Google Customer Match Ups the Ante and Gets Way Personal

When it comes to marketing, advertisers and business owners alike often spend a lot of time and money in an effort to reach their target audience. Be it by demographics like gender, age, and location or affinities like travel fans, foodies and fashion lovers – targeting the perfect consumer in a perfect way has long been an evolving process. Rumors and whispers regarding Google’s Customer Match have been circulating the internet for months and after announcing the new feature in September it is finally here!

What is Google Customer Match?

Google’s new feature, Customer Match, allows advertisers to upload lists of email addresses and create custom user audiences to market to with ads specific to them. This is a game-changing feature as it will allow you to develop different ads for consumers that are in different stages of their conversion journey. Your ads will appear on Google Search Results, YouTube and Gmail.

How to Get Email Data from You Consumers?

If you’ve already been curating email lists for your business from your ecommerce platform, CRM or signup forms, you are one step ahead in developing a Customer Match campaign. The following are a few ideas on how to begin capturing data from potential and existing consumers:

1. Ask your web developer to pull a list of email addresses of past consumers used to login to your website.
2. Include an email sign up form on your website.
3. Create a “sign up” call to action on your Facebook business page.
4. Place a newsletter sign-up sheet next to registers at any brick and mortar locations for your business.
5. Offer “email only” discounts and mention them on your sign up form and social platforms.
6. Develop a contest campaign or giveaway that requires email address submission to sign up.
7. Include a link to your email sign up form in your email signature.
8. Post free whitepapers or helpful guides that require email address submission to receive.
9. Add an “opt-in for our emails” checkbox in your ecommerce checkout page.
10. Collect email addresses at offline events like trade shows, conferences and seminars.

Get Personal: 5 Ways to Segment Your Data and Create Highly Targeted Ads

Once you have begun collecting email addresses, it is important to segment the data in order to efficiently use it to meet your marketing objectives. If you use what you know about your customers to influence them through tailored messaging, you are likely to see higher conversion rates. The following are 5 basic ways to harness the power of your customer data:

1. Existing Customers: This list features customers that have purchased in the past. Entice them to come back with messaging that features value proposition, offers discounts and educates them on other products you have.
2. Shopping Cart Abandoners: This list houses the email addresses of customers that have logged into your website and added products to their shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase. Close the sale by offering them a discount or creating an add specific to the product they abandoned.
3. Purchase History: Customers like to be informed of products they might like based on past purchases. This is a great way to upsell through targeted ads. Create a sense of urgency with expiring offers.
4. Dormant Users: This list includes the email address of customers who have not purchased or visited the website over an extended period of time. Developing ads that showcase new product features, new products and seasonal products can be highly beneficial for this list.
5. Order Value: This list segments your data based on how much consumers tend to spend when purchasing from your site. You can use this data to create targeted ads to your big spenders.

What You Need to Know

Just when you thought the ads following us around couldn’t get any creepier, Google upped the ante. Below are 3 things you should know before you set up your first Customer Match campaign:

1. According to Google/Ipsos, 2015 “Consumers in the Micro-Moment,” 70% of consumers agree that the quality, timing and relevance of a brand’s message influences their perception of the brand.
2. Early testing shows that Customer Match performs better than Facebook’s Custom Audiences and Twitter’s Tailor Audiences.
3. A Customer Match campaign must have at least 1,000 users and the list membership duration is no longer than 180 days.

Wrapping Up the Benefits of Google Customer Match

At J.M. Field Marketing, we are thrilled about Customer Match and the opportunities it will create for our clients. Customer Match will enable advertisers to better understand their customers, get a far more granular scope at how they react to different advertising and reach people with targeted messaging depending on their history. Are you interested in trying Customer Match to reach your customers? Contact us to speak to a member of our web marketing team!