How to Segment Your Audience for Retargeting

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According to a report, 97% of first-time visitors to your website or landing page leave without buying anything. These visitors with buying intent are often lost forever unless you bring them back through retargeting. In this article, you will learn how to segment your audience for retargeting.

What are Retargeting Campaigns?

Retargeting campaigns help to remind your website visitors of your products and services after they abruptly leave your website without buying.

It helps you retarget those visitors and show them relevant visual or text ads when they visit other websites.

You can use Google Ads, Facebook Retargeting, LinkedIn ads, and other advertising platforms to carry out your retargeting campaign.

It’s easy to connect with your audience and increase sales and customer loyalty through retargeting.

A well-planned retargeting campaign builds visibility for your brand. It also helps you reach an audience that is already interested in your products or services.

Surprisingly, retargeting ads are more cost-effective than other types of advertising.

Before we talk about segmenting your audience for retargeting, let’s quickly discuss the types of retargeting ads.

Types of Retargeting Campaigns

To segment your audience for retargeting, you need to understand the different types of retargeting campaigns.

Knowing these different types of retargeting ads will help you make the perfect decision.

So, here are 7 types of retargeting ads you should try right now;

#1. Buyer Persona Retargeting

Every marketer and business owner wants to get the best out of their paid advertising (whether retargeting or not). That is why it’s important to ensure that your targeting is on point.

You must do things differently if you want to get exceptional results from your retargeting campaigns.

What most people do is use industry-specific targeting. While this may yield you a few results, it won’t make much difference.

That’s why you should consider buyer persona targeting. It’s about prioritizing quality over quantity.

Of course, industry targeting will get you more clicks. But you tend to get high-quality traffic from customers who tend to buy your product or services when you specifically target your buyer persona.

For instance, if your target audience is CEOs of companies and captains of industries, traffic from an intern or a regular employee won’t make much difference.

So, to attract the right audience to your campaign, you need to define your buyer persona.

By the way, a buyer persona, according to Hubspot, is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer.

It’s based on market research, actual data about your existing customers, and a few assumptions.

When you understand your buyer persona, it’s easy to relate to the audience you want to market your product or services.

You will need the demographic information from your buyer persona to set up your retargeting campaign on several platforms.

#2. Segment your Visitors Based on Their Stage in the Sales Funnel

Before you segment your audience for retargeting, ensure that you already target your visitors based on their stage in the sales funnel.

Interestingly, most retargeting platforms can target your website visitors based on the pages they view. This will then align with the different sections of your marketing and sales funnel.

With this retargeting, you can create different ads for each stage in your funnel. It will also ensure that you deliver the right content at the right time for the right audience.

Generally, every sales funnel has 3 main stages, which are;

Top-of-the-Funnel (TOFU)

The first category of people you will find in your sales funnel is those at the top of the funnel.

These people visit pages relating to general information about your brand rather than your specific product or services.

It is possible that these visitors have already visited your website, read a few resources on the platform, and left without making any purchase engagement.

The perfect retargeting ads for this category of people will be an ebook related to the resource or content they earlier visited on your website.

Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU)

These people are already interacting with your brand. They have visited pages relating to your product or services but are still considering whether to buy from you or not.

A good retargeting campaign can convince them to make a purchase decision. You can give them a reliable offer that makes a case for your company. The offer could be case studies, webinars, demonstrations, etc.

Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU)

This is another important aspect of your retargeting campaign. It’s important to pay attention to this area when you want to segment your audience for retargeting.

These are people who have already visited your product pages, and they are already in the decision-making stage.

Whenever you retarget this category of people, send them to a landing page that offers them a free demo or possibly consultation. This will help build trust and give them the confidence to buy from you.

When you understand retargeting at different sales funnel stages, you can harmonize your inbound marketing and paid advertising. And this will help to improve sales and boost revenue.

#3. You can Use Account-Based Retargeting

Account-based retargeting may be too advanced for startups with a slim advertising budget. However, it’s a perfect retargeting strategy to close more deals with the right audience.

Again, this strategy is competitive. So, when you decide to use account-based retargeting, you must be several steps ahead of your competitors.

It’s advisable to get an expert to handle your account-based retargeting campaign. You tend to get better results when you outsource to an audience.

#4. Cross-Channel Retargeting

Cross-channel retargeting is another excellent strategy to convert people who visited your website without making any purchase.

If you are using cross-channel retargeting, you should know that most people are looking for different experiences on every platform.

So, try to tailor your marketing message in a way that will resonate across channels. With cross-channel retargeting, you can create unique marketing messages based on the site they appear.

Using a platform like AdRoll, you can run your campaigns across several social media platforms. But you can always adjust the content of your marketing message when necessary.

Even though retargeting across-channel makes it easier to be in the right place and time, don’t bombard your audience,

You can carry out quick research to know how often you can target your campaign and the platforms to identify your audience easily.

