Use Cases
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Is your SaaS company dragging its heels on launching a retargeting campaign?
With retargeted display ads alone boosting the chances of a website conversion by 70%, if you’re not already retargeting, your business is leaving money on the table.
The strategy behind retargeting is simple. A potential customer visits your site and leaves without buying, but while they’re there you place a tracker on them. Using this, you’re able to retarget them across a bunch of platforms like social media and Google to entice them back to your site.
Once SaaS companies figure out how to harness retargeting as a marketing tool, it can be one of the most successful ways to nurture and convert prospects into paying customers.
Let’s dive into what retargeting is, and how you can use it to supercharge conversions for your own SaaS business.
The Nuts and Bolts of Retargeting
Retargeting is a marketing model that resurfaces your product around the internet after someone has visited your website.
By using retargeting, businesses give themselves a chance to nurture and entice a potential customer back to their website to buy their product.
Using retargeting, businesses can:
- Hunt customers in more places. A sales team can’t be everywhere. With retargeting, a company’s product offering quietly follows potential customers and pops up around the internet to keep it at the top of their mind.
- Cast wider nets. Retargeting is scalable. Companies can build and grow campaigns into wider nets depending on their marketing objectives.
- Optimize their sales funnels. An optimized sales funnel is a successful one. By targeting potential customers with a focused message or product based on their intent on your website, you can increase your engagement and conversions.
There are two main networks companies typically use to launch their retargeting efforts: The Google Display Network (GDN), and Facebook, and for good reason. The GDN reaches 90% of the world’s internet users (and reaches 65% of them daily), and Facebook now has more than 1.4 billion users. And over a billion of them used the social media platform today.
That’s a lot of potential customers. However, retargeting can be used across almost every network on the internet.
To get the most out of retargeting customers, companies need to:
- Build a strategy. Think about the gaps you need to fill in your customer’s journey and what you can do to lead them down your sales funnel.
- Make retargeting part of their marketing game. Who are the people you want to retarget? Are you just looking to convert new website visitors? Or do you want to nurture current customers, too?
- Make it a recurring cycle. Retargeting works if it’s regular. You need to get comfortable with retargeting and set it up as an automation cycle.
Let’s look at a company who built a solid plan and managed to crush their retargeting efforts.
What a Successful Retargeting Campaign Looks Like
When B2B/SaaS company Lumension had their marketing budget slashed by 30%, they knew they had to get creative to keep their sales funnel full.
So, they focused on supercharging their retargeting effort. The company used its historical data to look at their target persona and how they were searching for product solutions similar to Lumension.
From there, the team wanted to figure out how to use the information they already had on prospects who had converted within the past five months to build a custom campaign. One that would drive personalized retargeting to capture the other prospects within the account.
They came up with five key retargeting strategies to focus on:
- Instant nurturing
- Lead retargeting
- Influencers
- Behavioral intent lookalikes
- Integrated online and offline event marketing and retargeting
The results? They were incredible.
The company was able to:
- Increase their homepage views by 865%
- Increase its total advertising impressions (leads) by 81%
- Increase its total website traffic by 10%
Ed Brice, Lumension’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, said the company was able to generate more leads with fewer resources because of their retargeting efforts. He said businesses should think about retargeting strategically, as Lumension found success through their strategy of five key pillars.
“I always tend to try to look at the emerging trends or best practices, whether that’s in the consumer side coming over to the B2B side, or someone in B2B has done something very interesting,” he said.
Want to build your own SaaS retargeting machine? Let’s dive into 4 ways you can use it to boost your website traffic and increase your conversions on Facebook.
Strategy #1: Reach Back Out to Website Visitors
Let’s start simple.
The easiest way to get a retargeting campaign off the ground is to remarket to everyone who visits your website.
By retargeting all your previous website visitors, you can stay at the top of their minds and entice them back to your site. The reason this strategy works, even in its simplest form, is because, for SaaS companies—brand awareness is everything.
For example, Ahrefs nurture their customers by promoting valuable content to retargeted visitors. CMO and Product advisor at Ahrefs, Tim Soulo, said the company doesn’t make Facebook Ads that lead people directly to their products. “We only promote our content on Facebook, because we want to give value first and people are then much more likely to sign up,” he said.
So, how do you get Facebook ads like this to pop up in your potential customer’s feed in the first place? First off, you need to have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website.
Once you’ve installed the pixel, head to your Facebook Business Manager to build your ad. Here, you can create a custom audience and tell Facebook who you want your ad to show to. You can either show an ad that will retarget any potential customer who visits your site or you can set up a campaign that will only retarget potential customers who visited specific pages, like pricing.
By doing this, you can offer discounted offers and codes to potential customers who visited your pricing page but didn’t quite convert.
Strategy #2: Connect with Free Trial Users Who Didn’t Convert
Every SaaS company knows free trials are a crucial part of their marketing stack to convert new customers.
But if you’re asking for a credit card upfront, you might be killing your chances of converting them. A study by Totango found asking for credit card details cuts the number of free trial users who turn into paying customers in half. According to ConversionXL, there are a bunch of reasons why potential prospects don’t convert after a free trial:
- They don’t understand how to use the product
- They have a false impression of what the product actually does
- They aren’t brought into the product quickly enough
- They don’t understand the value of the product
Using retargeting, you can turn all of this around through nurturing and supporting the prospect during their trial and encouraging them to convert by:
- Reminding them that their free trial is about to end
- Offer them a limited-time discount if they sign up to your product before their trial ends
- Offer an extension on their trial if they aren’t sure if the product is a good fit yet
By offering a time-sensitive discount, the potential customer that’s being retargeted will be more likely to think about signing up so they don’t miss out.
Strategy #3: Target Your Gated Content Downloaders
It’s frustrating when your gated content like e-books or white papers receive a ton of traffic, but hardly any of it converts into paying customers.
But the good news is, you can use the information a prospect hands over to access your gated content to retarget them. This prospect is what we call a MOFU lead: they’re in the middle of your sales funnel. They’re engaging with your content, but they’re not quite ready to buy.
These prospects need to be nurtured with engaging, value-added content, and an enticing offer to convert them into a paying customer. You could retarget them with ads that offer either a free trial or a discount off of your regular product subscription. This makes it easier for the potential prospect to recognize your brand, and it creates trust in your offer.
Strategy #4: Nurture Your Current Customers
The secret sauce to succeeding in the SaaS world? Customer retention.
Looking after your current customers makes sense. The median SaaS business loses about 10% of its revenue to churn each year, and a report by McKinsey found SaaS businesses with a monthly churn rate of over 2% is a warning sign that the company is in trouble.
One of the best ways to avoid churn is through nurturing, and you can use retargeting as a customer retention strategy.
If you’ve just uploaded a valuable piece of content to your blog: retarget your customers so they know about it.
If you’ve just added a new feature that’s going to make your current customer’s lives easier: retarget them and let them know.
If you’ve just won a SaaS award: make sure your customers know about it.
Retargeting is All About Nurturing and Converting
If you’re not already leveraging and retargeting your website visitors, your SaaS business is missing out on a big chunk of the revenue pie.
SaaS is made for retargeting. A lot of people who land on your website have already thought about your product as a solution to their problem, but they just need a little nudge to become a paying customer. And that’s what makes retargeting perfect.
You can use it to cast a wide net for every website visitor, or hyper-target visitors through time-sensitive discount offers and content funnels.
Get your retargeting game on point today, and start boosting your conversions through nurturing.
