Andre ChandraRetargeting, sending ads to people who visit your website, is one of the most powerful digital marketing tactics. Now, with geofencing, we can take that same tactic and use it to re-activate shoppers who’ve recently been to your retail location. We call it “four-wall retargeting” or “recapture marketing,” and it lets you make the most of your real-world retail locations and cutting-edge digital marketing tactics.
The Power of Retargeting
Retargeting is one of the most powerful tools in digital marketing. It allows brands to cookie people who’ve visited their websites (or tag them in another way) and then send ads to them on digital channels ranging from search engines to social media to display ad networks.
Research shows that retargeting improves digital ad performance to the tune of 10 times more clickthrough traffic than non-retargeted digital ads and 147% higher conversion rates. A study by Comscore and Value Click Media found that retargeting drove 1,046% more brand search traffic, more lift than any other targeting strategy, and that the effects were even greater when retargeting is used with other channels and other forms of targeting.
These benefits go beyond simply optimizing for conversions. The IAB found that 70% of marketers also use retargeting to drive brand awareness and 90% say retargeting performs as well or better than search, email, and other display ads.
Retargeting works so well because it uses behavioral cues to target your ad spending. You’re not just sending an ad to a person who looks like your other customers, you’re sending an ad to someone who’s already shown interest in your brands and products, usually by visiting your website. That dramatically improves the chances that they want to see that ad.
You increase those chances even more when you can target ads based on real-world actions like visiting your retail location.
Taking Retargeting Beyond Digital
Those stats show how powerful retargeting is in digital, but geofencing allows us to add a whole new dimension to it: Real-word behavioral targeting.
We call it “recapture marketing” or “four-wall retargeting,” some people call it “geo-framing.” Regardless of the name, the idea is just like website retargeting: The ads target customers who’ve been inside your actual location. Then we layer demographic data over that behavioral data and use retargeting tactics to make optimized offers to a tightly targeted audience. We also use cross-indexing by frequency at location data to differentiate between shoppers and employees.
When it comes to buying signals, not many are more powerful than knowing someone was in your retail location. When you compound that with demographic targeting using the other information in your list (perhaps in addition to website retargeting, too), you’re weighing the odds heavily in the favor of your campaign.
Retargeting isn’t a channel or specific to one site, it’s a multifunctional method of targeting that we can use pretty much anywhere on the internet. You can send ads to people who’ve visited your retail location while they’re interacting with these digital properties and many others:
- Display ad networks
- In-app ads
- Mobile ads
- And more!
All of these networks have different response rates and support different strategies. When we work on a retargeting campaign, the specific channels to be used are wide-open to be optimized for your goals.
Close the Omni-Channel Loop
Geo-retargeting is a powerful way to drive sales out of retail visits. Perhaps more importantly, it lets you close the loop on omni-channel attribution.
We’ve seen again and again that e-commerce often gets credit for sales driven by other channels, whether that channel is direct mail, a catalog, TV advertising, or the retail store. We know — from more than a decade of experience at this point — that e-commerce sales often start with other investments. This often leads brands to cut spending on channels due to a perceived lack of ROI when that channel is, in fact, important for the success of your website.
With geo-retargeting, you’re able to see that the digital ad that spurred the sale started with a retail visit to your real-world location. Better understanding leads to better optimization of your marketing spend and higher ROI in the long run.
Build a Retargeting Strategy That Works With the Real World
In the end, this is all part of the digital transformation companies and consumers have been working their way through for years. The COVID-19 lockdowns have driven consumers even more to e-commerce, but that doesn’t mean they’re not looking forward to coming back to your retail store.
We’ve already done the work to align our digital and real-world marketing channels (direct mail, catalogs, etc.). Now it’s time to unify your digital strategy with real-world retail, too.
When you’re ready to do that, we’d love to help you build the strategy to support it. Contact Propelo today to talk about how your brand can use real-world retargeting to drive more sales and align omni-channel campaigns around your most important channels.
