6 Ways To Drive More Online Revenue Using Your Customer Data

As a business, one of the most valuable things you have is your customer data. There are several different ways you can utilize your customer data in digital marketing to both re-engage current customers and find new customers.

First, let’s talk about the type of customer data you will need and how you can collect it.

What To Collect & Why

Most of your customer data will likely be collected via forms on your website or lead ads through advertising platforms like Google, LinkedIn or Facebook. Email addresses are probably the most important data point to collect. But I’d also recommend collecting names and phone numbers. If you run a local business, you’ll want to consider zip codes as well.

When you have this customer data, you’ll be able to use it for multiple purposes, including several advertising strategies across many digital platforms. We will be exploring some of the ways to use customer data in this article that will help drive additional revenue.

How To Organize The Data

The most important part of collecting customer data is organizing it in a way that’s useful for digital marketing. You should try to segment your audience in several different ways…

• Customers – People who have actually purchased your product or service.
• Leads – People who have shown interest, but haven’t yet purchased. This would be people who filled out contact forms or abandoned shopping carts.
• Website Visitors – People who have visited your site within a certain time frame.
• Inactive Customers – People who have previously purchased from you, but haven’t repurchased recently (if this applies to your business).
• Newsletter – People who have signed up for your newsletter or other way to stay in touch with you.
• Industry Lists – Sometimes if you are attending a trade show, you are able to get a list of companies or people who are attending. This can be used in several ways for digital marketing.

Once you have these customer lists being collected and organized, we can start using them in digital marketing across several different platforms.

How To Start Using The Data

The easiest way to get started with targeting lists is to start with remarketing. This can be used in several different ways…

1. Convert Prospects

Remarketing to users who have added to cart or become a lead, but not purchased your product or service yet. Remarketing ads keep your company top of mind as they browse the internet potentially doing more research on your offering.

2. Upsell Other Products Or Services

Did they buy something that you have an add-on for? You can market directly to those users with an upsell to encourage them to buy a sister product or upgrade. This is a great way to get incremental revenue because you are selling to people who have already purchased something from you. So they are more inclined to upgrade if they enjoyed their purchase.

For these ads, make sure you are giving them the benefits of the upsell so they understand why they should purchase it. You could also offer a discount code for their first purchase of the upsell. This is a great way to engrain your brand with an already engaged audience.

3. Drive Repeat Purchases

Is your product or service something that a user would repurchase? If you have a list of customers who have purchased from you in the past, but haven’t re-purchased in a while, this is a great audience to target with specific ad copy to get them to re-engage with your business.

You can target these users through channels like Search, Display and Social Media. With Search ads, the user has to be actively searching for your product or service. But social media gives you the opportunity to target an audience that is passive. It gives you an opportunity to get back in front of people who may have forgotten about what you offer.

Retargeting is the most basic way to use a list and is available across most advertising platforms. It can be good to use this strategy across multiple platforms at once, like Google Search and Facebook. This will ensure the audience is seeing your brand in multiple places and you’ll stay top of mind.

4. Exclude Audiences

This tactic is for businesses where a customer would become a lead or purchase a product once. In this case, you can exclude the audience of converters in order to save money. By not showing an ad to users who are already customers, you ensure that you won’t be paying for wasted clicks from that audience. These exclusions can be used across all platforms; Search and Social.

This is also something you will want to utilize on social media to funnel ads to the right audience and avoid audience overlap. If you are running an awareness campaign on Facebook targeting users interested in fishing and you have a remarketing campaign for website visitors, you want to make sure you are excluding the remarketing audience from your awareness campaign. This will ensure that people who have visited your site are getting the remarketing message and not the awareness message. This will help sculpt traffic, save money, and most likely improve your conversion rate.

5. Create And Target Lookalike Audiences

Facebook offers a tool called lookalike audiences, while Google Ads offers something called similar audiences. Both of these tools enable you to upload a list of your customers and create a new audience who “looks like” the audience you uploaded. This is a great way to find a prospecting audience because you can find people similar to your current customers without needing to know the exact audience attributes.

For this tactic, you want to use a customer list that is the best or most qualified customers, and is the biggest list of these types of users possible. The list you upload has to match to at least 100 people on the platform you’re using in order to use that audience for advertising or lookalikes. You want to make sure you are using a high quality seed list (like your best customers) to ensure you get good matches in your lookalike audience. You also want the list to be as large as possible so that the machine has as many data points as possible to find similarities.

6. Target Broad Keywords In Search

For a slightly more advanced strategy, you can consider using your remarketing lists in combination with broad keywords on search.

In this case, you would upload your list to Google Ads and apply the audience to the campaign. Then, you would set the Flexible Reach setting for the campaign to “Targeting.” This means that you will only show ads from that campaign to people in that audience. Once you have the audience targeting set up, you can add your broad keywords.

Since you are overlaying the remarketing audience onto the broad keywords, the keywords don’t need to be as specific. You already know this user is interested in what you offer. So showing an ad will keep your company top of mind.

You can also customize your bids for this specific audience or campaign. You may want to be more aggressive with your bids for this audience to ensure your ads show above your competitors.

This also works well for tailoring your ad copy to your audience. You may want to send a different message to people who have already visited your website. By targeting your remarketing audiences in Search campaigns, you can tailor the message to get returning customers or leads to convert.

As we have learned, there are many different ways you can use customer lists and website data for your digital marketing. This is some of the most valuable data your business has. So make sure you are utilizing it in the best ways.