How To Retarget Without Buying Media

To retarget users, marketers are sliding too far down the proverbial rabbit hole. But with time, every marketer realizes that to move the needle, experimenting with different strategies, especially with different channels is what hits a home run. Read on to know why Web Push Notifications have turned out to be must-have ammunition in marketers arsenal to bring back lost sales.

SimpleCPR, a leader in online safety education in North America for over 20 years, sells courses to help people effectively react in emergencies. While they receive an overwhelming supply of 50K visitors per month, it was a challenge to retarget users who did not buy the courses.

The team at SimpleCPR held a meeting to tackle this problem. They wanted a solution that would help them serve customers better by helping them in selecting the correct course or to retarget them for payment reminders.

They decided to give Display ads a shot, as this was one channel that most of the e-commerce brands embrace blindly. Gradually they realized that their banner ads were suffering from banner blindness! They were back to square one. The marketing team at SimpleCPR yet again started researching for other channels.

Enter Web Push Notifications. And they never looked back. SimpleCPR clocks a conversion rate of 2.3% and achieved a 5x ROI in less than a quarter.

Combating The Law of Shitty Click-Throughs

If retargeting was a person, it would be in its mid 20’s and on a high. Yet you will find marketers pulling their hair out to bring back the 98% of users that leave without buying.  

While it is necessary to bring the right traffic to your store, it is futile without a retargeting setup. Over time, users have got immune to receiving such messages and it fails to excite users to take any action as such (just like the SimpleCPR story you read above). 

At times of saturation, there arose a need for a new channel, something that users would willingly give permission to receive and that wouldn’t go completely ignored.

That’s when Web Push Notification came as a sigh of relief, a breath of fresh air, for all marketers who had to meet their marketing targets.

Playing The Trump Card

While web push notifications is barely 4 years old, the adoption has been off the charts. Chrome report tells that over 10% of the pages on the open web leverage web push notification which is a mind boggling.

The graph shows the percentage of page loads in Chrome that uses this push notifications-

Source

Gradually it started gaining a lot of attention due to its performance. From subscription rates to open rates to conversion rates, it had set new standards-

Know everything that you need to know about Web Push Notifications here

Now that I have your undivided attention, let's dive in. To retarget users without buying media, you need to first build your own media assets. Here is how you can do that like a boss-

Lay Down A Second Net AKA Build Your Media Assets

Here is what you already know - A chunk of your traffic will never come back. This fact is proven to death. But retargeting has the power to bring back lost sales. Approached the right way, your target audience will subscribe to notifications without a second thought.

Subscribing to web push notifications gives users a fast lane- They do not have to share their email address, phone number, the name of their first pet or any personal information for that matter! As it is a permission-based channel, it requires user consent before the notifications can be sent, thus making it spam free.

One can conveniently unsubscribe from notifications they don't want to receive, making it easy for uninterested users to stop receiving the notification, and you, to maintain a captive audience.

The trick is to provide users with context rather than merely asking them if they want to receive notifications. The generic prompt looks something like this -

The generic prompt experience restricts you to share what exactly the user can expect by subscribing to your notifications. Making use of customizable prompts lets you craft the notification prompt in such a way that it is in tandem with the page/user activity. Here is an example of a notification that is contextual-

The idea is to hit when the iron is hot. Here are 4 scenarios you can get inspired from-

Back in stock

How would you feel if you were to be directed to a section in a store which has your size sold out? And this happens more than often. But you can capture these users by asking them to subscribe to your notifications, which would notify them when the product is back in stock. Saves them a lot of time and energy rather than waiting for the right size/color to be back in stock. Chances are that they will definitely subscribe to the notifications.

Add to Wish-list

Have you ever been broke at the end of the month that you had to save stuff for later? Well, your users might be at that stage of their life. Or maybe they are weighing options or they want to know their friends' opinion on it. Either way, you can nudge them to subscribe for notification reminders, so that they are updated about the products in their wish-list.

Price drop alert

Who doesn't like discounts? Have a sale coming up? Is that product going be on an offer? Harness the opportunity to lure users into subscribing.

New product update

Let’s say that you are a huge fan of Nike. And there are new products added to the product line. Wouldn’t it be a bummer that you miss out on it, just because you forgot or didn’t know about it in the first place? Use the FOMO technique to lure users into subscribing to your marketing list.

What makes it the near perfect retargeting solution?

• Succinct and One-click redirection

Web push notifications are crisp updates that are to the point. No beating around the bush, no flashy words, just plain information just the way it should be.

With one-click redirection, web push saves both time and effort. The other day, for instance, I was watching Russian Dolls on Netflix and I got this notification that the black shoes I had in my cart were selling for 50% less! All I had to do was click on the notification and I was redirected to my cart.

• Prominent visibility across all devices

Are your users using Chrome as their default browser on Desktop? No problem. Does the other half of your users prefer Safari on their laptops? Don’t sweat it. Are your users out for coffee with just their Android phone? Web push notifications has got it covered. No matter where you are, what device you are using*, web push notifications has got your back.

When it comes to bringing back users to the website, because of its prominent visibility, the information is conveyed in a jiffy across all devices making it easier to bring back to your site faster. The CTA buttons make it possible to land on the exact intended page making life easier.

