Matching your customer data to online platforms allows you to create better customer profiles and audiences for more targeted advertising. This leads to improved results and cost savings.
As an organization, you often have a CRM system filled with valuable customer data. However, its true value is realized only when used effectively. We're not just talking about smart data usage in customer interactions; did you know that you can also leverage CRM data online for strategies like a next-best-action approach or excluding a specific group to ultimately save costs? In this article, we'll explain how to approach this.
Challenging but Effective
Organizations possess a wealth of data, including purchase behavior, customer service interactions, contact information, surveys, and more. How convenient would it be to link this data to online (search) behavior to create a comprehensive customer profile? Very convenient, as it turns out. This integration forms unique profiles ideal for personalization, enabling better alignment of marketing efforts with the needs and preferences of your target audience. This results in a more effective return on online media investments. But where do you start? Combining CRM data with online data can be a substantial challenge.
Step 1: Break Down Silos
Surprisingly, the first step is not finding the right technology. It begins with collecting the right data and ensuring that the right departments and colleagues collaborate. When digital marketers on the marketing team collaborate with CRM data specialists, new and more efficient opportunities arise to reach your target audience.
Step 2: Customer Match
The second step involves strategy determination. One of the tactics we recommend is Customer Match. This allows you to recognize customers and prospects on major online platforms like Google and Meta without using third-party cookies. The focus is entirely on first-party data – the data you, as an advertiser, have collected from your customers. With Customer Match, you combine your CRM data with the first-party data of prominent advertising platforms.
How Customer Match Works
When a consumer is logged into the Google environment, they are recognized based on their Google ID. During the creation of this Google ID, the consumer has given permission for specific purposes, such as recognition for relevant ads. Matching a customer database with Google's ID database reveals which of your customers are also in Google's database, having given permission for personalized ads. Customer Match provides an ideal application to reach your customers through the online channel.
You can upload your own data to an advertising platform such as Google or Meta. The data must be encrypted according to the platform's specifications to anonymize it. Only the corresponding IDs are then uploaded to the audience. Google does not distinguish between different data layouts or other deviations in the data. Keep in mind that the matching process lacks intelligence: any difference in the data prevents a match, even though it might be the same consumer in reality.
Advanced matching algorithms, provided by partners like EDM, result in more matches between the customer database and platform IDs, leading to significant benefits:
Such a matching process is not simple. To make it effective, our advice is to work with a matching partner. A matching partner prevents issues and prioritizes data quality as their main business. Standardizing and unifying data alone leads to a significantly higher matching percentage than doing everything yourself. Moreover, a partner has extensive knowledge of how such a process should be legally regulated.
The beauty of Customer Match is that it is not only highly effective for businesses but also brings many benefits to consumers. Recognized customers now enjoy a more personalized experience, premium content, and tailored recommendations online. It's an easy-to-implement application for including customers in online audiences or search when targeting specific segments. At the same time, it provides the flexibility to exclude customers from certain online campaigns. There's nothing more annoying for existing customers than seeing an ad asking them to become a customer again.
This blog is written by Mark Wilmont. He also wrote a sequel blog: Putting Customer Match into action.
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In this brochure you will learn more about how you can apply Audiences from EDM and what the advantages are of targeting the most relevant audience
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Are you responsible for acquiring new customers? Do you use data in your campaigns? Then use the SMART Audience Builder and convert up to 600% better than before in just a few clicks.
The SMART Audience Builder is an easy-to-use cloud tool that provides organizations with the ability to apply knowledge and insights to their own marketing data in order to increase conversions. Load any form of your own CRM data (Postal Code, House Number, Addition, Email, Phone) into the tool and gain additional insights from your own data. Through automatic integration with various knowledge and intelligence sources, you can apply attribute selections and predictive models to set up the most effective target audiences for activation. Throughout the entire process, you remain in control of your own data.
Approaching new relevant consumers who are genuinely interested in your proposition or product? EDM helps organizations create insights into existing customer groups, which can then be used to find potential new customers within the Netherlands.
With Audiences, we analyze the target audience based on historical data and data from current customer segments. This results in a target audience profile and channel preferences. We then set goals for all desired channels (Direct Mail, DPG media, Marktplaats, phone, and inserting). With access to extensive consumer databases, the best audiences are created based on various socio-demographic data, lifestyle characteristics, or advanced look-alike models. This enables the creation and activation of the best possible audiences, resulting in an average doubling of conversions.
An integrated customer acquisition solution. The proven method for effective data-driven marketing.
For every organization, acquiring new customers is crucial. To achieve this, recruitment campaigns need to be set up as effectively as possible. This means approaching the right target audience through the right channels in a data-driven manner. EDM has a proven method for data-driven marketing, which involves an iterative process consisting of 6 steps:
EDM analyzes the existing customer database and ensures its accuracy and currency. It improves the quality of incoming leads and analyzes them to gain insights into "who is the customer?". Then, an assessment is made of the channels already being used, which additional channels can be added, and how to optimize them as effectively as possible. This results in improved conversion rates and effectiveness, which serves as input for reworking non-conversions and continuously optimizing recruitment campaigns.
Are you responsible for acquiring new customers? Do you use data in your campaigns? Then use the SMART Audience Builder and convert up to 600% better than before in just a few clicks.
The SMART Audience Builder is an easy-to-use cloud tool that provides organizations with the ability to apply knowledge and insights to their own marketing data in order to increase conversions. Load any form of your own CRM data (Postal Code, House Number, Addition, Email, Phone) into the tool and gain additional insights from your own data. Through automatic integration with various knowledge and intelligence sources, you can apply attribute selections and predictive models to set up the most effective target audiences for activation. Throughout the entire process, you remain in control of your own data.
Approaching new relevant consumers who are genuinely interested in your proposition or product? EDM helps organizations create insights into existing customer groups, which can then be used to find potential new customers within Belgium.
With Audiences, we analyze the target audience based on historical data and data from current customer segments. This results in a target audience profile and channel preferences. We then set goals for all desired channels (Direct Mail, DPG media, Marktplaats, phone, and inserting). With access to extensive consumer databases, the best audiences are created based on various socio-demographic data, lifestyle characteristics, or advanced look-alike models. This enables the creation and activation of the best possible audiences, resulting in an average doubling of conversions.
An integrated customer acquisition solution. The proven method for effective data-driven marketing.
For every organization, acquiring new customers is crucial. To achieve this, recruitment campaigns need to be set up as effectively as possible. This means approaching the right target audience through the right channels in a data-driven manner. EDM has a proven method for data-driven marketing, which involves an iterative process consisting of 6 steps:
EDM analyzes the existing customer database and ensures its accuracy and currency. It improves the quality of incoming leads and analyzes them to gain insights into "who is the customer?". Then, an assessment is made of the channels already being used, which additional channels can be added, and how to optimize them as effectively as possible. This results in improved conversion rates and effectiveness, which serves as input for reworking non-conversions and continuously optimizing recruitment campaigns.