If Robin Hood was an internet marketer, he'd be splitting arrows with his retargeting campaigns...

If Robin Hood was an internet marketer, he’d be splitting arrows with his retargeting campaigns…

Hey there Rainmaker, if you APPLY what I’m about to teach you, it could make you a ton of money…

I’m writing this with the hope that you will turn into a case study for me.  So if you do apply this and get results worth sharing, please let me know.

And before I dive in…  This isn’t totally original to me.  I may be the first to explain it in this way, but this is based on what the best marketers out there are already doing online.  This is your chance to level the playing field.

My own selfish reason for sharing is that as I start writing this post, this formula is all in my head.  By the time I’m done, it will be down on paper.  You get to be the beneficiary of that process — lucky you!

Retargeting…  What is it?  And how can it make you more profits?

Put very simply, retargeting (sometimes mistakenly called remarketing, which is a different thing) is the ability to put more advertising in front of someone who has already visited your website.

Examples:

Recently I was looking at a mix of nonprofits, including the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.  Now, when I log into Facebook, I see ads for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in the sidebar.

I’ve also seen Amazon product ads show up all over the internet, for products I was just browsing on Amazon.

If you want to see it on a massive scale, visit the AdRoll website, who offers a platform for retargeting.  They definitely drink their own Kool-Aid — visit their site once and you’ll see their ads everywhere for weeks.

I’ve had this happen over and over again.  And you probably have, too.

We visit a site of interest to us, maybe because we saw an ad, maybe because it showed up in the search results, or maybe because we were linked to it from somewhere else.

When suddenly, almost inexplicably, the ads for this particular site (and often, for the particular product we were viewing) seem to follow us everywhere we go.  (Sometimes with exclusive limited-time offers, too!)

This is intentional, and a huge development in online marketing in the last few years.

And here’s what you need to know about it…

Retargeting is one of the most profitable forms of online advertising there is

This should come as no surprise.

It’s well-known that it’s easier to sell to someone who already knows, likes, and trusts you than it is to sell to a cold audience.

Someone who has visited your website in the past at least knows of you, and may even like and trust you already.

Even if they’ve only ever visited your site once, they know you better than someone who has never heard of you.

This makes retargeting one of the best-ROI forms of advertising available to internet advertisers today.

And if nothing else, you should pursue retargeting to take advantage of this.

Google AdWords offers this (they call it remarketing), as does Facebook, and third-party platforms like AdRoll give you access to a large number of networks all at once.

None of this is new, or particularly revolutionary.

What I’m about to show you is how to take retargeting to the next level…

You see, getting first-time visitors to your website is expensive — either in time or money investment.

And traditionally, when someone visited your website for the first time, there were one of three options…

— The vast majority of first-time visitors would leave your site, perhaps never to be seen again.

— Some visitors would opt-in to your email list, so you could communicate with them on an ongoing basis.

— And a very small percentage of first-time visitors would buy something from you.

And if you got good at conversions — getting the email opt-in and the first sale — you could grow a very profitable internet business.

But you still dealt with a huge portion of your visitors — sometimes 95% or more! — that would leave you, never to return again.  Which meant that as much as 95% of your expense to get new visitors to your site was going down the drain.

Retargeting is the secret to converting the other 95%

Now here’s where this gets really exciting.

When you combine paid traffic with retargeting, you have a 1-2 punch ROI equation that can rapidly accelerate your business.

So, let’s say everything else is equal.  You’ve been paying for search engine traffic, and 95% of visitors have been leaving without buying, and without signing up for your email list.

With retargeting, you can spend the next week (or whatever time period you define) running a “targeted ubiquity” campaign on those folks who didn’t sign up for your emails, and who didn’t buy.

What’s that?  Well, it’s targeted because you’re only advertising to people who’ve been to your site before.  And it’s ubiquitous because with retargeting you can show up everywhere.

For these folks, your goal over the next week is to get as many conversions as possible.

