Social Ad Targeting to Address the Customer Journey – Phase IV : Loyalty Targeting

It’s a significant outlay of money to gain a new customer
so it’s often more beneficial to keep the ones you already have.  The loyalty phase of the customer journey
keeps your best customers coming back for more. 
They may also refer your brand to friends and family; an extremely
efficient way to add new customers into the funnel.  Paid social media is one way to give
attention to this most-deserving audience to maintain what has become an
important business relationship.  Here
are some ways to use paid social to reach your loyal customers and impact your
bottom line:

• Cross-sell products and/or services.  Basically, sell more stuff.   For instance, if a customer purchases an amazing set of earrings and there are more pieces to the set, you can market the remaining pieces such as the bracelet, ring, and necklace.
• Upsell products and/or services.  Have an upgrade available or a version with more bells and whistles?  This is a good opportunity to see if a satisfied customer is ready to step up their game!
• Reward them.  Don’t let them forget how important they are to you.   One way to do this is to reward them with special deals, gift cards, exclusive events, and/or other meaningful ways to show how important they are to your business.
• Collect positive reviews.  A positive review of a product or service can help convert a shopper in the consideration phase.   Asking your loyal customers to provide reviews or recommendations goes a long way, especially since many users count on them when making a purchase decision.

Building your
audiences:

It’s important to employ a few pieces of technology into audience
targeting during the loyalty phase. 
We’ve mentioned using the pixel data in many of our blog posts as it’s a
critical piece to leverage when constructing your targeting strategy.   For
the best results, be sure events are tracked (note: avoid using automatic
events).  With the pixel in place and
firing correctly, you can create custom loyalty audiences and market to them
accordingly.  Here are just a few
examples.

• Audiences
  that spend certain currency ranges.  
  If the average cart size is $50 and you have a customer that spent $20,
  there might be an opportunity to increase their overall spend by offering meaningful
  suggestions of other products or services.  
  Conversely, if someone has purchased well above the average cart size,
  let’s say $250 in this example, this might be a good opportunity to reward
  them.
• Audiences
  that purchased specific products/services. 
  What if you have learned from customer behavior that if someone
  purchased Y, they’d be inclined to purchase Z? 
  Let’s say you sell outdoor furniture and if you sell a couch, you can
  almost always sell a fire bit in the same line.   Here’s a great opportunity to cross-sell the
  fire pit to the couch audience.  
• Audiences
  that haven’t purchased recently.  Has
  it been a while since someone purchased from you?  Maybe it’s time to remind them of your value
  prop or maybe you have a new line to sell.  
  It could also be that it’s time for a replacement or refill.  All good use cases to use paid to target
  based on your unique purchase cycle data. 

In addition, or instead of a pixel, you may have email
addresses and/or other pieces of contact data such as phone number to do a
match.  The data is always hashed (so it
won’t give away any personal information, same goes for the pixel).   If CRM data is available and to the extent
it can be segmented, you can create audiences similar to the ones listed above
… and then some.    

The other audience that you shouldn’t ignore are those
connected to your social pages.  These
are your social fans and followers.  They
took time to connect with you and may see your organic content through their
feeds so be sure and pay some special attention to them.   Rewards and exclusive offers or even unique experiences
are just one way to express their importance to your brand and help solidify
your relationship.

Using your
audiences:

To get the most of audiences during the loyalty phase,
use objectives such as reach and website conversion.  Steer away from awareness, unless you are
introducing a new product or services.  Focusing
on engagement may limit your reach, so stick with reach to get to the most
loyal customers you can from your finite set. 

Like re-targeting audiences, loyalty audiences require
some special care.  Here’s a few best
practices to keep top-of-mind when using paid social to target to this unique
group:

• Pay
  attention to your frequency.  This is
  likely not an awareness play be sure you have a frequency that leads to the
  desired behavior but doesn’t hit a point of diminishing returns. 
• Apply the
  right content approach.  Do not
  blanket a general message to this group. 
  Each audience likely supports a specific purpose so make sure that you
  are thinking through your marketing communications strategy and asking for the
  right call-to-action.
• Keep your
  data well-organized.  These audiences
  are dynamic.   Be sure that you are
  updating your data and creating a naming system that keeps the data current and
  makes swapping out audiences a breeze. 
  It will take you some time up front to plan it out but will save more
  time than that (plus some) in the end.
• Watch
  your budgets.  These audiences might
  be relatively small in some cases so don’t feel like it requires the same lofty
  dollars that might be needed for campaigns in other phases of the journey. 
• Turn on conversion
  lift studies:  Are you wanting to
  know how well your efforts paid off? 
  It’s getting much easier to run conversion
  lift studies to show how exposure to your content impacted marketing
  events from your audience when compared to a control group.

You are up-to-speed on the benefits and ways to use paid social audience targeting during the loyalty phase of the customer journey.

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