Reach Customers on Every Channel
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how to use email data for advertising.
- Describe your mobile messaging opportunities.
Use Email Data for Targeted Advertising
Marketing technology and advertising technology have merged, and that provides a great opportunity for email marketers to increase their business’s reach and performance. By combining these technologies, you can use all of your first-party data to create highly targeted advertising. The key to bringing all of this technology together is the email address.
As we mentioned earlier, people use their email address to sign in to accounts, social networks, and apps—to do almost anything on the Internet. That provides you, as a marketer, with a great opportunity to reach out to customers on social media through display advertising on websites, or on mobile apps. This is all done by using the email address to connect your first-party data to your target customers. You can do this securely in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Because Salesforce keeps all of your data secure you can rest assured that by creating targeted ad campaigns, you’re not passing on any subscribers’ personally identifiable information (PII) to any advertising partners.
Once you’ve created your automated campaigns, both scheduled and triggered, you can enhance their effectiveness through targeted advertising. There are four automated campaigns that you can add advertising to. Let’s take a look at each one.
Welcome Series
When customers buy your product or service, remove them from your digital and social advertising to new customers. This is a great way to save advertising dollars, but even better, it provides a superior customer experience.
Unengaged Subscribers
Keep an eye on subscriber engagement. Move any subscribers who have not opened an email in 90 days to an advertising campaign. That is, get your message in front of them on social media and across the Internet. The benefit here is twofold: You ensure that you are not hurting your email deliverability by continuing to send emails to unengaged subscribers. And you give yourself a chance to reconnect with these subscribers through different avenues.
Upsell Campaigns
Since you know what your current customers have purchased, try sending them ads for complementary products or services. You also can target users with renewal ads for monthly or annual renewals.
Abandoned Cart or Browse
All customers can become distracted. A great way to stay in front of them is to remind them about what they were doing the last time they visited your website. And this doesn’t have to be just about products or services. You can retarget subscribers with any piece of content that they have viewed. So go ahead and remind them about videos and white papers they may have started to view before.
By combining email and advertising, you are beginning to provide your customers with a more consistent and personalized cross-channel experience. Creating a consistent experience can increase the reach and frequency of your marketing efforts and drive up conversions.
Reach Customers on the Go
Consumers take their mobile devices everywhere they go. A phone or tablet is often the first and the last thing people look at every day. And consumers read more than half of all emails on a mobile device. So make sure mobile is part of your messaging strategy. But be careful about how you message your subscribers.
First, be sure your emails are mobile optimized. Make sure they look good on a mobile device and that all of the click-through links take subscribers to mobile-friendly pages. Walk through the whole process as a customer to ensure your mobile experience is user friendly.
Once you’ve got your emails looking great, you can start adding additional channels. However, keep in mind that consumers are protective of their personal devices. Use mobile messaging such as MMS and SMS with caution, and only for your most pressing needs. For push notifications you have more flexibility, since users can opt in or out of them—and can turn off location tracking—on their own devices.
Push Notifications
When you create push notifications or social or display ads to appear on mobile devices, follow the same basic guidelines for frequency and content that you would for email. But remember that push notifications offer you the advantage of using location data: When users are in your app, you can send them targeted offers as they approach your store, trade show booth, or any physical location you choose.
Here’s a short video that demonstrates how to create a push notification.
Text Messaging
Next let’s take a look at the most personal type of messaging, text messaging, also known as SMS or MMS. Use this kind of communication for the most urgent or personal types of messages. Outbound text messages from a business to a subscriber are great for appointment reminders, password resets, or shipping notifications. But don’t send too many, or customers will opt out.
SMS is a valuable tool for gaining new subscribers with inbound messages. Unlike with push notifications, you can reach consumers with SMS wherever they are. Simply offer your potential subscribers a chance to opt in with a short code (number) and a keyword. For example, “Join our email list and save 10% by texting your email address to OFFER at 12345.” You can post an opt-in code on any advertising sign or billboard.
Check out how to create a text message in the Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Stay Consistent
No matter what kind of advertising and mobile messaging you decide to use, remember to make sure it’s consistent. You want to convey the same message to your subscribers with your email marketing, mobile messaging, and other advertising. Customers on their mobile devices flip between social apps, emails, mobile web, and text messages. Be sure to produce a great and reliable experience no matter how they connect with you.
Get Started
You have all the tools you require to set up successful marketing automations and great customer experiences. Start by looking at your data and your email campaigns, to see what you can automate. Look at how you can schedule automated email sends and create targeted and personalized messages.
Set up your onboarding or welcome series, and remember to say thank you. Move on to mobile messaging to put the finishing touches on a great connected experience and forge a deeper bond with your customers.
Get started today!