#5. Use Facebook Custom Audiences

You can also retarget your audience using Facebook. Facebook custom audiences allow you to upload a list of email addresses or phone numbers.

Once you supply the information, your ads will be delivered to those people who visited your websites but didn’t take action.

You can also use the Facebook Custom Audiences to target people who use your mobile app.

Experts opined that retargeting based on email address enables you to target people at different stages of your marketing or sales funnel.

For instance, you can easily export leads, MQLs, SQLs, and opportunities, after which you develop a personalized message to guide your audience in their next stage in your funnel.

Funny enough, you can implement these stages in your retargeting without correlating web visits.

#6. Email Retargeting

If you want to establish a stronger connection and long-term relationship with your audience, you need email campaigns.

Email campaigns will help you to nurture your leads and keep them engaged. However, email retargeting campaigns can make other forms of campaigns more effective.

It’s easy to create an email retargeting campaign that complements or corresponds with a specific drip campaign.

All you need is to add a retargeting code into the signature or HTML of your emails. And whenever any of your leads open your emails, they will start seeing your ads across the web.

Of course, it goes hand in hand with retargeting segmented visitors. If possible, run two methods against each other and work with the perfect one for your business.

#7. Customer Retargeting for Brand Loyalty

Some people may think retargeting existing customers is a waste of time and resources. But if you analyze it holistically, it’s actually a worthy investment.

You can advertise offers for “freemium” products or add-ons to keep your existing customers happy and engaged.

You can also upsell your existing customers with accessories, new features, etc., to increase their lifetime value. And of course, every customer love freebies; it will make them strongly attached to your brand.

When to use Retargeting Campaigns

Before you segment your audience for retargeting, you need to know when to use this strategy.

Below are some of the best instances to use retargeting campaigns.

Long Term Marketing Strategy

Contrary to what most people may think, retargeting is not a one-off strategy. It’s an advertising method that businesses with an established followings can use as a long-term marketing strategy.

In a nutshell, if your website or landing page gets 100 monthly visitors or more, you should consider using a retargeting campaign. It will make a lot of difference in your marketing campaign.

Promoting Bestsellers

You can easily use retargeting ads to showcase your top-selling products to existing and potential customers.

And once you consistently promote items that your current customers love, you tend to convert visitors easily and increase the ROI on ads.

Introducing New Collections

Generally, people who visit your website already show interest in your brand. So, they are the perfect audience to target when launching a new product or service.

Once you retarget your ads to the previous visitors to your website, it will catch their attention immediately and make them visit your website again to check what’s new.

Interestingly, you can use display campaigns with Google AdWords or your Facebook retargeting campaign.

Moving Inventory

Moving inventory is another area where retargeting campaigns are effective. If you sell online, you must have handled slow-moving inventory at some point.

And since retargeting ads are budget-friendly and require little or no effort, you can easily showcase some of the surplus products from your store to your potential customers.

Building Brand Awareness

While more people are more inclined to buy online these days, they still need to trust and know your brand before they buy your product or services.

With retargeting ads, it’s easy to keep your brand in your potential customers’ minds, even if they aren’t ready to buy.

But when they frequently see your brand information via advertising, they may eventually remember it when they decide to buy.

Remind Inactive Users

Retargeting ads can serve as a reminder for people who have already signed up for your services but have not started using them.

The ad will help boost engagement and retention on your website, thus increasing conversion on your website.

Upselling

You can also use retargeting ads to upsell your existing customers. It’s an amazing strategy to get your current customers to subscribe to your new service or purchase your recently launched products.

Heavy Shoppers

Some people repeatedly buy from your website. These people are heavy spenders, and it’s easy to upsell them whenever you launch a new product or service.

So, once you have new products in stock that may interest some of your heavy shoppers, don’t hesitate to use retargeting ads.

It will help to drive repeat conversions and boost sales on your website.

Completing Conversions

If you run a website when you sell products or services, there will always be people who exit the website without finishing the purchase process.

Retargeting ads can help you move these potential customers to the next stage in the buying journey.

Before discussing how to further segment your audience for retargeting, let’s quickly learn more about the difference between retargeting and remarketing campaigns.

Retargeting VS Remarketing Campaigns

People often use the two terms retargeting and remarketing interchangeably. But they are both digital advertising techniques designed to achieve the same goals.

They both target audiences who have already visited your website and are familiar with your brand. The two terms also help engage and target people who are more likely to make purchases.

Additionally, retargeting and remarketing help use brand awareness and recognition to build a lasting connection.

But generally, the difference between remarketing and retargeting is in tactics and techniques.

While retargeting ads target people who have visited your website or social media profiles through paid ads, remarketing uses email to target the audience who have already purchased your product or services.

