Like many warm-blooded guys, I prefer to hit the web when searching for my favorite style of sneakers. Last week, I found the exact shoes I wanted on a great e-commerce site for an awesome price. I had to jump on it so I immediately added them to my cart. Of course, I am easily distracted pretty much by anything and everything (SQUIRREL!) and ended up not buying the shoes at that moment.
Over the next few days, I noticed a rapid increase in emails along with a never-ending exposure to the sneaks that I had chosen via banner ads on all of my favorite websites. I thought to myself… “Yeah this makes sense, the company is hitting me with a remarketing campaign to get me to convert by completing the purchase I already started.”
It seemed to work, because a few days later I went back to the site and purchased the shoes – treadmill here I come! After completing the transaction, I continued browsing and found myself on Facebook peeking into the lives of my loosely associated friends. Wait, it’s the shoes again! Annoying.
The remarketing of the shoes I already bought continued for well over two weeks across multiple websites, which made me really frustrated. How is it that they knew the exact shoes I was looking at, but not know that I already bought them? Do they really suck at remarketing that much?
I did a little digging and it turns out that, yeah, many companies do suck at it, but it’s not just at remarketing. It’s actually this entire concept of unified marketing – orchestrating all your marketing channels to better understand and act on how customers are interacting with your brand. Left hand, meet right hand. Razorfish, a premier digital marketing agency recently conducted a survey and found that, “76 percent of marketing execs don’t target their customers with behavioral data… and are struggling to translate the data into better customer-facing experiences”.
Marketers need to realize that unified marketing is essentially the Holy Grail that will get them the result they need and will provide a much better overall experience for customers.
Now, what is happening in the news online today? Really? It’s those damn shoes again!
