Remarketing for SaaS: What You’re Doing Wrong

Remarketing to people who have visited your SaaS website is such a low hanging fruit – it keeps your brand top-of-mind and entices visitors to come back for more.

When you set it up, you’d get past website visitors seeing your ads while they are browsing the web, watching YouTube videos, or reading news sites, for example.

If you are wondering how your remarketing campaigns stack up, ask your marketing team these questions:

• How many active remarketing audiences are there?
• How big are the audiences?
• How are these audiences segmented?
• What different ad messages, creatives, and landing pages are we using to communicate with people in each segment?
• Are we measuring conversion rates within each audience segment?

Segment Your Remarketing Audiences Carefully

The problem with remarketing is the one-size-fits-all approach.

Many SaaS marketers remarket to audiences with complete disregard of how these people have interacted with their website and what stage in their buyer journey they are.

How many times have you read a blog post on a company’s site – with zero purchase intent – and have been followed around the internet with an ad that invites you to book a demo? It’s quite unreasonable to expect the same ad copy to convert people who’ve visited a single blog post, as well as people who’ve visited the homepage, a feature page, read a case study, and checked out your pricing page.

Another example of poor remarketing is the approach of bringing users back to your homepage, rather than where they last left off the buyer journey. Instead of inviting people to resume evaluating your product and nurturing them to a conversion, you’d likely lose them altogether.

What you need to do instead, is to segment the groups of people who have engaged with your site in different ways, as they need to see completely different messages in order to convert.

Remarketing to people who have just come to the homepage and left would be different from remarketing to people that exited from the pricing page.

Have you differentiated your ad messages based on where people dropped out in the journey?

For people who dropped off from the homepage, you might want to think about a way to invite them back in to explore more of your product or solution. But if they dropped off from your pricing page, you could remarket with a discount offer.

Choosing the Right Remarketing Channel

B2B SaaS marketers who have a large base of organic search traffic can get great results with remarketing. They can leverage the organic audience coming to their website and pivot into paid social with remarketing campaigns.

When tapping into remarketing on social channels, you have 2 main options: LinkedIn or Facebook. LinkedIn may be the more obvious choice if you’re B2B, yet Facebook typically has a much lower average CPC. How do you choose?

Our advice is simply to remarket to your recent site visitors in the most cost-effective way.

Remarketing should be channel-agnostic. All those people who came organically to your website and did not convert, which is probably 98, 99%, should be remarketed to in the cheapest channel possible.

You already have the audience and you don’t have to assume anything based on the channel anymore. Your goal should be to remarket to them based on where they dropped out of your website in the cheapest possible channel. And usually, Facebook’s average cost per click is only a fraction of what LinkedIn’s is.

SaaS Remarketing Done Right

Remarketing requires creating separate journeys with multiple touchpoints and content delivered along the way. At the very minimum, you should have 3 layers or segments, depending on the buyer’s journey:

1. Bringing people who are still in discovery/exploratory mode back to informative, educational, and heavily branded content.
2. Bringing people who are in consideration mode back to comparative content that makes your solution stand apart.
3. Bringing people who are ready to convert to pages with persuasive offers and triggers.

Once you implement this remarketing strategy, you’d be able to nurture your leads along the user journey.

Let’s deep-dive into each of these remarketing journeys separately.

Informative Branded Content for Discovery Stage Remarketing

The first step is to segment your audience in Google Analytics based on how they’ve interacted with your website’s content. You can ‘bucket’ them into different groups, so you can deliver messages and content that relate to their past behavior and what it tells us about their buyer journey.

You could create remarketing audience segments of people who have visited a single page or a specific combination of pages. For example, one audience could consist of people who have engaged with a blog post, another group would be people who have landed on a case study page, and yet another – visitors to your pricing page.

Blog post readers are unlikely to be ready to convert – we have no reasons to think they have any buyer intent. What we can do is show them more top-of-the-funnel content, educate them, and expose them to our brand.

When you provide such audiences with editorial content that helps them solve a problem, instead of hard-selling your SaaS product, they become aware of your brand in a favorable way. After watching your remarketing video or reading your next blog post, you can remarket to that audience with the next steps.

Tailored Content for Consideration Stage Remarketing

Remarketing can get really creative at the consideration stage of the buyer journey. While your audiences are not yet ready to convert, they are in-market and evaluating their options.

Google’s own research showed that the consideration stage between trigger and conversions is a complex, loop-like process of exploration, or continually looking for alternatives to a solution, and evaluation – narrowing down your options based on criteria and cognitive biases. In other words, this is the ‘Messy Middle,’ where brands continuously lose and win customers.

For marketers, this an endless playing field, ripe with opportunities. Remarketing is a great tool to help your leads exit the ‘Messy Middle’ consideration as fast as possible (and in your favor).

Provide your hesitant audiences with all the information they need to make a decision. Leverage their cognitive biases as well – the need for social proof, authority bias, scarcity factor, the heuristics of their decision-making process.

One of the efficient ways to remarket these audiences is by building head-to-head comparison landing pages. Instead of merely listing your SaaS solution’s features, put them side by side with your competitors and show what makes your SaaS platform stand out. Show exactly where you deliver value.

Product tours and use cases can move the needle and trigger action. Client testimonial videos are always effective – they bring solid proof of how your SaaS software works. Developing premium content also comes in handy at this stage. You can remarket with some gated content asset in exchange of their contact details. This way, you could add email marketing journeys to the list or remarketing channels.

Triggers and Offers to Close the Remarketing Journey

The final step of the journey for these audiences is the closing offer. Simultaneously, for audience segments that have already visited your solutions and pricing pages and are clearly in buying mode, you can create very short remarketing journeys and start directly with your offer.

What other content can you create on your site to finally get a visitor to convert? Any kind of persuasive offer, such as a free trial or even a discount on the initial price, can bring a purchase clincher. Scarcity bias is a strong motivator here – rarity triggers a reaction to maintain our access to this resource.

To remarket successfully to the point of conversion, you’d need the right message and a dedicated landing page. It’s worth remembering that the page should center on how your SaaS product solves a problem for the customer. Have a look at our article focused on building SaaS landing pages that convert – it will provide you with all of the insight you need to successfully close the remarketing campaigns.

If you’re investing a lot in paid marketing, make sure you’re seeing the full Return on Ad Spend picture. See how we’ve found a way to track off-site conventions from free trials and feed the data back in Google Analytics and Google Ads.

This way, we can train the algorithms to optimize PPC campaigns for users who not only sign-up for free trials, but also stay on the platform and convert to paying customers. It’s all explained in this article on how to measure true ROAS when marketing SaaS.