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Three ways your loyalty program can support retargeting activity

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Adwisely is happy to share useful insights from industry experts. This guest post by Mollie Woolnough-Rai (LoyaltyLion) will tell you how a customer loyalty solutions can help recover abandoned carts.

Cart abandonment. Every retailers’ worst nightmare. You can do all the legwork to get a customer to your site and bag a product, but the numbers can still drop off at the checkout. Statistica reported that the cart abandonment rate hit 74.2% globally last year. A high price to pay when you’re a business owner and every purchase counts. To get your customers across the checkout threshold, turn your attention to customer retention strategies that re-engage website visitors after they have left the store.

One of the most effective retention strategies out there is retargeting. Say someone visits your website and adds an item to their cart but doesn’t buy it, you can then use retargeting to show that visitor a promotion that includes the same or similar products. Over time, this will improve the customer’s awareness of your brand and lead them towards a purchase.

In this blog post, we look at three ways you can use a loyalty program to support your retargeting campaigns and how, together, these two strategies can secure the all-important first purchase, and more thereafter. After all, if a customer joins your loyalty program, the chance of them purchasing for a second time is 47% higher.

Incorporating advocacy into your retargeting campaigns

Reviews generate social proof for your brand and enhance your word-of-mouth credibility. Customers who leave reviews are generally your biggest brand advocates, and new customers rely on their experiences when deciding whether to trust you and make a purchase. In fact, nearly 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase. So, encouraging them at every touch point is an opportunity not to be missed.

Use your loyalty program to incentivise and encourage your customers to leave reviews, showing customers the points they could earn, and rewards they could build up, by writing a review. You can then use those reviews within your ad copy to legitimise your store and bring people to your site with a predetermined level of trust.

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Giving shoppers a reason to return

Building customer loyalty with loyalty programs gives shoppers a lot of reasons to return to your store. Points need to be earned and rewards need to be redeemed. Retargeting ads are a clever way to inform your customers about your loyalty program and why they should become a member.

Start by showing website visitors personalized ads that tease them with the points they missed out on when they abandoned their cart. When they see the added reasons to return and complete their purchase, they’ll feel more inclined to pay up.

Retargeting ads can also help you raise awareness of your loyalty program and show those that haven’t joined the amazing benefits yours offers. To encourage sign-ups, show specific ads that demonstrate the simple actions your customers can take to earn rewards. Share how an Instagram follow can earn them points or, how inputting their birthday will give them a special one-off deal on the big day. Make it clear why your customers would benefit from joining. This way, you’re not just encouraging customers to sign up, but also ensuring that they continue to engage long-term.

Once they’re on board, you can re-engage these customers with personalized loyalty emails or one-off rewards through your loyalty program. You can even go further than email marketing and create new retargeting ads that remind your customer of their points further down the line. This allows you to re-engage them when their interest may have faded.

Use data to identify at-risk customers

A loyalty program gives you a unique look into your customer base so you can pinpoint which customers are engaging and purchasing. The data your loyalty program collects will help you distinguish your first-time visitors, non-members and fully engaged customers so you can target your ad spend on the right people.

Remember, your engaged customers already know you and are loyal to your brand so you can afford to spend less on retargeting them. Instead, focus your ad spend on at-risk customers who are close to spending their cash elsewhere. Once you’ve identified them, you can then grab their attention and direct them back to your store with the right engagement activities.

Use cart abandonment to your advantage

All in all, retargeting and consumer loyalty programs work as complementary strategies to attract shoppers back to your store, complete their purchases and shop with you again. A loyalty strategy allows you to offer up incentives for repeat custom and retargeting ads help you remind customers of your loyalty program and its benefits.

Get it right, and you can transform a cart abandonment nightmare into a valuable opportunity.

About the author: Mollie Woolnough-Rai is a content marketing executive at LoyaltyLion, a data-driven loyalty and engagement platform trusted by thousands of ecommerce merchants worldwide. Stores using LoyaltyLion typically generate at least $15 for every $1 spent on the platform.