Many people make the mistake of applying the rules of brick-and-mortar business to digital sales. If you drive to Home Depot, you’re there to buy something. In the digital world, the customer journey isn’t that simple.

Over 71% of customers will leave a digital checkout before they finishing buying. Customers are going to go away and come back an awful lot before they buy from you.

What you have to do is make sure they keep coming back and one of the ways to do that is with ad re-targeting.

Re-targeting means serving ads to people who have already visited your site. A customer adds an item to their shopping cart but they don’t buy, so you show them an ad with the exact same product to remind them about it later. And it works well, because these are people who have already demonstrated interest in your company: ad re-targeting has been found to bring back as much as 26% of customers with abandoned carts.

However, there are some big mistakes that marketers tend to make with their re-targeting spend. To help you avoid such mistakes, we’ve compiled a list of the seven deadliest re-targeting sins along with ways to avoid them.

1. Not Having Enough Fresh Traffic To Support It

To have success with ad re-targeting, you need to have a steady and powerful stream of fresh traffic coming to your site.

Your ad will only be seen by people who have interacted with your brand or product before, so if you don’t have fresh traffic, you’re going to end up showing ads to the same group of people over and over.

You’ll first need to run Facebook ads geared to bring in cold traffic. To start your customer acquisition efforts off on the right foot, Facebook offers a number of methods to get your ad in front of the relevant people. You can:

• Use Facebook’s Audience Insights to find your key demographics.
• Use Facebook’s grid search to find new influencers for your company.
• Create look-alike audiences to find more of the kinds of customers you acquired through previously successful campaigns.

In the end, there are a ton of ways to target new traffic with Facebook Ads, but these are a few of the key tactics.

2. Crossing The Line Between Re-Targeting And Stalking

Re-targeting is an insanely effective tool for bringing customers back, but only when done in moderation. Seeing the same company’s ads all across the internet can creep your customers out and drive them away.

According to a study done at Shopify, customers began to feel uncomfortable after being re-targeted five times. By the tenth time, they’re outright angry. Angry customers won’t just ignore your ads, they’ll share their distaste with others.

[source: Shopify]

You can avoid giving off the stalker vibe by segmenting your re-targeting audience. Facebook lets you create custom lists within your audiences so you can re-target lists that haven’t seen the ad you’re serving or who haven’t been re-targeted recently.

3. Not Re-Targeting Enough

It’s easy to tell yourself that re-targeting is so creepy you shouldn’t do it at all.

As they say in poker and inspirational posters, however, you lose 100% of the hands you don’t play. If you aren’t pushing the envelope with re-targeting, you’ll never find out what kind of rewards it could bring you. You just have to know when you’ve gone too far and scale back.

Think of it this way:

• The average cost per click for Facebook Ads is $0.27.
• If you have 1000 clicks, you’re spending $270.
• If your page converts at the average conversion rate of 2.35%, you’re looking at roughly 23 conversions.
• If 71% of checkouts are abandoned, then you would need 58 abandoned checkouts to get 23 conversions.
• If you have 58 abandoned checkouts, and re-targeting brings back 26% of abandoners, you can get 16 more conversions out of re-targeting.

Let’s say each conversion nets you $20 and let’s assume that 2.35% conversion rate. If you aren’t re-targeting, you’ll make $460.

However, if you are re-targeting, you’ll make $780.

4. Not Giving Customers The Right Reason To Come Back

One of the most common strategies for re-targeting is to bribe customers to come back with a discount. It’s simple and it works. Yankee Candle is a great example of this. The candle company launched a re-targeting campaign that increased conversion rates 600% using this simple image:

[source: Google Display Network]

But there are two things you must keep in mind to pull this off.

1. Don’t offer a weak discount. Giving customers 5% off an order might be better for your margins, but it’s just not good enough to motivate customers to come back.
2. Don’t over-discount your customers. Sean Percival, founder of e-commerce company Wittlebee and partner at 500 Startups, says that over-discounting your customers leads to lower margins and worse customers. Customers who only shop from you when you’re “devaluing” your product are looking for a low price, they’re not really invested in your product or service.

The best protocol is to be sparing with your discounts but make them good.

Don’t waste time with 5% off coupons, but don’t build your business off 30-40% off codes because you’re desperate for growth. Coupons like that will give you customer service headaches from entitled people who would never be your customers otherwise. That’s not the kind of growth that you want.

5. Not Using Email To Re-Target Customers

Re-targeting customers who visit your site is great, but there are other channels for re-targeting you need to be using. Chief among these channels is email.

You’ve probably already used your email list as a custom audience, but did you know you could dig even deeper and build a custom audience just of users who click links inside your emails?

Just like you place a Facebook pixel on your site to track what your customers are up to, you can use an email pixel to see which customers are getting value out of your emails.

[source: AdEspresso]

Depending on the size of your email list, this could net you quite a few extra customers to re-target.

What makes them special is that they’re customers you would have treated as cold traffic before. The fact that they’re clicking on links in your emails tells you something crucial: they’re engaged. It’s not in the most obvious way, but these are potential customers in waiting.

If you can re-target them with content that’s relevant to the kinds of links they’ve been clicking, then you could have yourself a highly powerful re-engagement machine hooked up to your email list.

6. Showing The Same Old Ad Over And Over

Re-targeting campaigns by definition target people who know your company. If you show them the same ad over and over again, it’s going to trigger ad blindness and become nothing more than background noise.

This is especially true when talking about advertising across different campaigns. You might think you can safely reuse a month old creative, but customers will notice you recycling your ads for re-targeting.

However, this does not mean constantly designing new ads from scratch. There are a number of things you can do to freshen up your existing ads to make them seem new to customers:

• You can change the colors of a Facebook Ad to make it catch the customer’s eye again.
• You can rewrite the copy to drive a different message home.
• You can switch out images to make old designs seem new.

The average Facebook user scrolls through 13.8 Facebook ads every day. To stand out from the crowd, you’re going to need to consistently be serving new ads.

7. Redirecting To Anything But An Optimized Landing Page

Re-targeting ads are optimized in the sense that they address the customers who have already shown interest in your company. Those people are likely to convert at a much higher rate than random strangers, because they’ve already connected with you in some way.

But if your ads drop customers on a home page instead of a landing page optimized for conversions, they’re not going to convert.

Navigating from your home page to whatever deal or product you advertised requires effort on the customer’s end, and this causes friction. Always direct your ads straight to the relevant landing page and make it as easy as possible for the customer to give you money!

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Avoid these seven mistakes, and you’re on your way to a successful re-targeting campaign.

But these aren’t the only things you can do to sink your ship. What mistakes have you seen companies make with their re-targeting? Let us know in the comments!