Remarketing remains an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. Your success can vary depending on what strategies you employ when remarketing. Many websites employ a simple remarketing strategy that tries to reach everyone who has visited their site. This can work, but if you're trying this, and you're not getting desirable results, you might look at alternate strategies.

Remarketing to Past Customers

Remarketing to your past customers will probably be your most profitable campaign(s). The reason is because they've already bought from you, they're aware of the level of service and/or product that you provide. They know that they can trust you (and you won't steal their money), and that you'll give them what they expect (or better). Obviously, you can also market your products to existing customers via email (which you should do), but often times people may not read your email so remarketing with online ads is another way to remind them to purchase from you.Since it will be cheaper to lure a past buyer back than attracting a new customer (who may take multiple visits/pitches before they buy), you can afford to discount a little more. In other words, you can give them a special offer that you might not offer to new visitors.Facebook makes it easy to target your customers assuming you have their email addresses. To do this, create a Custom Audience and specify your customer's email addresses. The ads will then only be shown to these people, and you can pay per click (so if no one clicks on your ads, there's no cost to you).Remarkety, which is free if you have less than 10,000 customers, provides a service that emails customers based on their actions to keep them engaged with your site and reminding them you're out there. Here are some examples:

• Request Feedback (product, first purchase shopping experience, cancelled orders)
• Emails to Inactive Customers (who haven't bought after a certain time period)
• Offer Rewards to your Best Customers

Recouping Abandoned Carts

Often times something happens in the buying process that prevents a potential customer from completing a purchase. Often times, the buyer gets cold feet and may want to think about the purchase more. If someone started the checkout process, but didn't complete payment you know that there was a good level of interest in what you were selling - a level that is higher than most people who visited your site, but didn't start to checkout. Therefore, segmenting these website visitors and remarketing to them is likely to return a higher return on investment (ROI) than targeting everyone that went to your site.Determine who those people are who abandoned their shopping carts can be tricky. Luckily, there are some software companies that help you do just that - determine who abandoned their cart and remarket to them via email. AbandonAid, Remarkety and Rejoiner are two services that do this. If one of these sound useful for you, don't forget to check if they are compatible with your shopping cart before making the purchase.Here's a video from AbandonAid:

Target Specific Terms

When you do remarketing through Google, you can choose to market to your customers only when they do certain searches. Google's Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) functionality offers another way to segment your remarketing list to the highest ROI opportunities.For example, let's say you're a shaving store and you sell razors and razor blades. Typically you'd prefer to sell razor blades over razors, because they have higher margins. In that case, you can set-up a remarketing list in Google, and then create a AdWords campaign that uses this, With that campaign, you'd also specify keywords relating to "razor blades". Now, the ads will only show when a past site visitor also happens to be looking for razor blades. This helps ensure that the person is not shown the ad all of the time, but only if they are still actively looking for your product/service.Remarketing can be very simple (show your ads to everyone who's visited your site) or complex (segmenting only certain visitors to see your ads). Segmentation can lead to a higher ROI, but there's also a chance that you make the amount of people eligible to see your ads so small that you lose out on some sales (by not showing the remarketing ads to some people who would've otherwise seen it).[contentblock id=1 img=html.png]