What’s the single most valuable asset as a brand or company?
Customers (and potential customers)!
While it might be the most obvious answer, customer data (i.e., CRM data) is often overlooked when creating and implementing digital marketing strategies. Think about all the data generated from customers—the email newsletters they’ve signed up for, the products they’ve purchased, the events they’ve attended.
All of these data points can be put to work to maximize your digital advertising strategy.
According to research by Econsultancy and Adobe, using data for marketing that focuses on the individual ranked highly as a company’s most exciting opportunity. But how do you take it from opportunity to action?
When it comes down to it, this customer data is pointless until you put it into action and activate it. You need to go beyond the individual channels, teams, or systems because marketing is about more than single, solitary interactions—it’s about fostering a complete customer experience. The end result will be worth it. According to a McKinsey analysis, brands, and companies that put data at the core of their marketing and sales decisions achieve 15 percent to 20 percent higher ROI.
To fully activate your customer data with CRM data onboarding, you need to understand what it is, why it is valuable, and how to do it. We have your back on all that and more in this post.
What is CRM data onboarding?
CRM marketing—or, more specifically, CRM data onboarding—is an extremely powerful tool for marketers. CRM data onboarding enables marketers to create custom audiences based on your email newsletter lists, past-purchasers, event attendees, and more. CRM data onboarding allows you to target the same audience in your display campaign as you would in your email campaigns or other customer data points.
At the core of it, CRM data onboarding bridges the gap to bring offline data online, allowing marketers to leverage that data in their digital advertising strategies.
Account-based marketing (ABM) = CRM data onboarding
Does account-based marketing, or ABM, sound interesting to you? ABM encompasses tactics like CRM data onboarding and IP address targeting to enable your first-party data in a highly-focused marketing strategy. By leveraging first-party data, you can concentrate on a clearly defined group of target accounts with a personalized message.
Watch our webinar for ways you can leverage ABM in digital advertising.
How does CRM data onboarding work?
There is an easy explanation and a complex explanation, so we’ll start with the easy one.
Easy explanation:
You upload a list of first-party data of your customers, ranging from emails to postal addresses to hashed device IDs, to create a custom audience. These can be users who have already demonstrated an interest in your product or service.
Choozle’s partners match those customers to browser cookies, allowing you to serve ads to those users within any of your digital advertising campaigns.
Complex explanation:
CRM data onboarding is processed using a deterministic matching model and leveraging a user database of over 1 billion devices and 250 million unique users. These can be users that are frequent purchasers or customers who purchased specific products, long-term customers who are up for renewal, prospects who shared their contact information at a conference, and many others.
Once a list is uploaded, Choozle’s partners find all of the possible cookies for an individual across their different devices to create an aggregated audience from your CRM list. That collection of targetable cookies becomes the actionable data segment that you use in your digital advertising campaigns. This process takes approximately 72 hours, at which point your custom audience will become available in the CRM Lists section of the Audiences Tool. CRM lists match 30-70 percent of the individuals from your original file, dependent upon the location of the consumers in the recordset, and the quality and freshness of the data uploaded.
But wait. How do you get the CRM lists in the first place?
Step one: Segment
Before you run to get all possible CRM lists, remember to segment, segment, segment!
Ideally, you should segment this list before uploading them for your digital advertising campaigns. Think about segmenting your customer database by value, actions, loyalty, recency, purchases, attendance, and satisfaction. The possibilities for segmentation are endless but can enhance your strategy as your target audience and creative can be based around how you’ve segmented your customer database.
Step two: Export
Each system or platform will have their own way of exporting your customer lists into a .csv file. But generally speaking, it’s pretty straightforward.
Since each system is a little different, we’ve gathered a few of the most widely used email platforms and links to their support documentation. One thing to remember as you are exporting lists, a bigger list is always going to be better. But it’s still worth testing if you have a smaller file, but it could be challenging to scale your digital advertising campaigns.
Step three: Onboard
While this step might be a bit mundane by formatting .csv templates with your customer records, it’s a necessary step to ensure your audience segment is ready when you need it. A few things to remember as you onboard your segmented customer records:
- CRM lists must have at least 100 unique records to be processed.
- Each row should represent one user and have an email, phone number, or both.
- Each row of data completed in the template is counted as one record.
- Valid phone numbers should be listed without dashes or parentheses between numbers.
With Choozle’s CRM data onboarding solution, with an activated Data Package you may upload up to 40K CRM records without incurring an additional charge.
Step four: Activate
Congrats! You’ve done the work to get a CRM list, segment the list, and onboard the list. Now’s the time to enable your CRM data list in your digital advertising strategy. While CRM targeting is considered as a top-of-the-funnel strategy, you should take advantage that the customers on your CRM list might already be familiar with your brand or company.
When it comes to copy and content for your ads and landing page, don’t overcomplicate it. Your ads for CRM lists don’t have to be that profound: They can include a message that is seasonal, compelling, relevant, or personal. Think about how you segmented your customer database in the first place. That segmentation can be a starting point for creating ads that are engaging for your target audience. For instance, you could include a 10 percent off coupon code for your ads targeting past purchasers.
