Most visitors to come, view one or a few pages, and go away. These website visitors are anonymous – their identities are unknown. For a business-to-business website, it is common for <1% of website visitors to fill out a form and reach out. 3% would be considered a good conversion rate. In the best case, 97% of your visitors remain unknown.
Digital Advertising Retargeting
Retargeting allows you to advertise to these people after they leave your website. By putting tracking code on your website, digital advertising services will display your ads as people venture across the internet and social media services.
Retargeting options include the Google Display Network, LinkedIn Insight, and Facebook.
Retargeting on the Google Display Network can be are inexpensive to run. While it is normal to pay $2 – $4 per click, sometimes much more, for a Google search ad, clicks from a display ad are often around $0.70 per click.
Note: Retargeting is often used interchangeably with remarketing. Google even calls its retargeting service Remarketing. Technically, retargeting refers to advertising with people that have come to your website, while remarketing is marketing to a customer to get them to buy again or upsell them.
While click rates on display ads are low, they do drive people back to your website. These people are visiting your website for at least the second time.
Retargeting with Direct Mail
Your web browser sends data to the webserver when you visit a website. Included in this data is the IP address of your computer or local network. Data service companies have mapped IP addresses to the physical address where your computer is located. When the physical address is a single-family home, you have the mailing address of the website visitor.
There are several services that will automatically send direct mail to website visitors that view particular pages and have a residential mailing address. These services typically send the direct mail with 48 hours of the website visit, ensuring first-class mail gets delivered within five days. Two such services are Pebblepost Retargeting, and El Toro IP Targeting.
El Toro also offers its IP Targeting to direct mail providers so they can provide the service to their clients. They also have a listing of their direct mail partners on their website to refer business.
DirectMail2.0 is another company that offers IP retargeting to direct mail providers with their LEADMatch service.
Opportunities for Direct Mail Providers
Digital marketers love retargeting. The clicks are inexpensive and the people it drives to the website have been there before. Even when people don’t click, the ads can help the brand stay top-of-mind, at no cost. But many, if not most, people have become immune to display ads and ignore them. Unlike search ads, where someone is actively looking for information, display ads are shown when a person is not thinking about your service.
Since retargeting is a proven tactic, you may find digital marketers very receptive to adding direct mail retargeting into their marketing programs. It provides a physical touch that will be in hand when the prospect is interested in learning more about your service.