Maybe that’s converting to an email sign-up.  Maybe it’s converting to a first-time paying customer.  The goal is to bring them back to your site and get them to take action.

Whatever your goal, here’s what you know.  These folks came to your site in the first place because they had at least some passing interest in what you offered.  Even if 95 out of 100 left without doing anything, there’s still probably between 5 and 25 (or more!) out of that original 100 who just needed a little extra push.  Retargeting is that push.

Now let’s take this up a notch…

Most folks who do retargeting are doing this kind of “lost visitor recovery” advertising.  They’re looking to reduce advertising waste by bringing back the folks who were on the fence before.

And this is great.

But what if you changed your priorities here?  What if instead of focusing on retargeting as being the second chance, you actually made it your goal to wait until step two to convert?

Here’s what you need to know.  There are a lot of advertising networks that tend to frown on more powerful promises in your marketing.  Or that frown on marketing altogether — so-called “content networks” that exist to promote content, not advertising.

What if you were to set up that retargeting campaign so that it existed to drive people into your offers — whether for your email list, or your front-end products…  And focused all your front-end advertising exclusively on getting the visitor to your site in the first place (with no goal of conversion)?

In this case, you could use these content networks to drive the first click through to your website, to compelling, interesting articles that do nothing more than plant a seed of credibility in the visitor’s mind.

Then, using retargeting, you could start to show ads all across the internet, bringing those same visitors back to a conversion-focused page on your site.

Why is this so powerful?  In short, because content networks have access to a ton of traffic you don’t get access to with straight offers.

It doesn’t stop here, though…

You can feed all sorts of paid traffic into this second-step retargeting conversion system.

For example, in some markets, email list rentals are still thriving.  I’m actually thinking back to an email list rental I did a couple months ago where this could have been very beneficial.  With no retargeting, we were able to break even.

With retargeting, it’s quite possible we could have brought a large number of the visitors who didn’t convert back.  Maybe we could have turned those into direct conversions.  Maybe into email opt-ins, that would convert later.  Maybe we could rotate ads with both objectives.

(In this particular case, we would have paid a premium to send the visitors to an email opt-in page, but perhaps a retargeting campaign could start sending visitors back to an opt-in page the minute they leave your site.)

Retargeing could totally revolutionize your ROI on email marketing.

SEO content can work the same way.

Most pages that are optimized for SEO don’t necessarily make great conversion pages.  That is, SEO is meant to attract traffic, but not necessarily convert it.

By adding retargeting to the mix, you can intentionally reclaim some of your free traffic, and direct it to whatever conversion-oriented page on your website you’d like.

Here’s your biggest takeaway…

Retargeting can be used to make any traffic source more profitable.

And it gives you the opportunity to profitably tap traffic sources (like content networks) you might not otherwise be able to access, and make a profit doing so.

If you want to maximize the profit and ROI opportunity in retargeting, you should intentionally develop your retargeting program to function as the second step of a two step retargeting conversion system.

Step one is to get affordable and qualified traffic, wherever you can buy it.  While it’d be nice to make step one profitable, don’t limit yourself on that premise.  While other competitors HAVE TO make step one profitable because they don’t use sophisticated retargeting, you can reach a bigger audience because you can afford to lose a few pennies here knowing you’ll make them up and then some on the next step.

Step two is to use retargeting to bring that traffic back to specific high-conversion pages on your website, in order to monetize it and maximize ROI and profits.

I don’t expect many of my readers to apply this…

It’s the nature of the advice business, and of free advice in particular.  Even if you’re inspired by this, you’re not likely to apply it.

But if you’re already actively advertising your products online, and you add this, you stand the chance of dramatically increasing profits.  Even on the hard-to-make-profitable customer acquisition process.

If you are the 1-in-100 or maybe even 1-in-1000 who will apply this, and you get great results, remember to let me know.  I’d love to share in your success, and perhaps use you as a case study on this going forward.

Yours for bigger breakthroughs,

Roy Furr

Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets