt-out of the ads when they no longer want to see them. The feature will ensure that you as a brand are seen as caring for the likes and dislikes of your audience and will not come across as pushy and forceful. Also, as discussed earlier, if the user has not acted on your call to buy during the initial retargeting attempts, there is a bleak chance that they will do it now when they have been regularly seeing your campaigns. So instead, marketers should save their time and resources and invest them somewhere else rather than keep spending money on fruitless retargeting.

Don’t retarget for products already purchased

Why would a consumer be interested in watching the advertisement of the product they have already purchased? Since these customers will unlikely take any action on your retargeting campaign, brands will tend to lose their money on targeting the wrong audience. Therefore, people who have converted recently should be excluded from all kinds of retargeting campaigns unless the brand is looking to upsell or cross-sell different products. A proper mechanism for post-conversion and suppression can help make your marketing efforts much more efficient and ensure that the customer is not bothered by these retargeting ads, which will make no sense to them now.

While there is no denying that retargeting is an essential digital marketing and advertising tool that significantly improves the brand’s marketing outreach, if done mindlessly, it can negatively impact your image and massively reduce the impact of your campaigns. Hence marketers must undertake the retargeting exercises but should do it subtly so that consumers do not get annoyed and block them from further communications.