Retargeting is a lead-nurturing marketing mobile user acquisition strategy that lets you reconnect with users and cultivate long-term customers from existing leads. In today’s uncertain market, in which LTV is harder to predict than ever, retargeting is a key mobile user acquisition strategy to compete. In this blog, we’ll cover the key benefits of mobile retargeting and how your brand can leverage it to create value.

Why your brand needs retargeting 

From greater brand awareness to sales, here are some of the key benefits of mobile retargeting.

It raises your brand awareness efficiently 

Retargeted ads tend to see higher than average engagement rates. This makes sense as a person who’s served a retargeted ad has already engaged with the brand at least once in its multi channel conversion funnel.

Because retargeting focuses on nurturing existing leads, retargeted ad campaigns see higher CTRs and lower CPCs. According to 99 Firms, mobile retargeting campaigns generally see 10x the clickthrough rate and half the cost-per-click (CPC) when compared to standard display ads. According to WordStream, the industry average CPC for retargeting is just $0.66.

The takeaway?

Mobile Retargeting campaigns are the best deal in town. In other words, they drive engagement and leads for cheaper than standard acquisition campaigns. To leverage this cost efficiency in your user acquisition campaigns, consider taking a hybrid approach: acquiring new customers and retargeting them with ads based on their first experience with your brand from the start.

It reduces abandoned carts 

Abandoned shopping carts are one of the most pressing issues retail brands face. According to Swiftly, more than 77% of shopping carts are abandoned globally. This results in considerable lost revenue. With retargeting, brands can reduce their shopping cart abandonment and increase their sales by 20%. Furthermore, some studies show that retargeting can boost conversation rates by up to 161%.

Users can get distracted and abandon their shopping carts for a myriad of reasons. But, there’s a safe bet to be made that regardless of their drop-off, they’ll still be interested in the items they selected after they’ve left them behind. Don’t underestimate the value of mobile retargeting campaigns, which can give a customer a second chance to complete the purchase of something they may have forgotten they really wanted or needed.

It drives more sales

Retargeting ads for your brand keeps it top of mind for customers and increases the likelihood of a sale when a customer is ready to make a purchase. According to Upstream, retargeting a consumer who has previously interacted with a brand on mobile is 10x more likely to result in a positive engagement or a sale compared to a first time ad. In fact, same-day customer retargeting has been known to drive a 100x lift in sales.

Furthermore, data from Swiftly estimates that the 17.5% of apps that serve retargeted ads see an average 25% conversion rate. Furthermore, mobile retargeting increases CTRs by 48% and the number of paying customers a brand has by 50%.

What do these stats amount to overall?

Of all the app conversions generated globally, an estimated 35% are driven by retargeting.

Build retention and long-term brand loyalty

Mobile retargeting campaigns build retention — especially when combined with a loyalty program. Loyalty members are more likely to try new products, engage with ads and make purchases when prompted by a retargeted ad. In fact, more than half of customers (58%) who belong to a brand’s loyalty program buy from that brand at least monthly. This type of routine engagement turns one-time purchasers into long-term customers as users get into the habit of browsing a brand’s app and products.

How to create value with retargeted ads

Based on this data, the benefits of retargeting are clear but it takes technology, data and mobile user acquisition strategy to actually harness these benefits. Here are some tips to help you create value with retargeted ads.

Measure incremental value

When running mobile retargeting campaigns, it’s important to remember that some percentage of the people who view your ads would complete a purchase anyway. To isolate just unique conversions and understand the value of your campaigns, it’s important to incrementally test them. The incrementality of a mobile retargeting campaign measures the additive lift that the spend invested in re-engaging users contributed to your overall goal. It does this by creating a holdout or control group. While there are many incremental lift methodologies you can use, we recommend the ghost bid methodology.

For more information on how to run a successful incremental lift test, read our blog post here.

Personalization 

Personalization can radically enhance your mobile retargeting campaigns by speaking to a user’s experience in the moment they engage with your brand. You can personalize your ads to show a user a product based on their in-app behavior. You can also personalize your ads to show items they’ve abandoned in their shopping cart.

The first step to successful personalization is audience segmentation. Create buyer personas that include privacy-compliant data about users and where they are in your conversion funnel. Have they spent a certain amount of time in your app or reached a certain level of your game that suggests they’re likely to make a purchase? Segment these users and personalize ads based on their stage of engagement to enhance your conversion rate.

Timing 

Related to personalization, you should consider the best frequency and times to serve ads to your users. You should start retargeting ads to users from their first experience with your brand but don’t overdo it with an annoying influx of ads. Create buyer personas to understand the times of week and day that your best customers are engaged. Use frequency caps to keep from showing too many ads and driving customers away.

Quality creatives

With fewer data targeting levers at advertisers’ disposal to enhance the performance of their mobile retargeting campaigns, the value of quality creatives has grown immensely. Make sure to rotate your creatives between seasonal and evergreen designs to avoid ad fatigue. Since mobile screens are much smaller than other forms of media, ads can have more impact for better or for worse. In other words, your audience can tire of your ad creatives much quicker on mobile devices. To confront this, create different variations of each ad and rotate them liberally so that they’re less repetitive to your audience.

Takeaways

Retargeting is a lead-nurturing marketing mobile user acquisition strategy that lets you reconnect with users and cultivate long-term customers from existing leads. Some of the key benefits of mobile retargeting campaigns include:

  • Efficient brand awareness
  • Less shopping cart abandonment
  • Sales
  • Retention and brand awareness

To leverage these benefits, marketers should optimize the timing of their ads using personalization, leverage a variety of high quality creatives and use incrementality testing.

Create value with retargeting with YouAppi

Mobile retargeting with ReAppi, YouAppi’s programmatic retargeting platform. Create buyer personas, segment your ads, and test for incremental value to drive more sales, retention and LTV. Schedule a meeting with our team to get started.