Adopt these retargeting techniques to drive LMS completions
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Forgetting something? How to adopt retargeting and remarketing techniques to bring learners back to your LMS and drive completions
A quick glance at your admin dashboard shows a gaping hole in course completions. While there may be a number of reasons that your learners aren’t sticking around until the end of the lesson (poor content, lack of time, etc.) that doesn’t change the fact that you need data, compliance, and completions.
Let’s assume that your learning content is great. You’ve found and implemented the right content. But no matter how engaging the content, if learners don’t have the time to dedicate to learning, they may log out before they finish a critical lesson or curricula.
Don’t worry – your marketing department knows a few tricks that can trigger your customers, clients, employees, and partners to visit your LMS again and again. These triggers fall under the “remarketing” category and will soon sound familiar to you, too.
If you’ve ever shopped online and left something in your cart when exiting that website, you’ve surely been beckoned back to the site. Later that same day, you probably noticed an advertisement showing the exact items you neglected to buy. You may have even received an email saying “Missing something? You left these items in your cart.”
These are retargeting and remarketing techniques, and they can be applied to your LMS. These are particularly helpful if you have an outfacing or enterprise LMS.
Note: LMSs are already one step ahead of corporate websites and brands because your learners are required, either through SSO or self-registration, to provide an email address when registering for courses, etc.
What’s the Difference
Retargeting often refers to ad placements and display ads that you see when browsing the internet. For a relatively low investment, you can create retargeting campaigns to display ads for your learners. This tool is great for re-engaging with your learners and upselling them when appropriate.
Remarketing is more commonly associated with email and email advertisements and promotions. This is the email you get from your favorite retailer when you abandoned your shopping cart before purchasing anything. This technique is widely loved by retailers. More than 25% of the Internet Retailer 1000 (the top 1000 retailers in the world by revenue) send shopping cart abandonment emails to their customers:
Do I Need to Be a Marketer?
No! Anyone with a computer and a small budget to test the effectiveness of these tools can create and experiment with remarketing and retargeting. If you do have a marketing department, you should collaborate to make sure your campaigns aren’t interfering with any of theirs, and so that you can share tools and accounts.
Here are a few tools that an LMS administrator, CLO, or training manager can get started with to re-engage learners who have been absent from the LMS.
Retargeting Techniques & Tools
Google Adwords
The king of retargeting, Google Adwords, makes getting started easy. The first step is to set up an Adwords account for your learning solution, corporate university, or outfacing LMS. With Adwords retargeting, you can engage learners who have left your LMS when they visit Google, browse YouTube, and use certain apps. This is free to set up, and you’ll pay per either impressions or clicks.
You can also use Adwords for remarketing. By uploading a list of your learners’ emails (with their permission and in accordance with CAN-SPAM regulations), customers will see your ads when they sign into their Gmail accounts.
Social Media Accounts
If your company or brand has an existing Twitter or Facebook presence, you can use those sites to create retargeting campaigns for your learners, potential customers, and partners.
To use Twitter for web retargeting, ask your website manager to install a Twitter website tag on your page. Now, when learners check their Twitter accounts, an ad promoting the learning course you want them to complete will appear on their Twitter feed.
Adroll
Slightly more elevated than Google Adwords, Adroll allows for deep segmentation among your audience (different learner groups, anyone). Adroll provides excellent built-in measurement so that you can prove the ROI of LMS retargeting.
A Note of Caution
If you bristle at using cookies and data to send targeted messages to your learners, then don’t do it. Retargeting and remarketing can sometimes feel intrusive or inauthentic, and you should only proceed if your entire team is on board. If emailing your learners or using their email addresses to create ads, make sure that you’re in compliance with CAN-SPAM and other legal requirements.
If you do choose to employ these marketing techniques, pay attention to the frequency and context of the ads you’re creating. When done well, retargeting and remarketing can drive learners back to your learning environment to complete courses and assessments, become certified, learn more about your product, and improve your business results.
The Roundtable LMS is perfectly configured to keep your learners engaged and drive your business through smart reporting and a better performing workforce. We’re happy to help our clients explore retargeting to maximize their learning investment. Contact us if you’d like a demo of the LMS, today.
