Everyone wants a personalised experience online, and nobody likes irrelevant adverts. In the digital age, you need to have that personal touch if your brand is going to be seen by the right people. #marketing #adverts #advertising #crm #customerexperience
These days, everyone wants a much more personalised experience when it comes to shopping online. Bombarding people with marketing they see as irrelevant is likely to put them off ever considering your brand, so it’s important that you target the right people, with the right adverts. People-based marketing improves your advertising efficiency and introduces that personal touch which customers really connect with because it feels tailored to them. If you want to boost your brand and succeed in the digital age, then you need to fine tune your marketing strategy and send your ads in the right direction.
People-based Marketing: Using Email as an ID
We’re all so connected to screens these days, that using a multi-channel method is the only way of gaining traction for your brand. The problem with this is that someone can appear to be a different person from one device to the next. The way to get round it is to get people to sign in using their email addresses, so they can be targeted across all devices. If you’ve connected with a customer once and linked them to their email, then you can reach them by various different channels. This could be through audience tools on social media or using Identity Resolution, which collects and matches identifiers across devices and touchpoints back to an email address. From the smartphone in their pocket to their desktop computer, once you have an email address, the digital world is your oyster. You can assemble a cohesive, omnichannel view of each customer.
An email address is the key because not only is it a person’s online identity, you can attach deterministic attributes to them based on the behaviours they display and information they provide when completing a form, transaction or survey to ensure they see relevant advertising. Marketers used to use cookies to identify the pages an individual had viewed on one website in order to direct them to relevant content elsewhere. A good example would be tracking the items a customer viewed multiple times but didn’t purchase, so they could be targeted with adverts for that product which might spur them on to buy it. These days cookies – which simply target devices – are no longer enough.
Customers may browse and buy across multiple devices, and retargeting them may be a wasteful exercise if the customer has bought the product on a different device. People based targeting is far more effective. This can be done by leveraging an identity graph, available from technology platforms such as esbconnect. Although nothing beats building your own first party email database, you can benefit from the scale and insight of other data providers.
Why build your email list?
If customers are landing on your website, you want to capture their details as soon as possible. Rather than rely on cookies, an email stored in your CRM will gain you an ID which will work across multiple channels and devices. Your CRM is a means by which you can store your customers’ online behaviour and any demographics they may tell you about, using their email identities to target them more effectively. That data can be enhanced using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) or a Data Management Platform (DMP). You gather a lot of information on your customers aside from their email addresses – phone numbers, occupations, purchase histories, newsletter subscriptions and downloads, for example. All that information is joined up in CDP, so IDs, devices, domains and browsers are connected under a person’s digital identity.
You can then start to create audiences to target which you reach via any channel, knowing you are targeting individuals and not devices.
By segmenting individuals not devices, you can make sure the advertising they see feels relevant to them across multiple different channels. These segments can be based on the information you collect and tailor to your brand. You can create sales funnels based on engagement which span multiple channels and prevent over-targeting by placing frequency caps on an individual not a device. This personalises the customer experience and makes them far more likely to interact with your brand, clicking on your adverts and hopefully following through on their interest in your products, keeping them coming back or encouraging them to buy for the first time.
Acquiring new customers by any means entails spending money, which is why you want the most cost-effective solution. People-based marketing produces better results, and by using your CRM data to build lookalikes and identify people, you can significantly reduce your cost, increase accuracy in targeting and build out relevant segments. People are buying across multiple devices, and this method improves your advertising efficiency and gets your brand seen by the right people. To find out more about acquiring new customers, building up your CRM base, enhancing your current email base and building an identity graph, get in touch with the esbconnect team today.
