27
2015
Jul

Remarketing Drip Campaigns

Remarketing Drip CampaignRemarketing has a strong ROI simply because it’s the highest quality reach. The remarketing audience has been to your website and visited specific pages demonstrating their interest in what you have to say. Drip campaigns have some of the best results in the industry because of the strength in frequency. Since reach and frequency are the gold standards of marketing delivery, a strategy that excels in both of these can make magic happen. Let’s explore how this can be done.

Remarketing campaigns are targeted based on an audience established by the execution of a JavaScript snippet on your pages. This means that audiences are people who have already been exposed to your business. In simple terms you are continuing the conversation and the goal is to bring them back again and again until you get your full marketing message across to them.

Drip campaigns deliver a series of messages over the course of time and are most common in email but conceptually can be applied to display advertising. What you do is plan a series of message (ads) based on either wants/needs or objections/answers. The wants are messages that might bring the audience to action and are typically strong product advantages. The objections and answers are common barriers that your offer runs through on the way to a sales transaction. Almost every sales rep knows the common barriers and they are trained carefully on the answers to the objection. In both cases the goal is to design an advertising campaign that communicates a series of these ads.

The challenge here is that the ads need to be delivered in sequence and the default audience configurations are not designed for this. In a typical remarketing campaign, the audiences are based on a zero to x number of days selection. What we need is a range of days. A common drip campaign would be one ad set for 0-30 days, followed by a different ad for 31-60 days, followed by another at 61-90 days. To get the control you need, start with standard audiences based on 30, 60, 90 and all days then put them in the ad groups like this:

0-30 30 day audience
31-60 60 day audience minus the 30 day audience
61-90 90 day audience minus the 60 day audience
91+ The All-time All Visitor audience minus the 90 day audience

The effect of this configuration is a range of days within the audience although there are some odd things that will happen to a few people in the audience. Because the audience is based on a cookie setting, a person revisiting the site will add themselves back to the 30 day audience restarting the drip campaign. The true definition here for the 60 day group is 60 days since last visit.

As an example from our business, we do PPC Management, Social Media, Website Design, and Image Ads so we want to have visitors to our site learn that we do these things. Within the limits of an image ad, the best we could expect would be to get one of these points across in each ad. So in the first 30 days we develop the messaging for PPC, then from 31-60 days we focus on social media, followed at 61-90 days with website design, and lastly we do a branding ad. The same sort of process could apply to a product that had several sales benefits much like shifting from less filling – tastes great (think Miller Beer).

This approach does result in some additional work especially on the design side because you need different ads for each of the day ranges. In the simple example here we would need 4 sets of creative for each of the ad groups.