Facebook remarketing is one of the most exciting developments in online advertising in recent years.

Now, instead of being limited to picking demographics and targeting options that we think relate to our target audience; we can actually leverage actual user behaviour to determine which ads are shown.

In a nutshell, this means that we can automatically group people who visit certain pages on our website into custom audiences, which we then show different ads to.

So rather than running a generic advert promoting apples and oranges; we can show an ad for apples to someone who has read an article on our site about apples, and anyone who has read an article about oranges will see ads for oranges instead.

This means we can show the right message to the right person at the right time – meaning a greater likelihood of getting a good return on your advertising spend.

When it comes to membership sites, there are 6 key ways in which you can really leverage Facebook remarketing…

1) Promoting key content and lead magnets

Remarketing enables you to organise your website visitors into ‘buckets’ according to what pages they’ve viewed on your site.

So if you can break down your core topic into 5 or 6 “sub topics”, then you could set up a separate custom audience for each of those sub-topics.

These essentially become “interest lists” – where you now have targeted audiences of people who have expressed a specific interest in a sub-topic.

So if someone has been reading a blog article about time management, then rather than showing them generic ads for your business coaching programme; you could show those guys ads for your time management lead magnet, as a way of enticing them to sign up to your list.

You could then specifically promote other blogs on the same topic to just that audience, in order to encourage repeat visits to your site.

2) Moving people down your funnel

Once someone has signed up to your email marketing list, you may not want to continue using up your Facebook ad spend showing ads for “entry level” content to leads that you’ve already captured.

To that end, you can use remarketing to not only exclude people who have already opted in from seeing ads for your “top of funnel” content (blogs, podcast episodes etc) – but also to show a completely different set of ads to those people, designed to move them down your sales funnel.

So, to your opted-in leads, you may start showing ads for a tripwire product, a free trial for your membership or a webinar designed to generate sales.

Use Facebook remarketing ads to move people down your sales funnel

If you time things right, you could even coordinate the ads that your leads are being shown with the emails you’re sending them as part of your sales sequence.

3) Salvaging lost sales

It easy to assume that if someone visits our sales page, proceeds to checkout and then doesn’t buy, then they have changed their mind and the sale is lost.

This often isn’t the case.

People may abandon the checkout process for a multitude of reasons – sometimes life and circumstances just get in the way; perhaps they were distracted, maybe they left their wallet in another room, maybe they were at work and wanted to wait until they got home to join your site.

Whatever the reason, an abandoned checkout can be salvaged; and utilising remarketing to show ads to people who have viewed your checkout page but not your “thank you for joining” page is a fantastic way of nudging people back towards your site, reminding them to complete the transaction.

4) Promoting membership content & events

When paid advertising is discussed, it’s almost always in the context of – directly or indirectly – trying to drum up sales.

However as we always say, when it comes to membership sites it’s what happens after the sale that determines your success.

To that end, it is worth investing in making sure your members are getting value from your site.

The more a members feel they’re getting value, the longer they’ll stick around; so it’s certainly worth considering using Facebook remarketing in order to show ads to your members that promote key content or key events available to them as part of their membership.

And on a similar note…

5) Facebook remarketing for Re-engagement

You could take the idea of showing ads to already subscribed members even further by using them to re-engage people who are starting to “slip away”.

By this, we mean members of your site who, for whatever reason, haven’t logged in for a while.

This is often a warning sign that someone is not going to be around much longer.

Assuming you have a member dashboard or some other specific page that your members are redirected to when they log in, you could use Facebook remarketing in order to show ads to people who haven’t seen that page within the past 30 days.

Those ads could be geared towards getting people back on your site, perhaps highlighting any new content or feature they may not be aware of.

If you can re-engage the members that you’re most at risk of losing, then the potential return in terms of their continued subscription would more than justify the ad spend.

6) Win-back campaigns for lapsed members

Cancellations are par for the course for every membership site.

Not only should you not take them personally; but you also should not give up on those lapsed members.

Every membership site owner should have a strategy in place to try to win back members who have left you.

Typically email will be the preferred medium for this, but you can take this even further by throwing remarketing into the mix too.

A few weeks or months after someone cancels their membership, they should start seeing ads trying to entice them back.

As you can see, the potential for using remarketing ads as part of the marketing strategy for your membership site is huge.

In terms of how to actually implement remarketing on Facebook, we have a full course available to Membership Academy members showing you step by step how to set this up.