PostFunnel, in partnership with Blue Moon Digital, Inc., is presenting you with this guide on how to optimize marketing programs for your audiences, across multiple channels. Blue Moon Digital is a data-based digital consultancy that provides its clients with a comprehensive approach to their online ecosystem. They’ve spent 17 years perfecting this process for Consumer brands.
Like many brands, you probably leverage email, paid search, SEO, paid social, organic social, affiliate networks—the list goes on, right? And like all brands, you want to provide your customers with the best experience – wherever they meet your campaigns.
Question is, how do you do that when there are so many channels, data points, and touchpoints involved?
It’s not the simplest thing in the world, but luckily – it’s not rocket science either. And the services and tools to help you with it are readily available.
In a nutshell, it starts with making sure all your channels and tools are conversing with one another. That’s the only way you can really understand who your customer is, which is an essential requirement in providing excellent user experience.
Then, this dialogue must be accessible: you need clean data that clearly paints your audience’s picture.
Eventually, with these data and synchronization in place, you can enter a level of sophistication in which you provide experiences that can increase the lifetime value of your customers and improve retention. If you align with the audience, you might find hidden revenue you didn’t know was missing.
In this post, we will focus on the first part – the ways different channels can “converse” and assist one another. In other words, how your digital channels can complement work together.
Email and SMS
Email and SMS provide a straightforward way to tailor content. Email lists should be segmented, at its most foundational level by subscribers vs. customers. From there, we can enrich segmentation, for example, by building on known purchase information such as recency or demographic details, including gender, location, age, and more.
As you collect data, you can further enhance the email subscriber’s record with what products and marketing messages your audience engages with or begin to infer what they might like based on behavior. This data should help dictate your communications strategy. With the correct content, you should see users increase engagement, convert more, and enter a cycle where they are eager to open your sends.
Paid Search & Shopping
The pay-per-click strategies of Search and Shopping are high-performance channels, typically focused on ROI. Many brands work to own key search terms that will drive performance, but what can better data and personalization do for you here?
With a few audience lists, you can begin customizing the user’s landing page experience or which ads they are served. Advancing further, you can focus specific content or bid strategy to critical audiences, for example, identifying terms where you’d like to improve ROI and serving ads for those against your highest Lifetime Value customers. Additionally, by including these signals, SEM automation can leverage insights to further tailor bidding against your goals.
Search Engine Optimization
Many people consider search engine optimization (SEO) to be focused on organic ranking, but the contributing factors are quite complex.
Understanding your customers and their search behavior allows you to decide what keywords to target, optimizations to prioritize, content pages to build out, and enhancements to the user experience to ultimately improve page rank.
Taking this process one step further, consider using what you know about your users to tailor the site for an improved experience, which impacts rank. Highlight the products they are more likely to be interested in with recommendations or create a cohesive message and share across platforms.
Paid Social, Video Ads & Programmatic
Segmentation can go much further than just age or gender. And it should. Importing your audience lists allows you to break out creative to strengthen ads that resonate. Ads can be simple or complex (always use your data to determine what works), but the right message can mean the difference between making another sale or being ignored.
Already customizing creative to granular customer segments? Consider a dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform to provide scale in serving up personalized ad experiences.
Another exciting tool to leverage is similar-audiences or look-a-like targeting that you can build once your lists are uploaded to a platform. These allow you to reach users who look like a list you have – e.g., purchased men’s jackets.
Paid Media channels also present the opportunity for cross-channel customer activation. If you are seeing email fatigue in a customer segment, you can re-engage those users with compelling messaging such as new arrivals or an offer in Paid Social, Video, or Programmatic advertising. Or if you’re hoping to acquire new subscribers to your Email file, try suppressing your active buyer file and targeting look-alikes of frequent purchasers, utilizing a lead generation ad format.
Remarketing
Usually the most dynamic of the set, remarketing allows you to reach users with ads highlighting products or services they view via dynamic or static creatives. This strategy recovers users who you have already reached and can help drive conversion you almost lost.
In addition to the behavioral targeting inherent in remarketing – e.g., the ability to retarget users you’ve previously engaged with – more audience data points can be layered into a campaign to further refine the experience and improve performance.
For example, a brand may serve a different creative with messaging about completing their purchase with an awards point redemption to a loyalty program segment vs. a 15% off for new customers.
Affiliate
Leveraging your audience data in an affiliate program can help control costs against your investment in publishers promoting the brand, increasing profitability.
Many affiliate networks now allow for different commission structures based on customer data, such as new or returning purchasers. In some cases, this data is available with the network via their pixel implementation. You may also have the ability to onboard data from outside sources to enhance your controls even further.
A better understanding of your audience and their preferences for specific content can also inform your affiliate strategy. This can be taken into account when prioritizing opportunities in publisher recruitment, link creation, ad placements, and content development.
Analytics
To round out all these segmentation opportunities, it is essential to continuously learn about your users. Companies should understand site behavior on the whole, and by subgroup, unlocking incredible opportunities for both brands and consumers.
Make sure to segment your users in creative ways, test unique site experiences against them, and continuously learn and improve their experiences.
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Understanding the consumer and using your data to improve your customer touchpoints is not the way of the future—it is the here and now.
The above digital marketing strategies, coupled with the right technology to activate them, whether CDPs such as Optimove or ad platforms like Google and Facebook, will help you get the most out of your programs.
The end result? An optimized audience-first approach that gets your customers to shop and love the brand even more.
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Stay tuned for more from PostFunnel’s partnership with Blue Moon Digital
