Drive Home the Deal in Action Phase
By now you’re practically an expert in the world of digital advertising, especially if you’re here after reading our guides to the awareness and consideration stages. You’ve built out an awareness phase that drives interest in your product and a consideration phase that showcases just what makes your brand unique. The only question now is how exactly do you turn all of this interest into long-term sales? That’s where the final stage of the sales funnel comes in, what we like to refer to as the ‘Action’ phase. In this blog entry we’ll go through some of the ways we use the groundwork laid out in the previous phases to drive conversions at scale.
Put your data to good use
Throughout our funnel series we’ve discussed how your audience data is a powerful resource for your advertising campaigns, and this is no less true in the conversion phase. In fact, this phase is where your data will be the most refined and useful. At every stage of the funnel we’ve sharpened your audience fingerprint, creating a definitive list of interested intenders who are just begging to become your customers. Now is the time to bring them back to purchase your product, so how exactly do you do that? With a technique called ‘retargeting’. Retargeting is where we take the data you’ve collected throughout your top and mid-funnel stages and use it to serve specialized ads to the people who are most interested in your product. These are the people who have clicked through your ads, interacted with your website, maybe put an item in their shopping cart and abandoned or even purchased. All have shown a heightened interest in your product and are just waiting for you to retarget them with some specialized ads to push them to convert. What do those ads look like? Let’s take a closer look!
Drive home the deal with action creative
You may be familiar with the advertising term Call to Action, or CTA. This is often the last prompt a potential customer sees before they make a jump to an actionable item on an advertiser’s website. Those buttons on digital ads that say “BUY NOW”? You got it, those are calls to action! Think of your action phase as your whole campaign’s call to action. You’ve already made your intenders aware of your product, you then made them consider what makes it better than your competitors, now you just have to make them take action and buy it! How do you do that? There are several ways that are proven to work.
The first and perhaps most effective way is to create ads that highlight a sale or special offer. We’ve covered in previous blog posts how sales offers drive increased conversions and ultimately boost ROI, now is your chance to give it a shot! The holiday season is the ideal time to try this technique as many retailers are already running sales and your intenders will likely be searching for great gift ideas. Taking advantage of this can lead to huge results. In fact, one of our clients saw nearly 4x increase in sales and ROI while running their Black Friday sale! This type of performance isn’t exclusive to the holidays, however. Many brands will opt to generate an offer code for their retargeting campaigns, giving their intenders an exclusive offer that’s just too enticing not to take up. This can be a 10% off coupon code, a buy one get one half off offer, or even something as simple as free shipping, anything to give your customers that extra push to convert.
Another technique that can be used in tandem with discount offers is using alternative ad units and focusing on where your customers are most likely to purchase. In our experience, using units such as the mobile (and often persistent) 320x50 leads to huge increases in click throughs. By using a mobile ad unit that stays persistent onscreen as your intender is browsing you make sure that your offer they can’t refuse gets presented to them in a way they can’t ignore. These two techniques together are a potent mixture for driving conversions at scale.
Your customers are waiting to purchase your product, why wait to give them a good reason?
Final Thoughts
Your action phase is where your whole campaign comes together, the place where you put every data learning, every awareness and consideration success into practice and drive home big conversion numbers using smart technology and specialized action creatives. It’s all part of a proven full-funnel strategy, the FieldTest recipe for advertising success: Turn on the faucet of traffic to your site in awareness, prove your audience’s intent to purchase in consideration, and retarget with your best sales and offers in action. With this strategy and the FieldTest ad platform you have all the tools at your disposal to run an effective digital ad campaign across the open internet.