So you’re winning customers and growing revenue—that’s good! But don’t commit the all-too-frequent mistake of ignoring the long-term potential of using your customer data. Those customers are more than just revenue sources; in aggregate, they’re key to driving better performance from future marketing campaigns.
At Playbook, we use lists of customers in these three ways—each with an eye toward ever-improving KPIs. Here’s how the initiatives break down.
1. Exclusions
This one is all about saving wasted spend and making sure your budget is applied where it’ll drive incremental value. We work to ensure each of our clients regularly (ideally weekly or dynamically) creates and exports lists of existing customers and/or prospects already in the funnel. From there, we make sure those people are excluded from campaigns. Without applying some rigor here, you’re spending to convert the converted (and those who are about to convert without seeing another ad).
2. Custom Audience Targeting
We work with our clients to target custom audiences of people who’ve shown a high likelihood of converting so we can retarget them and/or increase what we’re willing to pay to engage them. We start by doing this once, as a test. If we see success, we refresh the list at least monthly.
Part of the nuance here is aligning on what “success” and “high likelihood” mean—if our audiences are a bit broader, goals should reflect that (in other words, if a test doesn’t work, you can consider narrowing the audience and trying again).
3. Lookalike Audiences
Every two or three months, we ensure each client pulls their high-LTV customers so we can build lookalike audiences. As with custom audience targeting, we do this once as a test and refresh if successful (which it usually is). It’s a great way to expand your targeting to net-new customers likely to be interested in your product or service.
It’s All About the Bottom Line
There are numerous other ways to use your audience lists—for instance, you can segment by levels of engagement and modify your messaging accordingly—but the above three initiatives have proven, over and over, to be worth the time and resources for a client’s bottom line.
