The Holy Grail of advertising has always been to reach the right customer, with the right message, at the right time. Which is easy to say, but actually doing it has always been phenomenally hard.
Even when you know who your best customers are, catching them at the right moment with a message that gets their attention and persuades them to buy is immensely difficult to pull off.
Luckily, Salesforce and Google have come together to make it a lot easier. In a July 2017 webinar titled Connect Your Google Search and YouTube Advertising to the Customer Journey, Google’s Global Product Lead for Search Audience Solutions, Kiloran de Lapérouse, and Salesforce Enterprise Account Executive, Paul Feltham, showed advertisers how they can use Salesforce Advertising Studio and Google Customer Match to create smart, segmented campaigns that deliver exponentially better results than traditional PPC marketing. (Watch the archived webinar here)
Connect Google Search advertising to the customer journey
The key is to use CRM data from Salesforce to identify likely buyers, and then use Google Customer Match to reach those customers – or other buyers like them – with targeted AdWords messages at crucial points in their customer journey.
This approach enables advertisers to get relevant messages in front of likely buyers at favourable times – without the wasted cost and effort of also reaching people who aren’t likely to buy.
Three ways to use Customer Match
Kiloran outlined three ways brands can use Customer Match to achieve key marketing objectives:
- Customer Retention – Advertisers can create a list of loyal customers in Salesforce, and then reach those people via Google Customer Match with special offers and limited-time discounts. Conveniently, Customer Match doesn’t need an email address to find customers on Google, YouTube, Gmail and Shopping; it can also match them on offline data such as name, postal address and phone number.
- Customer Acquisition – One of Customer Match’s most powerful features is its ability to take a list of high-value customers and find similar buyers who aren’t already in the advertiser’s Salesforce CRM. By de-duping the original list against the people it finds, it can put targeted messages in front of an audience of high-value lookalikes, without incurring the cost of targeting existing customers.
- Suppression – By creating a list of all existing customers, and asking Customer Match to suppress them, advertisers can be sure their campaign only reaches net new customers.
A wealth of industry use cases
Beyond these general uses, Kiloran talked about specific use cases across different industries, where Salesforce and Customer Match can make a significant impact on search marketing results.
- In Financial Services, providers have seen success by using customers’ previous purchase histories to target customers searching for products like credit cards with personalised offers.
- In Automotive, manufacturers and resellers have seen great results from targeting customers who have previously engaged with the brand (e.g. by visiting the website) but not bought anything.
- In Retail, a popular strategy is to create a list of the highest-value purchasers from the previous year and target them with loyalty discounts, using personalised messages that reference past purchases.
Combine Customer Match with RLSA for the best effect
Kiloran acknowledged that webinar viewers may feel slightly confused by the similarity of some of these approaches to remarketing campaigns that use Google’s Remarketing List to Search Ads (RLSA) product.
In fact, the two products complement each other well, she said, as a Customer Match list comes from the advertiser’s own CRM and therefore can be made up of known high-value customers, while an RLSA list is third-party data and thus the value of the customers is less known.
An effective bidding strategy, she added, was to combine CM and RSLA lists for maximum reach, but to bid 1.1x more on CM customers.
Advertisers see fantastic early results
The integration between Advertising Studio and Customer Match is already over a year old, and lots of Salesforce customers have seen fantastic early results from it.
Kiloran highlighted four customer success stories, with Turkey’s Pegasus Airlines; designer fashion brand Roland Mouret; kids’ clothing retailer The Children’s Place, and software vendor TurboTax.
All of them have used Customer Match to deliver tailored messages to specific customer segments, such as customers who bought at the same time last year, or customers likely to buy at the start of a new tax year. The results speak for themselves:
- Pegasus Airlines saw a 13% lower cost per acquisition (CPA), and 12% more revenue per conversion.
- Roland Mouret reduced CPA by 87% month-on-month and saw AdWords conversion rates increase by 22%. A particularly effective element of its strategy was to create personalised landing pages for high-value customers.
- The Children’s Place saw a 237% increase in click-through rates and a 153% increase in conversions.
- TurboTax enjoyed a 31% decrease in CPA and a 19% increase in conversion rates.
Unlock the full value of your CRM data
The combination of Advertising Studio and Customer Match is a gift for marketers who have historically found it a challenge to connect their customer data with their search advertising strategies.
It’s a fantastic way to overcome issues like the need to keep customer data secure and keep Google apprised of who has or hasn’t opted in at any given moment. With the integration of the two products, customer data is always encrypted, and Salesforce continuously refreshes opt-in status with Google, so that ads and messages are never shown to customers who have opted out.
With Salesforce and Customer Match, advertisers can unlock the true value of the customer data in their CRM – using it to deliver the right message, to the right customer, at the right time.
Find out more
Learn more about using Salesforce Advertising Studio with Google Customer Match in the on-demand recording of the webinar: Connect Your Google Search and YouTube Advertising to the Customer Journey
