Remarketing – the process of marketing to existing customers, visitors or users of your website or app – is often under utilized by many marketeers.
But will re-marketing work for you? How do you figure out which segment of your user base is driving transactions and conversions – are they existing customers or are they first time customers?. Google Analytics makes this a little easier by letting us divide the customers into two segments – New vs Returning.
Like the names suggest – New users are first time visitors while returning visitors are not. Segmenting customers into categories for further evaluation can lead to highly specific, actionable insights.
Let’s have a look at how this worked for us.
Our client – A – owns a small e-commerce store somewhere in America, catering to a niche segment of users – specifically those users with kids. We can clearly see the impact of returning customers on her bottom-line as compared to her new customers.
Looking only at the Adwords attributed conversions
As we can see, returning customers have contributed more to our client’s overall revenue than have new visitors, for all users who landed on the site via Google/CPC.
Additionally, the e-commerce conversion rate, average session duration, bounce rate are all better for the returning visitors than the new ones.
If we look at the data closely, we can see that in Jan-March 2015, 43% of visitors contributed 64% to the total revenue and in Jan-March 2016, 29% of visitors contributed to 55% of the total revenue.
Let’s have a look at the data from Organic Traffic.
Jan – March 2015Jan – March 2016Organic traffic data shows similar trends with returning visitors contributing much more to the company revenue than new visitors. Additionally, 21% of returning visitors contributed a whopping 55% of total revenue in Jan-March 2015 and 23% of returning visitors were responsible for 50% of revenue in Jan-March 2016.
The contribution of returning visitors is massive and should not be ignored.
Creating a marketing strategy that targets new customers without forgetting returning customers will be instrumental in driving conversions, revenue or engagement for your site or app.