IN-DEPTH: Turning every engagement with your prospects into an opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell

Published: 11 Feb 2011

IN-DEPTH: Turning every engagement with your prospects into an opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell

By Ritesh Gupta

Retargeting allows companies to find their previous website visitors across the Internet and display relevant banners to drive them back to a website to complete their transaction.

As a specialist entity in pay per click solution in retargeting, Criteo believes in the context of retargeting – personalisation, at the individual level, is the most pronounced trend for late 2010 and into 2011, across the board and even more specifically in the travel industry.

Jim Price, VP Sales - Travel Industry, Criteo, says, “The growing awareness that solutions exist in the marketplace that can take the rich data captured on the page (e.g. specific products, dates of travel) and turn those in to truly personalised 1:1 marketing messages.” He added, “Driving this trend is a desire to extend SEM marketing dollars to increase conversions in an efficient and performance-based method.”

The company’s technology enables online e-commerce sites to re-engage with potential customers who have left their website via dynamic banners containing the most relevant product specific recommendations that are generated in real-time for each individual.

Price spoke to EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta about personalised retargeting. Excerpts:

What do you think the travel industry should focus on as far as personalised retargeting is concerned? What do you recommend to the travel sector in terms of do’s and don’t’s?

Jim Price:

Top 3 “do’s”:

1. Personalise – experts and third party sources such as comScore agree that there is no more effective way to generate traffic to your site that will convert to sales. Non-personalised targeting focused on creating “groups” of users based on demographics, geographics, or promotion types are no longer “best in breed” – personalised is today’s 1 : 1 marketing.
2. Cross-sell – turn every engagement with your prospects into an opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell (think: air to hotel, hotel to vacation package, cruise to travel insurance).
3. Demand scale – although in the past retargeting was considered a niche tactics, today 1:1 personalised retargeting can and should scale to a material portion of your incremental revenue and therefore justify increased marketing spend. But not all retargeting solutions are created equal in this regard – find a solution that can find 80% of your audience enough times on enough different publishers to make your campaign impactful.

Top 3 “don’ts”:

1. Don’t settle for a small campaign – if you have 1MM UV’s to your site every month you should be generating on average over 70K leads and 1400 orders per month – this is material scale.
2. Don’t focus only on “sales” or “promotions” – retargeting can help with these efforts but needs to be thought of in the context of an always-on, day-in, day-out traffic generating source.
3. Don’t try to build this yourself – you have good options in the marketplace that can offer a proven full-service solution; media purchasing, ad creation, ad serving, recommendation engine and analytics in one straight-forward solution. Find that trusted partner (rather than piecing together a fragmented solution) and allow them to do what they do best allowing you to focus on what you do best.

Retargeting (also known as remarketing) allows you to find your previous website visitors across the Internet and display relevant banners to drive them back (retarget) to your website to complete their transaction. How do you think the travel industry has focused on bringing ready-to-buy users back to their websites?

Jim Price:

First, Retargeting and Remarketing are used in the marketplace interchangeably - Google prefers the term remarketing. Speaking of Google leads me to my answer. Every site has a portion of organic (un-paid) visits which are understandably greatly valued. A “best-in-breed” site may have up to 30% of its visitors returning in this fashion. However, most sites see much lower ratios of direct-navigation and SEO visits.

Consequently, a larger portion of visitors either return to sites in the way they came originally (SEM) or they don’t return at all having been lured away in the SEM and affiliate channels to your competitors. Retargeting, by virtue of its closed-loop nature (your valued visitors are re-engaged by seeing your personalised ads) offers a very effective and economic tactic for bringing traffic back to your site to convert.

How do you assess the significance of retargeting as part of a company’s customer acquisition and conversion strategy? How should one approach the same?

Jim Price:

A successful retargeting campaign can increase your online sales by 5-15%. This is incremental and comes to you by virtue of a higher propensity to buy (converting leads to sales/bookings/other actions) and higher average order values (personalised cross-sell and up-sell offers). Merchants that implement retargeting claim that almost 50% of their sales from retargeting are new customers.

Can you elaborate on any example of your recent campaign for a top travel company? How does it show the efficacy of retargeting?

Jim Price:

Let me answer this way – across the dozens of travel campaigns that are running today with Criteo we see; 5-15% increases in online sales, CTR on ads at 0.5-0.7% (almost 10x the industry average), conversions to sales increases of 70-150%, 98% renewal rates and the majority moving to “uncapped” campaigns.

Criteo says it has revolutionised retargeting with the most sophisticated form of dynamic personalised retargeting. Can you elaborate on the same?

Jim Price:

The “revolution” is the sophistication and elegance that Criteo developed with regard to personalisation. Criteo has invested over 5 years and a majority of its workforce in R&D in order to develop the algorithms, buying processes, dynamic creative and automated optimisation tools to make personalised retargeting work accurately and at scale, which is not easily replicated. Criteo offers a total solution that will scale while meeting your COS/ROI objectives in the most straight-forward and transparent way - charging only for the actual clicks that generate leads (CPC) and never demanding any post-view attribution.

What according to you is key to capturing lost prospects? How should one retarget them with unique personalised banner ads featuring product-level recommendations based on their browsing history on a particular website?

Jim Price:

The key is “right product, at the right time, at the right place”. You know what product (“right product”) your prospect is interested in because you have cookied that inquiry on their initial visit. You can then also offer recommendations of other products based on other similar inquires. The “right time” is critical – 95+% of all visits abandon without purchase but not entirely because they don’t want your product – they just don’t want it right now or are comparing to others. This is where scale and reach intersect – how many times can your retargeting partner find that prospect within their purchase window? “Right place” – premium publishers in high visibility ad spots will make a huge difference.

As far as efficiency and RoI is concerned, how does retargeting ensure that the cost-click conversion rates are significantly higher than other types of advertising?

Jim Price:

This goes back to the 3 “Rights” – product, time and place. Don’t settle for a retargeting campaign that simply repurposes static, or even segmented, creative running a campaign for 30 days or longer across a handful of networks or exchanges at a set CPM.

In 2011 you have retargeting options that can offer real 1:1 marketing by creating dynamic personalised ads showing products that were actually viewed. In addition, the technology exists today to bid in real-time for each specific impression across networks, exchanges and direct publishing venues. Analysis of the campaign in real-time continually to optimising all of those elements is key to ensuring the most effective and efficient conversion rates. Implementing all of these pieces – dynamic creative, real-time bidding and continuous optimisation constitutes today’s best-in-class” solution and will be the standard going forward.