There are tons of marketing techniques out there, especially in the digital space. Not to mention, there are more businesses now than ever before competing for people’s attention.
Therefore, advertising today requires precision targeting and innovative strategies to create effective campaigns. When it comes to programmatic advertising, it’s all about figuring out which techniques can achieve the results you want — which is an increase in your bottom line.
In this article, we’re going to talk about one of the most common techniques used in the programmatic ad space: Reminder advertising.
Read on to learn more.
What Do We Need Reminder Ads For?
When we want to get specific about advertising — as in the different types and their purposes and which should be used when — three general categories come into play:
- Informative advertising
- Persuasive advertising
- Reminder advertising
As far as strategy goes, their uses and timing within the marketing-sales funnel is pretty self-explanatory. Informative advertising is used to build brand awareness (top of the funnel) and persuasive advertising is used to encourage potential customers to act (middle of the funnel).
Reminder advertising is what we use towards the bottom of the funnel to make those conversions and sales. It’s also used to promote customer loyalty by “reminding” people that your products or services are still available.
What’s more, once your potential customers and clients have narrowed down their choices to you and the other guy, reminder ads can serve as the push that sends them in your direction. This is also what’s referred to as lead nurturing, and it can increase your sales opportunities by 20% — and that’s a lot!
Now that you understand that reminder advertising is something you need, let’s talk more about what it is.
What Exactly Is Reminder Advertising?
By definition, reminder advertising is the act of creating ads for the sole purpose of reminding an audience that a product or service is still available. Being that it’s a reminder, there’s no need to use these types of ads to inform the audience of what you’re offering or why they should buy into it.
This is part of what makes it such an effective marketing technique, as its focus is on customer retention and not initial attraction. It also serves to maintain the top-selling status or rates for established products and services at any stage of their respective life cycles.
Of course, there is some persuading that takes place within a reminder ad. However, this persuasion happens in a different way compared to the tactics used in actual persuasive ads. For example, when you have a potential customer choosing between your products or someone else’s, reminder ads can pop up during the middle of the sales funnel simply to stay in their purview to encourage them to choose yours instead.
Lastly, reminder advertising is at the center of ad retargeting. Retargeting is a type of targeted advertising geared toward existing customers with the purpose of brand name maintenance. It’s especially useful when it comes to abandoned shopping carts as an eye-catching ad or gentle email reminding customers that they “forgot something.”
The Best Reminder Advertising Tactics and Techniques
Reminder advertising crops up in several forms. The key is figuring out which implementation strategy will garner the best results. This usually comes down to choosing a specific digital ad format to complement your strategies.
Here are a few scenarios and the types of reminder advertising they call for:
Reuniting Customer With Abandoned Carts
There are quite a few reasons why customers will click “add to cart” but not “complete purchase.” However, the goal is to get the sale, even after the cart has been abandoned. As mentioned above, ad retargeting is the primary method of fixing this issue, as is an email reminder.
The best ad formats to use for retargeting include:
- Banner ads
- Rich media ad formats
Banner ads serve as an excellent reminder for your products or services, especially when it comes to existing customers and leads. For example, if a customer jumps ship on their order, sometimes all it takes is seeing a large banner ad for the products that were in their cart on another page — with a discount of course.
Rich media ad formats are more detailed but an equally good option as they offer a chance to add more life to the products or services in question. This is because you can make them more interactive, unique, and memorable. This is the type of excitement that really encourages people to feel more confident in making a purchase. They also work well in email newsletters.
Attracting More Users to Your Physical Store
If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you can still use digital reminder advertising to get people through your doors. For example, push advertising is incredibly powerful when it comes to reminding people that you exist since they crop up when a user is within close proximity to your store.
All it takes is a quick and concise message to see results (and some geotargeting) to get your ads delivered to users’ screens once they step into a defined area.
Remarketing to Other Potential Audiences
Users may not convert the first time, but there’s still a good chance they’ll come around with a little encouragement. Realistically speaking, it can take several encounters before these members of your audience decide to take action.
This is where you want to get more creative by experimenting with different ad formats, channels, and even products. You’ll also want to put more energy into mobile ad retargeting as most online sales happen via mobile device. Plus, mobile ads can be delivered in several different enticing formats.
The key is to not give up until you figure out what works.
All of these techniques can be used together or separately, depending on what your goals are. Keep in mind, your messages can be customized when retargeting, so you’ll have the opportunity to find new ways to speak to your audience to see what they respond to and see if those same messages work in the future.
We’ll Leave You With This
Reminder advertising is a tried and true method of brand promotion, maintaining a long product life cycle, and customer retention. Even if the above scenarios don’t apply to you at the moment, it never hurts to remind your customers — existing and potential — that you’re still around.