The holidays are quickly approaching – while it might seem early, preparing your marketing strategy now will save you tons of time (and headaches) as we jump into the busiest time of year for eCommerce stores.
The springbots have 5 simple tips to refresh your retargeting strategy just in time for the holiday season! Read on for how to get rolling with your holiday retargeting plans.
Tip 1: Update your creative to reflect holiday promotions or sales.
If you’re running a holiday promotion, make sure that your site visitors know about it through your retargeting ads! Add some fresh creative to your AdRoll presence to entice new holiday site visitors to purchase – focus on a clear call-to-action and consider adding a discount or free shipping in your ad copy to prompt them to click.
It’s especially important to display strong creative to first time site visitors during the busy holiday season. Once we’re able to capture these new site visitors through AdRoll’s tracking pixel, we want to get them to convert as quickly as possible and be a lifelong customer.
By showing those new visitors relevant, engaging creative, we’re giving them a stronger incentive to buy!
Pro Tip: Need more help with designing your holiday ads? Check out more of our tips for designing eye-catching creative here.
Tip 2: Focus holiday ads on shoppers that are going to convert.
Through AdRoll segmentation, we’re able to serve different ads to site visitors that are at different points in the purchase process. This segmentation is extremely valuable, as it allows us to serve relevant content to your site visitors depending on their intent to buy.
Think of it this way – if someone comes to just your home page and then leaves, we’ll want to serve them different ads than someone who spends 5 minutes on your site looking at multiple products. The second site visitor is much more likely to buy, so we want to spend more time and resources on them without ignoring the first visitor.
Think about creating a few different sets of holiday ads depending on purchase intent. For site visitors who might just come to your home page, prompt them to sign up for your email list or learn more about your brand in your retargeting ads. For visitors who come to the cart page, consider offering a special discount or free shipping to get them to buy when they’re most likely to convert.
Pro Tip: Learn more about ways to segment and target your site visitors with more specific ads in this blog post about optimizing your AdRoll performance.
Tip 3: Adjust your retargeting budget based on your volume of site visitors.
As a general rule, most eCommerce retailers see large spikes in site traffic during the holiday season (the average is a 32% growth from October – December!) If you keep your retargeting budget the same during the holidays as you do during slower times of year, that existing budget won’t allow you to reach the demand from more traffic. Retargeting becomes much more competitive and expensive during the holidays – therefore, your dollar won’t go quite as far as it might during other times of year.
As a result, consider increasing your budget from around October to January, depending on your store’s peak season, to be able to capitalize on upward trends in traffic and reach more of your site visitors where it counts.
Pro Tip – Are you a Springbot customer and interested in adjusting your budget for the holidays? Contact our Customer Success team at help@springbot.com to learn more!
Tip 4: Look at historical retargeting data and capitalize on patterns.
Learn from past mistakes, and do more of what works – it takes a bit of time to dig through the numbers, but data-driven decisions is what can make or break your eCommerce store!
Look at past retargeting performance to see what types of messaging, content, and promotions your site visitors have responded to best. Then, repurpose some of your most successful ads with a fresh holiday theme!
AdRoll also offers a great A/B testing functionality – if you upload multiple ads in the same size, AdRoll will automatically show you which ad is performing the best! This is a simple way to experiment with different types of creative to see what is the most effective for your store.
Pro Tip: If you’re a Springbot customer, dive into your AdRoll performance on the View tab to help shape the direction of your holiday retargeting strategy!
Tip 5: Learn from your competition.
Taking a look at your competition is easy – if your competitors are also running retargeting ads, go to their site and then surf to other sites around the web; you’ll be sure to see their ads almost immediately!
We never encourage copying content without permission, but use great ideas from other players in your industry to build out your retargeting strategy. Take a look at what promotions other stores are running, the type of creative that they use, and when they’re running ads. Then, take that information and start to adapt it to your store. Not only will it make your store more competitive in retargeting, but it will give you benchmarks on which to compare your own campaigns.
Bonus Tip: Build your retargeting strategy around your overall eCommerce goals.
Focus on what really matters to your business when building your retargeting campaigns. Think about the marketing channels that drive the most revenue for your store, and use retargeting to make them stronger during the busiest time of year for eCommerce stores.
For example,if your store is planning on launching a series of email blasts during the holiday months due to previously demonstrated success from email campaigns, use retargeting to collect new email addresses for your list by setting your ad destination URL as a lead form on your site. With these new email addresses, you’ll be able to target more shoppers with your email campaigns, which will hopefully lead to more conversions.
Want to learn more about revamping your holiday retargeting strategy? Register for our webinar with AdRoll to get the inside scoop!
