Introducing Journeys: a new way to retarget your website visitors

Updates

Reza

Journeys are a sequence of ad experiences designed to re-engage your website visitors.

Think about the last time you saw a retargeting ad as a consumer. Most likely, the brand retargeted you with the exact same ad, over and over again. Do you remember how that made you feel? If you’re like most people, you probably noticed the ad the first couple times, then blocked it out for a while and finally started to get annoyed when it would just never stop!

Regular retargeting : 🤔 > 😒 > 😠

Well, your customers are no different. Ad fatigue is real and as a brand you need to take it seriously. There is nothing worse than spending precious ad dollars to drive prospects away from your brand by retargeting them for months after they’ve left your site.

Today, we are incredibly excited to announce Journeys to help you combat ad fatigue. Journeys are a sequence of retargeting ad experiences designed to keep your visitors engaged with your brand and to bring them back to your website.

Journey retargeting: 🤔 > 🙂 > 😍

We all know how powerful email drip campaigns are. Nurturing prospects through a sequence of timed messages is a proven strategy in marketing today. Shoelace brings this concept to retargeting ads with Journeys, along with the added touch of making them effortless to launch!

How do Journeys work?

Journeys introduce the concept of stages to Shoelace retargeting campaigns. When a visitor leaves your site, they will enter the first stage of the Journey and gradually move on to the next ones. Each stage contains one or more different ad experiences. Pretty simple!

Journeys are an ongoing retargeting campaign type. Which means that your Journey will always be running and prospects will enter and exit the various stages of the campaign after they leave your website.

Case study: Wee Squeak Journey Campaign

Wee Squeak is a successful Shopify brand that sells fun shoes for kids. They were kind enough to take Journeys for a spin before we launched! Scroll through their Journey below to see what kind of experience their visitors went through after leaving Wee Squeak’s website.

Results: 12 x ROAS

Wee Squeak’s Journey campaign performed phenomenally well! While most of the credit here goes to Susan and the team at Wee Squeak for building a super engaged audience and driving high quality traffic to their store, Journeys delivered an impressive return on ad spend.

For more on the importance of high quality traffic for retargeting ROI, check out our recent blog post: The secret to getting high performing retargeting ads.

Multiple Journeys based on visitor behaviour

This is probably my favourite part about Journeys! Shoelace can run multiple streams of Journeys based on visitors’ behaviour on your website.

Take the Completed Purchase Journey, for example. Typically, when someone completes a purchase from your store, Shoelace excludes those customers from your retargeting ads. However, this audience is actually a very valuable group of people: your loyal customers! When done right, Journey campaigns aimed at past buyers can be extremely valuable.

Black Milk Clothing: Completed Purchase Journey

Black Milk Clothing is an extremely popular Shopify Plus brand that we have the pleasure of working with at Shoelace. Scroll down to see a great example of a Completed Purchase Journey campaign.

On day 1 to 3 customers who completed a purchase are encouraged to buy a gift voucher for a friend. On day 7 to 10, once customers have received their order they are encouraged to share a photo of their recent purchase on social media. And about a month later, they will see the latest styles available to buy at Black Milk. Cool right?

Shoelace Journeys + Integrations with other apps

Over the last few months, we’ve launched several integrations with other Shopify apps and we have many more coming soon! These integrations make for some killer ads inside your Journey campaigns.

Example: Fomo Ad inside a Journey Campaign

In this example, you can see that one of the ad experiences inside the Journey is a Fomo ad that highlights products that other customers have bought to create social proof.

Do I have to build my own Journey?

As with everything Shoelace, we do all of the heavy lifting. So the answer is no! When your audience reaches the minimum required size, you will receive a ready-to-go Journey campaign proposal from Shoelace. You will have lots of editing options to fine-tune the message of your Journey, but it will be ready to go live as is!

We are really excited for you to give it a try and looking forward to hearing your feedback along the way. Hearing your thoughts really helps us make Shoelace better for everyone, so please let us know what you think!

Happy retargeting!

-Reza Khadjavi
CEO at Shoelace

If you want an intelligent retargeting assistant to take care of all your retargeting for $49/month, consider trying Shoelace today!