Shachar Radin Shomrat, CMO at myThings suggests how marketers can extract maximum potential out of retargeting
The multi-device nature of today’s consumer has created a significant value add opportunity for advertisers leveraging martech to enhance and properly optimize performance marketing initiatives at scale.
The rise of big data, together with the subsequent proliferation of programmatic machine-learning, has long heralded the arrival of 360-degree customer insight coupled with fully personalized messaging.
But for most marketers, this is still a visage on the horizon rather than an everyday reality. Leveraging data to generate actual performance takes nous and knowhow, as well as a fundamental understanding of how different devices, channels and systems fit together.
Luckily for marketing departments everywhere, as the scope of the datasets at our disposal expands, newer and better technologies emerge to aid this extraction of value. Below, I take a look at some of the marketing technologies that are converging with retargeting and enabling savvy players to deliver next-level performance advertising.
Convergence #1: Super-charging retargeting with first-party data
The most effective retargeting campaigns, those that drive performance at scale across key segments, feed their algorithms and programmatic bidding engines as many high-quality datasets as possible.
Overlaying anonymized data and internal segmentation rules from an advertiser’s own CRM into a retargeting campaign is a booster shot to arm of campaign performance. On desktop, this data can be leveraged via retargeting tags, offline XML feeds and via DMP integrations – all without sharing any personally identifiable information (PII).
For advertisers expanding their marketing efforts from desktop to mobile or app, this data further enhances cross-device messaging initiatives by enriching the data powering underlying campaign algorithms and improving the retargeter’s ability to engage effectively with users away from an advertiser’s website or app and beyond social networking inventory.
Convergence #2: Adding mobile marketing data to the mix via MEPs
On the app front, it is the duty of Mobile Engagement Platforms (MEPs) to serve the roles played by CRM systems and automated marketing suites on desktop.
MEPs are responsible for syncing audience segmentation and messaging across mobile-centric channels such as push notifications and SMS, as well as email.
Once an advertiser has onboarded a platform and established their segmentation and messaging rules, they can then integrate their retargeting campaigns with the platform, syncing anonymous segments across these channels. This will further extend the level of consistency across each mobile channel, as well as establishing an equilibrium between them for each respective segment.
Convergence #3: Measuring impact across segments and devices
After syncing CRM and marketing automation data on desktop and in the mobile ecosystem, marketeers can tap into further enhanced retargeting performance by measuring campaigns on a per-segment and per-device level.
Operating with this level of granularity allows for more effective exposure of the incremental uplift attributable to retargeting, via A/B testing. Armed with this insight, they can then work with their retargeters to dynamically shift budget to the best-performing segments and devices.
For maximum efficacy, retargeting segmentation should properly reflect the business logic of an advertiser’s own sales funnel. In this way, they will then clearly be able to ascertain those segments generating the biggest uplift in KPIs and subsequently re-allocate budgets to maximize ROAS.