Top 5 Alternatives to Retargeting for Your SaaS Following the Loss of Third-Party Cookies!

Retargeting has been a hugely fruitful acquisition channel for many SaaS businesses.  If there was one area you should be investing in paid marketing, then ‘ad retargeting’ is definitely it, since retargeting is one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising to increase sales conversions.

However, did you know that third-party cookies (the tracking agent used to retarget ads across different channels) are going to be fully phased out by 2023?

So, does this signify the death of retargeting altogether?!

The answer is yes and no…

…retargeting as we know it today won’t be possible, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be other ways to remarket our product to visitors and customers.

But first let’s circle back for a moment, just in case you’re thinking, ‘well what the feck is retargeting anyway and why should I care!’.

What is Retargeting?

Retargeting, also referred to as remarketing (although they are not exactly the same), allows you to deliver adverts to people who have previously shown an interest in your product or brand.  This includes someone who has visited your website, downloaded some content, or signed up for a free trial of your product for example.

You may not have been aware of its official title, but I’m sure you’ve been subjected to those ‘creepy’ ads before that seem to know where you have been and what you’ve been looking at!  That’s the full glory of retargeting in action.

The ads can be shown across an extensive range of platforms including Google (search results and millions of network partner websites), Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more. 

This is accomplished via recording a tracking pixel, which has previously been uploaded to your website, and then it uses third-party cookies to track the user wherever else they visit online. 

So, if you set up a retargeting ad for your SaaS product, that advert will then follow and display to those people as they navigate across different platforms, which helps to recapture their interest and bring them back to your website or offer, and convert them into a paid subscriber. 

In fact, retargeting can increase conversion rates by as much as 150%!

So, now we know what it is and why it’s so effective, I wanted to share with you my tactics to help you overcome the eventual loss of retargeting via third-party cookies. 

My Top 5 Alternatives to Retargeting for SaaS

1. Embrace the power of first-party cookies/hashed emails and CRM Retargeting

If you are unaware of what third-party cookies actually are, they are basically tracking codes that are added to your browser, which can then track which websites you visit, purchases you make online, along with other behavioural data.  Advertisers can then use that data to send ads to their past website visitors or people with similar matching profiles.

However, in recent years, this has been seen as an infringement on the online user’s privacy.  Safari and Firefox have already blocked third-party cookies from their browsers, and Google is now also phasing them out in Chrome, which it aims to do by the end of 2023.

Therefore, we now have to find alternative ways to target and track prospective users. 

The good news is that not all cookies are being phased out, and you will still be able to leverage first-party cookies, which you collect on your own website and store within your analytical tools or CRM software. 

Therefore, if you capture your visitors’ email addresses, for example, you can begin to track them and their future interactions with your ads or content, thus helping to determine marketing attribution. This is what companies like Hubspot and Marketo have been doing for years to determine the conversion path of customers and calculate ROI for your marketing campaigns.

This brings us to a tactic called CRM Retargeting, which has grown in popularity in recent years due to its personalised approach.  It is based on the aforementioned first-party cookie tracking along with a technology called ‘email hashing’.

Email hashing basically encrypts your email into a code allowing your login behaviour to be tracked without passing your actual email data, thus overcoming any privacy concerns.  

With email hashing, you can use your CRM data to create custom audiences and target them with ads across any other browser or site where the user has entered their email address to log in.  That could include social media sites such as Facebook and Youtube, and browsers that require logins to use certain features such as Google Chrome, Bing, Yahoo, and their associated apps.

The beauty of this approach is that it works across multiple devices, whereas third-party cookie tracking didn’t.  So, if someone uses their mobile to complete an action on your site, then goes to their desktop to search for something else online, as long as you have used your same personal email on both devices, you can present them with your ad.

2. Create email-exchange worthy content

Since one of the main ways of targeting users across channels is going to be done via email moving forward, then you’ll need to think of new ingenious ways of incentivising your website visitors to part ways with their precious email address. 

Usually, with a SaaS product, you’d try to encourage your visitors to sign up for a free trial of your product, but what if they’re only at the exploratory phase and still aren’t quite ready to invest their time in trialing the product yet?

Instead, you can try to offer them valuable content for which users will be happy to exchange their email addresses, such as business guides, e-books, how-to video tutorials, templates, calculators, demos, evergreen webinars, etc.  In B2B, most individuals are looking to grow their business, improve their skills or make their job easier in some way, so if you can offer that for free, they’ll be sure to sign-up.   

