Bringing Mobile Shopping Discovery to Life With Remarketing

As a self-proclaimed fashion enthusiast, Ben spends considerable time using apps on his phone. Switching from one app to another, Ben constantly longs for that moment of serendipity — profusely exploring thousands of fashion catalogs daily until that one product sparks his interest. Unlike the transactional nature of intent-based buying, where a user has a linear experience from selection to purchase, discovery shopping for the Ben of today’s world is a nonlinear process and can appear as a complex challenge to retailers. However, reading and responding to Ben’s signals effectively can drive discovery shopping and subsequently improve consumer stickiness and grow customer loyalty.

A recent Business Insider report shows that only 4 percent of North American retailers currently employ suggested selling based on previous purchases. While retailers do understand the importance of customized shopping experiences on mobile, the struggle amongst most to combine data, context and intelligence across various platforms to enable discovery shopping is real. But how exactly can one drive discovery shopping on mobile? While the simple answer is personalization, the more sophisticated solution is remarketing.

Every top retailer must revisit its marketing strategy to engage the mobile shopper and deliver a personalized storefront-like experience on mobile. To achieve this, retailers should be able to guide consumers through a highly relevant array of brands, categories and products in visually engaging formats. For instance, a lifestyle retailer could retarget existing users and promote a series of highly customized offers on brands they follow through a native ad carousel.

Deep User Understanding
Remarketing presents retailers the opportunity to cater to critical factors such as comprehensiveness and relevancy through big data learning. Building a user-behavior profile based on in-app activity such as product display page views, purchase history, and add-to-cart or wish list additions is the first step towards creating a personalized shopping experience. For example, a shopper who is on the constant lookout for a pair of trousers has dropped signals all over the app — from searching for a specific brand to dwelling on product display pages to dropping items from the cart to filtering out price ranges and inquiring about available discounts. Based on this user-behavior graph, retailers can correlate and deliver stories that strongly mimic and facilitate the user’s intentions.

Dynamic and Rich Discovery Experiences
While building relevance for recommendations is key, communicating it via rich, immersive ad experiences can inspire action. Bringing users face to face with the product features through HD images, price details, reviews and ratings, or payment options within the ad unit instantaneously shortens the time taken from exploration to consideration to transaction. Native and video ad formats help create a rich experience that mimics the retailer’s app, thereby creating higher conversions. For example, video ads could be the best means to introduce shoppers to new product launches.

Everything Has to be Real Time
Be it real-time promotions or real-time transactions, shoppers demand end-to-end fulfillment on mobile. Nearly 60 percent of consumers want real-time promotions and offers. Through deep back-end integrations with retailers’ inventory management systems, remarketing ads can showcase products while accounting for dynamic factors such as product availability, shipping time and packaging options. Additionally, by deep linking — i.e., taking a user directly to the intended page within the app — retailers can ensure real-time transaction fulfillment from within the ad unit.

However, does catering to each individual with a personalized recommendation mean increased marketing costs for retailers? The answer is a resounding "no." Remarketing empowers retailers to nudge consumers with relevant, real-time offers based on user intent through dynamic creative and seamless transaction capabilities, thereby increasing a shopper's chances of purchasing a product. The more user learning there is, the higher the return on investment is through personalization.

A personalized shopping experience is no longer a futuristic and distant concept. The power of the mobile platform can be leveraged to build a 360-degree view of the shopper and communicate with them in a tailor-made fashion. Combining the remarketing capabilities of contextual learning, dynamic creative optimization and real-time integrations, retailers can bring mobile shopping discovery to life.

Edward Laws is the global senior vice president and general manager of performance advertising at ‎InMobi, a company that enables consumers to discover new products and services by providing contextual and personalized ad experiences on mobile devices.