On the whole, 97% of browsers of a commercial website don’t convert. This of course depends on your industry and your own structure, but the fact of the matter is, the majority of people who visit your website do not convert and buy something. Writing exclusively for ExchangeWire, Alice Travers (pictured below), Customer Success Manager, DMP, Experian explains how to turn a prospect into a conversion.

This is a concern for the marketing tech world. It’s not efficient for marketers to invest the same amount on all individuals within that 97%, because statistically not everyone will fall into the audience profile you’re targeting. Take a high-end sports car manufacturer as an example. A fair amount of their traffic will come from people who love cars, but are simply not viable customers – whether that’s because they can’t afford them, their lifestyle doesn’t allow it, or they can’t drive. While advertising to this group may well bump up your adverts’ click rates, it won’t help improve your cost per acquisition.

Instead, marketers and advertisers should be digging into that 97%, identifying who they are and what we should do with them. It’s not even certain whether or not the 97% converted, we only know they didn’t convert on the website. Desktop, mobile, and tablet devices are being used more and more for researching, browsing, price matching and investigating product specs before the purchase decision is made, whether that’s in store or online. Attribution is an ongoing challenge for marketers. It’s one that needs to be addressed as it also impacts the customer experience.

Imagine you’ve researched something online and then gone and bought it in-store. Now imagine being followed around by adverts for that very product after you’ve made the purchase. It’s going to cause irritation, especially if that advert includes a discount you didn’t benefit from. Wasted ad spend and a negative brand experience. That’s not the best, is it? 

Opening up the 97%

Alice Travers, Customer Success Manager, Experian

What the industry needs to do is open up that 97%. We need to find out more about these people to make programmatic retargeting more relevant.

With additional insight and with channels talking to each other, this should be doable. Advertisers and marketers should aim to join the online and offline to recognise existing customers and people who would never purchase. The contextual information – often gathered from third parties – needs to be taken into account and play a role in the decisioning process.

It’s all about data and the ability to ingest the right information to generate actionable insights. This data can come from all the sources – first-party, third-party, channel-specific and offline.

Accurately finding high-value customers and only targeting those with retargeting is a clear win. Those people who are far more likely to be interested, far more likely to eligible and, importantly, who haven’t already gone and bought that product offline since visiting the website are in advertisers’ and marketers’ sweet spot.

The answer is a Data Management Platform (DMP) with the right data. Without the relevant contextual data, it’s impossible to understand each individual enough to be able to service them correctly. This is the case when retargeting valuable prospects who have yet to decide to convert, when deciding who not to advertise to at all (those youngsters who really, really want a sports car, but are only 13) and when sending messages to an existing customer base.

Keeping customers loyal is just as important as convincing them to buy from you in the first place.