Last week I walked through 4 steps to double your website conversion rates and today I’m going to elaborate on the 4th step, follow-up.  More specifically, how to follow up with all of those prospects that visit your website, but do not end up calling you, completing a webform, or making a purchase.

For the average website, we’re talking about nearly 99% of your traffic.  Did you know that?  Only about 1% of website visitors convert to customers.  Of course, this varies across industries and depends greatly on the source of traffic, but generally speaking a very small percentage of visitors convert.

On one hand, that fact is extremely discouraging.  As business owners and marketers, we invest a lot of time and money into driving visitors to our websites and about 99% of them leave without making a purchase.

On the other hand, this is a huge opportunity!  If you’re already generating leads and sales from your website, then you have 3 marketing segments:

  1. Customers – this is everyone who pulled the trigger and made a purchase.  Again, we’re probably talking about 1% of your traffic.  Could be more or less depending on your industry and marketing tactics.
  2. Prospects with contact info – these are the visitors who completed a contact form or called in, so you have their contact info.  We might be talking about 5% of your traffic.  As you probably already know, the best way to convert these prospects into customers is via email and/or phone follow-up.  That’s sales 101.
  3. Prospects without contact info – these are the visitors who did not complete a contact form or call you so you have no means to follow up.  If you do the math, we’re left with about 94% of your visitors in this segment!  For these prospects, there’s only one way to follow up – Retargeting Advertising.

Conversion Rates

 

What Is Retargeting Advertising?

Most people are aware of retargeting advertising so I’ll try to be brief with a simple example.  The fact that you’re reading this article on www.mainstreetroi.com means your browser has saved a retargeting cookie.  This cookie has no personal identifying information, but it does include the webpages you visit on www.mainstreetroi.com.  That’s the important information we need.

When you leave our website, then we can show retargeting ads to you based on the webpages you visited.  For example, if you read about our AdWords advertising service, but did not request a quote, then we can laser target ads to you to try to bring you back to request a quote.

Retargeting advertising is different than other forms of advertising where you’re targeting by demographics, geographic locations, keywords searched, or other websites.  Instead, you’re targeting prospects based on their behavior, including visiting certain pages on your website.

Now that you know how this works, let’s talk about the 3 different types of retargeting ads you can you use.

 

1. Website Retargeting

Website retargeting is simply displaying retargeting text or banner ads on other websites.  For example, when your prospects leave your website and go to cnn.com to read the news, then you could show your ads on cnn.com webpages.

This is the most common form of retargeting, but it’s just the beginning…

 

2. Social Retargeting

In addition to surfing other websites, I’m sure your prospects also use social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  Did you know you can show retargeting ads on these networks as well?

That’s right! You can display ads on Facebook and Twitter only to prospects who have visited certain pages on your website.

 

3. Video Retargeting

Finally, there’s video retargeting on video websites like YouTube.com.  With video retargeting you’re not showing a traditional text or banner ad.  Instead, you’re using a pre-roll video ad similar to a 30-second TV commercial.  But unlike TV, with video retargeting you know that your prospect is interested in your product or service because she already visited your website!

 

How to Get Started

First of all, retargeting advertising is only appropriate if you’re already generating leads and/or sales from your website.  Think of it like a conversion multiplier.  As you learned in elementary school, when you multiply zero with any number you always end up with zero.

With that said, if you are generating leads and/or sales from your website and you want help with retargeting advertising, then we can help.  Click here to contact us and learn more.

 

[google_authorship_badge]