Kenyan brands can rope in more clients via online remarketing

Kenyan brands stand to increase their online consumer conversion rate by 70 per cent through embracing remarketing to target customers who visited their websites but failed to make a transaction, recent research has found.

“Remarketing advertisements give brands the enviable power to directly target promotional campaigns to reach interested consumers. It places a small code on consumers’ devices who have bounced from pages on their website, allowing them to keep persuading the customers to return and finish their purchase,” reports a study on the Impact of Retargeting Advertisements by online marketing platform, Wishpond.

“A website visitor who has been retargeted with a display advertisement is 70 per cent more likely to convert into a customer for that particular brand and remarketed advertisements bring back 26 per cent of lost consumers to finalise a sale.”

Following from the technical set-up, remarketing creates a way for brands to engage with consumers and research on the type of products they are interested in so as to increase purchases and retain existing customers.

“Remarketing is about keeping a conversation going with existing customers across channels, consumers that brands have had contact with before and can identify. It is the easiest entry point for brands and consumers to engage — low-hanging fruit for customer acquisition — but remarketing is a much broader concept that focuses on retention,” said Kirthi Kalyanam, director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University in an interview with AdExchanger, a news and views on data-driven digital advertising website.

Targeted areas

An example of a brand that employed this strategy successfully is Japanese car manufacturer, Mazda. In a bid to increase the number of test drives in its stores in the UK, it employed remarketing so as to target customers in certain geographical areas.

“Mazda wanted to drive people to local stores for test drives, it knew it needed to target specific locations and not in areas that it did not have a store nearby as this would have decreased its engagement rate,” according a report on a case study conducted by digital marketing firm, PrMediaOnline, on How Brands Use Remarketing to Increase Their Order Value and ROI.

“The car firm researched what geographical areas would lead to the most engagement and conversions and specifically targeted those areas. Having a more researched and targeted approach will lead to a higher conversion rate and ROI rather than placing advertisements in front of as many consumers as possible.” The approach resulted in 53 per cent higher conversion rate, 98 per cent higher value of sales from customers, and 20 per cent engagement rate from their remarketing advertisements.

The remarketing campaign was a success because it managed to dynamically insert the model of car the consumer was interested in into its advertisements, leading to increased click-through rates and booked test drives, rather than using a generic advertisement.

However, despite the success that remarketing can lead to, the multiple advertisements stalking consumers online can be overwhelming to the extent that they find measures to prevent the remarketing advertisements from appearing on their online social media platforms.

“Remarketed advertisements are connected to a growing backlash from consumers who do not want to be overwhelmed with advertising. This has led to an increasing number of them downloading advertisement blockers — that is a clear sign of dissatisfaction,” said Mr Kirthi Kalyanam.

“The bigger issue of remarketing for consumers is that they can be annoying, wasteful and invasive.

‘‘There is an argument to be made against advertising all the time. Frequency capping and choosing the right time is critical for brands who want to find success in remarketed advertisements.”
- African Laughter