Marketing gurus have often emphasized the importance of a business’ current and past customers. It has been proved that retaining customers is as important, if not more imporant as gaining new ones. Retaining customers takes less effort and investment than attracting new ones. This holds true for online marketing as well.
Internet marketing can prove to be very costly at times, squeezing the profit margins of businesses. The best way to boost your sales and consequently the profits is by targeting current and past customers. These customers are more likely to purchase your product as they have already shown their preference for your brand and product in the past. These potential customers are comfortable with online purchase as well as your website, which leads to higher possibility of repurchase by this customer segment.
There are a number of strategies that you can employ specifically for retargeting past customers or cross selling to current customers. Here are two very useful strategies.
Banner ads can be effectively used to retarget your customers. Try to show relevant banner ads to this customer segment and not just the ones you use for your new prospects. You can employ some advanced attribution tracking techniques to find out the effectiveness of the campaign.
Email marketing is another very useful strategy for retargeting past and current customers. Based on the life cycle of your product, you can time your email reminders to your customers industry specific needs.
Though these strategies may not be applicable for all products sold online, they can come in handy for most of them.