“Remarketing is a powerful marketing tool that complements your brand and drives conversions across your marketing funnel”,said Gerard LaFond, chief digital officer/executive vice president of The Hoffman Agency. It increases your brand’s visibility and helps you to connect with customers who have already shown interest in your product or service. It reminds them about the brand through personalized ads and increases the chance of conversion. 

Let’s see how one of our Clients, Fateh Education, a study abroad consultant has used advanced retargeting on Meta to improve their LTO (Lead-to-Opportunity) rate.

Lead to Opportunity (LTO) is a sales metric that measures the number of leads that are converted into opportunities. 

Lead to Opportunity = (Total number of opportunities/ Total number of leads) x 100 

LTO, Rewarming & More…    

Fateh Education helps students pursue their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in universities across the UK and Ireland. They were successfully generating over 80 leads in a day on Meta Ads.

However, Fateh was still facing challenges with their conversion rates. Their sales cycle spans between 1 to 2 months, and despite constant follow-ups, potential leads often request additional time to decide on availing the service. This prolonged decision-making process impacted their LTO ratio. 

To address this, Fateh implemented rewarming campaigns specifically targeting high-intent opportunities that increased their LTO pushing the prospects further down the sales funnel. 

The sales funnel of Fateh is pretty simple and has around 4 major stages. Each of them is explained in detail below. 

Lead Stages Of Fateh

Following is the ideal user journey for every lead that enters the CRM of Fateh.

Enquiry: 

When a student submits a form on their website, they are identified as a lead. Subsequently, counselors from Fateh engage with these leads via phone/email/SMS to collect essential information, understand their needs, academic goals, and areas of interest, etc.

Disqualified & Not Interested:

Students who are not interested or are looking for other countries which Fateh does not offer counseling for are marked disqualified or not interested. This helps counselors not waste their time behind leads that are not likely to get converted.

Opportunity:

Students who seem interested in considering Fateh are marked as an opportunity. This stage is divided into two distinct categories: 

Opportunity Cold

Students who are interested but require additional nurturing will fall under opportunity cold. They may have questions or concerns that need to be addressed before they can confidently move forward. 

Opportunity Strong

Students who are highly motivated and ready to avail the service will fall under opportunity strong. They have already done their research and are convinced of the benefits they will gain by choosing Fateh. They may just need guidance on how to proceed with their application process.

Final stage

Students from the opportunity stage move on to the next phase, where they apply to universities based on their desired courses and countries. After applying, the students will wait for offers from the universities, and finally, after visa approval, they will move abroad.

How Fateh Used Advanced Retargeting Strategies Using A CDP

The marketers at Fateh have strategically synchronized leads from their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to Meta ads, aiming to refine audience signals using Conversions API through CustomerLabs CDP. 

To achieve this, they have first initiated the process by connecting their CRM with CustomerLabs CDP. For a detailed setup of how to connect a custom source with CustomerLabs CDP to bring in any data, refer to this detailed documentation.

After choosing the sample data from Fateh’s CRM, the marketers filtered the data according to the opportunity lead stage. 

Event Configuration

The last and most important step in setting up a workflow is event configuration. Marketers named the event as an opportunity and gave parameters like name email ID, and phone number to Facebook to better match the audience.

Segmenting Warm and Cold Opportunity Lead Stage

Segmenting the high-intent opportunities will be beneficial as these audiences are already familiar with Fateh and therefore, creating a segment of these audiences was necessary. Fateh’s marketers have used CustomerLabs CDP to segment these audiences using the audience-building feature. The leads that are in the opportunity cold, opportunity strong, and opportunity stage, for the last 180 days are segmented. 

The below screenshot shows how the opportunity lead stage audience segment for the last 180 days is created.

Audience Exclusion

In the enquiry stage, counselors would have identified the students who may not be interested or don’t meet specific criteria. This may include factors such as disinterest in offered programs, requests for colleges offering Ph.D. and medicine, inadequate English proficiency, age misalignments, no desire to study abroad, preferences for a different country, or engagement with a different agent.

Creating Custom Audiences in Meta for Retargeting

To have the audience synced properly in a structured format, they have updated the schema with user traits like first name, last name, email ID, phone number, and lead stage that had already been given while creating the event. 

One-Click audience activation

After updating the schema, to activate these audience segments in Meta, all they had to do was, just a single click!

Yes. With a single click, they were able to sync all the audience to Facebook Ads through Conversions API. 

Tip: Setting up your Conversions API helps you send your first-party data signals to Meta without any loss.

Once toggled on, the audience is populated directly on Meta. The below screenshot shows the audience populated from CustomerLabs to Meta.

Retargeting In Meta Ads Using First-Party Data

These audience segments are used in the ad campaigns with personalized messaging related to the leads in the opportunity stage. To re-engage these students, retargeting worked as an effective solution. 

“Retargeting proved to increase the Conversion Rate by 30%”, says Google.

Results of Retargeting With CustomerLabs

After executing the rewarming strategy for the opportunity lead stages using CustomerLabs CDP, Fateh has seen a remarkable increase in the Lead-to-Opportunity (LTO) rate. The below tables show the comparison of how the conversion rate from Lead to Opportunity was before and after using an advanced retargeting strategy in Meta.

 Before using advanced retargeting in Meta Ads

Campaign Name	Total Leads	Total Opportunities	LTO
Lead form campaigns	990	76	8%
Sales campaigns	825	136	16%
Total	1815	212	12%

After using advanced retargeting in Meta Ads

Campaign name	Total Leads	Total Opportunities	LTO
Lead form campaigns	990	136	14%
Sales campaigns	825	229	28%
Total	1815	368	20%

However, post-implementation of the rewarming campaign on the opportunity stage using CustomerLabs CDP, notable improvements were observed. Specifically, for lead form campaigns, the LTO raised to 14%, while the conversion campaign witnessed an impressive LTO of about 28%. These results highlight the positive impact of implementing a rewarming strategy using CustomerLabs CDP helped in enhancing lead performance and conversion rates.