In other words, remarketing campaigns are for your existing customers, while retargeting ads are for potential customers who already know about your brand but are yet to convert.

Why You Should Segment Your Audience for Retargeting

When you don’t segment your audience properly, retargeting can be challenging.

For instance, if you have demographic data about your audience, you can easily identify the source of your lead, their interaction on your website, etc., which can help you segment your audience better.

Once you can segment your audience, you can cluster them into different lists to help you improve your chance of converting them.

Reordering can also help you choose the best time and location to reach out to your audience and send them marketing messages.

Generally, you tend to get more results from your marketing effort when you leverage psychological triggers to get people to take action.

You should be able to identify audience micro-moments and connect those micro-moments through retargeting.

But again, it all starts with understanding your users’ needs and motivations. It increases your chances of success in your retargeting campaign. That is because you will give more personalized ads and experiences to your audience.

Here are some easy to implement tactics to help you segment your audience for retargeting;

Avoid the Obvious Mistakes

Before you start to segment your audience for retargeting, you must avoid some mistakes that could thwart your effort.

More often than not, advertisers mistake creating a generic retargeting strategy that considers any of the information they have about the users.

They don’t consider how these users interact with their brands when crafting their marketing message.

All they do is use the same generic messaging for all. The danger of this approach is that it will land all your audience on the same homepage.

And in the end, these people you are attracted to your website may end up not converting. That is because they came to the wrong landing page.

From experience, it’s better to start segmenting your audience based on where and how they are interacting with your brand.

If the interaction occurs on your website, you should consider creating different lists based on the different pages they have visited on your websites.

You should also consider the extent to which they have gone into the conversion path.

However, if you are using Google Analytics with EEC (Enhanced Ecommerce), you will notice that the platform has done most of the segmenting for you.

Your Google analytics will automatically create different lists that separate people who visited your product page from those who have added to the cart and those who dropped at the checkout.

So, when you are launching a retargeting campaign in this situation, you are addressing any barrier that possibly prevents your user from converting.

Ways to Segment Your Audience for Retargeting

#1. Prioritize Users’ Experience Over Channels

Sometimes, business owners and advertisers think too much about channels to forget their users’ experiences. And this could make them compartmentalize their retargeting strategy.

So, the first thing you should do whenever you launch a retargeting campaign is to consider your users first.

If you prioritize your users’ experience over the channel you are using, you will be endless possibilities to convert your audience.

For instance, you have the option to retarget your campaigns across multiple channels.

The default mindset is to have a Facebook prospecting and retargeting campaign. And that is the limitation most advertisers have.

It affects the overall result of their retargeting campaign.

But you can easily create lists of your website users based on your traffic source. You can create the list of website users on Google Analytics by selecting traffic sources, then source, medium, and campaign as required.

This implies that you don’t have only to retarget users within Facebook Network but also reach out and re-engage users across Google Display Network, YouTube, and more properties.

You also have the option to retarget users who have clicked on an email or have been referred by an affiliate site.

#2. Flirting with Your Competitors’ Users

Sometime back, we published an article titled – “3 Strategies for Targeting Your Competitor’s Audience Without Search Ads, in the article, we discussed how you could target your competitor’s audience without search ads.

One of the best ways to segment your audience for retargeting is to flirt with your competitors’ audience.

You may see this as a bit controversial, but it’s a strategy that will save you money and yield you great results.

Some advertisers sometimes set up campaigns that target their competitors. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this.

Take it a step further by tracking and continuing to engage with users who have already clicked on their competitors’ ads.

Interestingly, you can easily judge your competitor campaigns through impression share or direct conversion.

But if you take the step to flirt with your competitor’s audience, and they seem to be interested, make a concerted effort to engage them continuously.

To make the whole process easier, you can get RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) in Google to target those users who have visited your website but are now searching for your competitors.

Ensure that you target these users with a unique and engaging marketing message that will make them trust and want to do business with your brand.

If you can’t stop potential customers who visit your website and search for your competitors, you may lose them forever.

#3. Using Sequential Messaging and Storytelling for Engagement

You can easily get the best from your retargeting campaign when you use sequential messaging and storytelling for engagement.

If you want your campaign to get more conversion, don’t make it a one-dimensional interaction.

Just because your target audience shows interest in your ads through clicks and engagement doesn’t mean your job is done.

Try to develop ads series that are linked together. Campaigns like this will get you massive conversion and ROI.

The first ad could give a glimpse into the story. After which, you launch several other ads either in a linear way or with a few alternative follow-ups.

Just do what works best for you to make your story open and engaging.

Again, if you decide to use sequential messaging and storytelling for your engagement, you need to be very creative.

You need to be smart with your audience’s perspective and develop a storyline that resonates well with them.

#4. Broaden Your Strategy Through Life Events Targeting

Another great way to segment your target audience is to broaden your strategy through life events targeting.