Once you have this subscriber list in your CRM, you can then upload it to your advertising platform such as Facebook or Google as a custom audience, then you can create a set of ads to start to nurture and promote your product to those users across different platforms and devices via the hashed email tracking mentioned above. 

Send new similar content to what they downloaded in the first place to build trust and move them through the funnel.  Also, remind them that your product is still out there and what solution-driven benefits your product will bring them.  If you confront them with your ad at the right time when they’re at the consideration or intent phase of the buyer’s journey, they are more likely to sign up for a free trial, but they won’t if they’ve forgotten about you.

3. Retarget free trial users who didn’t convert

A great way to increase sales conversions is to retarget people who have signed up for a free trial of your product and didn’t convert into paying customers. 

Just because they didn’t sign up for a paid subscription, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t like or enjoy using your product. 

There may be other factors that influence their decision to subscribe to your product immediately during or following a free trial.  They could still be in the process of evaluating alternative competitor solutions, or they may be trying to convince senior members of the organisation to commit to the investment for example. 

These trial users are far from being a lost cause, in fact, they are at the bottom of the funnel, which means they are in the highest percentile of actually converting.

Therefore, again you can create a custom audience including your trial user email addresses, and target them with ads such as video testimonials to showcase how your product helped other companies similar to theirs or offer timely promotions following a trial to create urgency and incentivise them to sign up.

Handy tip!!… If you’re not already providing a social login facility for your SaaS product, via Facebook, LinkedIn, or Gmail for example, then you should get one integrated asap.  It is common for people to use their same personal email across multiple social media accounts, browsers, and mail clients, so it will improve the chances of being able to target them with cross-channel ads in the future.

4. Remarket to your existing customers

Although email has reduced in its efficacy over the years due to the amount of clutter in people’s inboxes, open and click-through rates are still much higher for your existing customers who are already aware of your brand and have purchased from you before.

Therefore, you can still use email to target your existing customer database not only to help retain them so they don’t churn, but also to advertise to them to up-sell and cross-sell product upgrades or add-ons. 

This could include upgrading to a higher-tier plan with additional features, adding more users to their account or expanding resource usage, or contracting services like custom account setup, additional premium support, or onboarding.

Over time, however, even your existing customers can become unresponsive to your marketing emails, in which case you can then re-trigger their interest by sending them cross-channel ads via custom audiences as mentioned above.

5. Retarget via on-platform actions

Since first-party cookies are still around, you will still be able to perform retargeting tactics within the same platform. 

If we take Facebook as an example, when someone completes an action within Facebook itself then you can retarget them again at a later stage. 

This works well to help move users through the sales funnel from the awareness phase through to consideration and intent, then direct them to your website to complete the purchase.

For example, if someone performs and specific action such as reacting to one of your posts, visiting your business page, or watching a video, which we would refer to as a top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) action, it means they have shown some interest in your product or brand.

We can deliver them with a targeted middle or bottom-of-the-funnel (MOFU/BOFU) ad.  The CTA of that advert would be inviting them to sign-up for a webinar or trial your product for example.

The same type of retargeting strategy can apply on other platforms too such as YouTube.  This allows you to use much more personalised messaging, which is more impactful and more likely to capture the attention and interest of the prospect.  Imagine they watched a video on a certain topic, if you then target that same person to sign up to a webinar approaching that same topic, they are much more likely to convert, and you have then captured their email for multi-channel advertising and to nurture them to subscribe to your product.

Why we Shouldn’t Panic in a Cookie-Free World

While most marketers will be aggrieved at the prospect of losing third-party cookies for good, and it’s unlikely that we will be able to continue retargeting people based on website visits alone, this new approach of retargeting will be more effective and relevant in this personal data conscious world.

Therefore, we have to adjust our advertising strategies to suit the modern age, and it’s all for the better in my opinion.

Firstly, as previously mentioned, using first-party cookies and hashed emails means that multi-channel marketing is no longer device-based, but we will be performing people-based marketing instead regardless of what device they’re using to browse the web.

Also, gone will be the days of creepy ads that follow you around every corner even if you just checked that site out once, or even stumbled on the wrong content by accident.  Have you ever let your child or family member use your mobile, or a colleague use your work’s computer, then are suddenly bombarded by ads that are totally irrelevant to you?

More importantly, most people just don’t like being followed without explicitly giving you their permission, period! This could therefore create negative sentiment towards your brand, which of course is the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve.

The future of retargeting will be more relevant, more impactful, and generally less ‘icky’ than before, helping to optimise your advertising spend, click-through rates, and increase sales conversions, so you can grow your SaaS product in a more effective and virtuous way.