• Does not hog on space

Web push notifications do not occupy any space on any device or in your inbox. As we examined earlier in the graph, the churn rate with app push notification is higher compared to email and web push notifications. One of the reasons being that the app takes up a lot of space on the phone. Retargeting messages on mail tends to get buried in the ‘n’ number of emails you receive every day piling up the inbox until it can take no more.

• Targeted and Personalized

What is the point if your users do not feel that you are giving them personal attention? They would start feeling annoyed and eventually leave, like all relationships. You need to create a bond with your users, provide them value and make them feel wanted. You can achieve this by acing personalization and sending them targeted notifications according to the demographic, location, their interests, and activities performed on the site.

Imagine receiving an update on cat food when you just own a dog. It is that absurd! As absurd as the notification I received on shaving cream a few days back. While giving every single person dedicated attention might seem impossible, it is not as tricky as it seems.

With web push notifications, you can capture the right moments to reach out to the users to nudge them to convert. To delight users, you need to capture them in their marketing moment with the right context.

Here are the top 3 reasons why users unsubscribe from push notifications-

• Winning the moments that matter with Drip notifications

Human behavior is such that an action is mostly triggered by multiple nudges. Sometimes they might be contemplating or sometimes they might need reassurance. Web push notifications help lure the user by reminding them about the products with timely notifications and encourage them to convert. The more you show a product, the higher the intent of purchase.

You can set when you need to send out the notifications, at what interval they need to be sent and the frequency of the notification can be predefined. Your marketing calendars can be planned in advance to run things smoothly without last-minute hassle.

It gives a feel of personalized when in reality it is an automated notification. Saves time and energy, and rescues you from a headache. Automate and let web push notifications do their magic.

Real-time triggered notifications

All that is swell- Automate and send out a series of notifications to retarget users. But the million dollar idea is not just to automate, but to reach out with triggered responses according to users activity on your website.

With web push, you can have a predefined template, that has all the text and CTA’s in place. While it gets pushed at the time you have defined, it automatically picks up the Name and the Image of the product they have abandoned.

When it comes to drip, many bucket users according to the events like user Adding to cart, user adding to Wish-list and so on. Rather than focusing on the event, the prime focus needs to be on the user - ‘When’ the user added to cart and when the user added to the Wish-list.  

For example, let's say Kate adds a product to cart and abandons it at 5:00 PM and Sharon abandons a cart at 4 PM. If you have set the triggered notification for 2 hours from when the user abandons the cart, then the notification would go accordingly rather than sending a notification according to event activity. You should send notifications according to ‘user based’ and not ‘event-based’. The image below illustrates how triggered notifications work-

Now that’s intelligent retargeting.

Retargeting Campaigns For Micro Funnels

It is only recently that marketers have actively started tackling Browse Abandonment; retargeting merely used to be associated with Cart Abandonment. It is interesting to note that more than 42% of revenue comes from browse abandonment nurture campaigns. So much for just tackling cart abandonment! Web push notifications help you retarget both browse abandonment and cart abandonment by sending personalized notifications.

The browse abandonment campaigns have a different objective than the cart abandonment campaigns and because of this, the metrics vary. While for cart abandonment it is conversions, for browse abandonment it is CTR and Page Views.

There are 3 ways to gauge users purchase intent -

• The stage of the buyer journey they are in - The closer they are to making a purchase, the higher the intent

• Recency - Recent the visit more the intent

• Frequency - The number of times they visited the particular page higher the intent

Here are a few web push retargeting examples you can have a look at-

Cart Abandonment

The average cart abandonment rate is 68.8%. A number that you can’t lay a blind eye on. Here is an example of a web push notification template you can get inspired to recover abandoned carts-

Browse Abandonment

Users who leave your site without adding to cart need to be reached out with personalized notifications. Here are two scenarios of browse abandonment-

Product Abandonment

The very reason a user has gone through a product page shows their interest in the product. Nudges of encouragement might lure them into converting. Check out the notification drip that was sent by Helm Shoes -

Category Abandonment

Category abandonment is when users visit your site, check out a particular category of products. For example, John comes to a lifestyle store and starts browsing for lamps in specific. This action shows he has an interest in buying a lamp. It's not every day that someone starts looking for lamps after all. But he leaves the store in a while. While there might be many reasons for him leaving, you need to make sure that he revisits your store. What you can do, is inform him when new products are added to the collection or give him a first-time discount.

Here is an example of a drip notification Myntra sent-

How To Track Campaigns And Conversations In Google Analytics

In E-commerce, Data over gut. Always.

Get your numbers right to cater your users better. You need to track which campaigns have worked for you and double down on those.

Acquisition > All Traffic > Source and Medium > Add secondary dimension as Campaign

You can have a look at this video we made to know how you can track the push notifications campaign and analyze the conversions -

Recommended Tool

Like Check Holmes puts it - With pigheaded discipline and determination, your brand can become the ultimate sales machine. Understand the tool, experiment with different tactics and strategies and zero down on campaigns that work best for retargeting and hit that number you have always dreamt of!