So, study your audience closely and segment them based on life events. Generally, this list or segmentation is readily available when launching prospecting campaigns.

But you can create your audience segmentation for your retargeting ads.

For instance, if you run a utility, storage, or removalist company, the people you would want to target in your ads are those actively looking to buy a property.

Once you create a new audience based on your targeting criteria, you can easily reach out and engage your web visitors who are yet to buy your product or services.

#5. Contextual Retargeting

Contextual retargeting is another aspect you should explore when launching a retargeting campaign. This type of ad matches the content of a web page with the content of an ad.

So, instead of using data about your potential customers, the system automatically displays relevant ads based on the page’s content.

You can create your audience based on social and demographic profiling with contextual retargeting.

For instance, you could segment Facebook or Instagram users and retarget them based on their context.

Similarly, you can create a campaign and ad that will only display when your potential audience is in a specific location or attending an event of public interest.

Your campaign won’t yield the expected result in contextual retargeting if you don’t profile and segment your audience properly.

So, before you launch your contextual retargeting campaign, ensure you understand your target users and how they are likely to react to your campaign.

#6. Retargeting Users Who Have Run a Site Search but Not Transacted

One of the ways to segment your audience for retargeting is to target people who run a site search on your page but have not transacted.

Marketers often underutilize this segment of the audience. But if you understand how to target the audience who run a site search, you understand your website visitors’ behaviour.

With this knowledge, you can gather valuable information about your website visitors, especially those yet to convert.

To better target this segment of your audience, you need to use Google Analytics. Use it to create a new audience list and analyze why they are not converting yet.

To use Google analytics for creating a list of people who run a site search and yet to transact, follow these tips;

Start by specifying the conditions that will define the filter. So, once you get to the audience builder page, choose conditions, and select Site Search Status equals to Visits With Site Search.

After the previous step, you have the option to add more conditions and select AND Days since the Last Session is equal to or less than 2. Ensure that you use this filter when you are retargeting warm leads.

The next step is to add the AND operator and select Transactions (per user) are equal to 0.

After taking the steps mentioned above, the next step is to save the filter and create the audience.

#7. Use Buying Personas to Retarget Your Most Valuable Audience Segments

You can never undermine the effect of buyer persons on your campaign. The concept of buying persona is as old as marketing itself.

Contrary to what most people may think, understanding your buying persona doesn’t require much time and effort.

Start with your Google analytic reports; the audience behaviour will give you an idea of your buying persona.

For instance, it’s easy to identify your audience’s gender, age, and location. You can also see the devices they use, the model, the operating system, when they are most likely to be active on your website, and many more.

Just learn how to navigate your Google analytics; it will go a long way to help you.

And with the information from Google Analytics, you can create your audience based on certain traits and retarget them specifically after they visit your website.

When you use buyer persona to create ads and campaigns, your audience resonates well with such campaigns.

4 Retargeting Mistakes to Avoid

Now you understand how to segment your audience for retargeting. And when you target your audience very well, your conversion and ROI will increase.

In this section, let’s quickly talk about some retargeting mistakes to avoid. These mistakes could negatively affect the performance of your campaign.

So, here are 4 retargeting mistakes every business owner and marketer should avoid;

#1. Showing Too Many Impressions

Showing too many impressions is one of the retargeting mistakes to avoid. It’s natural for you to be concerned about annoying your customers when launching your retargeting campaign.

Understandably, your concerns are genuine; Excessive retargeting can truly piss off your potential and existing customers. It’s a documented fact.

And you can avoid this pitfall without stress. All you have to do is set a frequency cap on the number of impressions each of your users is served.

With this approach, your retargeting ad won’t show too many impressions.

#2. Not Showing Enough Impressions

This is another area you should pay attention to boost your retargeting campaign performance.

As I mentioned earlier, showing too many impressions can make your campaign’s purpose counterproductive.

But not showing enough impression can make your retargeting campaign ineffective. Remember, the whole essence of your retargeting campaign is to keep your brand fresh and evergreen in your audience’s mind.

And if your campaign is not achieving that, it’s a complete waste of time, resources, and effort.

So, if you aren’t consistent with your ad, you may not solidify your brand awareness across different niches.

#3. Not Being Creative with Your Ads

If you want the best from your ad, you must be creative with your marketing message. Your retargeting ads won’t stand out if you don’t devote your creative energy to writing a good copy.

Every campaign element should be branded and ensure you use a concise copy with an irresistible call to action.

And It’s important to use dynamic ads for your retargeting campaign. It helps to keep your brand fresh in the mind of your audience.

#4. Not Segmenting Your Audience

If you want your retargeting campaign to yield the expected result, you must pay attention to it.

Ensure that you properly segment your audience before launching your campaign. Generally, every page on your website should have its segment and set of creative.

And ensure that your creatives reflect the different stages of your audience buying journey.