Converging Bought Media & CRM
When interactions within brick & mortar businesses were the primary method for customer engagement, it was human nature to craft your sales pitch specifically for each of your customers in order to ensure that they knew you cared about them as a customer.
Merchants were willing to retain every detail of the customers’ personal information, in order to enhance their overall customer experience. Amazingly enough, shopkeepers and their employees kept all of this information in their heads!
Fast forward to today and I’m excited to say that we can now handle our online digital businesses in a similar way, ultimately supporting our customers and their ideal journeys.
My first dive into this facet of advertising was using Google AdWords Customer Match to enhance Paid Search Targeting for one of the largest sports apparel companies in the world. In this environment, we were able to get our customers closer to the products that they had previously purchased, while also showing similar products that they may have an affinity towards based on web analytics. As you can imagine, the performance was exponentially better than a blanketed “All Users” approach.
While CTR did suffer in some instances, CVR gained exponentially in all cases, which shows people are more apt to convert in a personalized environment.
Google just recently released Customer Match-Based Similar Audiences for Search Ads, which allows you to target similar audiences to your CRM lists in search. That said, finding new customers just got a heck of a lot more targeted from an upper funnel perspective.
Facebook also offers great options when it comes to leveraging your customer data and applying it either directly to your CRM lists or targeting audiences that are similar to your customer lists (lookalikes).
Imagine if back in the pre-Internet days, you could literally take all of the customers you currently had and find new customers based on their information. This would be a game changer!
With the explosive growth of personal assistants, personalization could shift more to what the platforms know about the users, as opposed to the data we have in our CRMs. Either way, we wouldn’t be doing our customers right if we didn’t try to get personal with them when the opportunity is right there in front of us.
At the end of the day, from a 30K foot perspective, where the rubber meets the road (and any other kind of cool business terms we can throw in here): Try to always step out of your digital shoes and take it back to a brick and mortar perspective. You might find some cool insights once you get out of your digital box.
Finally, is it not true that you want to go “where everybody knows your name?”
If you would like to learn more about how the Enilon team can help you leverage your customer data to enhance their journeys, please feel free to reach out and we’ll be happy to chat!
Author: Zach Griffith, Director of Search
