Customer Match was released just over four months ago, giving you the capability to upload email addresses provided by your customer base. This enables you to target users across devices on the search network, YouTube and Gmail ads within Google AdWords.

This makes customer match a powerful feature for businesses to specifically target their existing customers with specific content at precise moments.

Before starting, it’s worth keeping in mind that the quality of your CRM is important as you need the following criteria collected as well as a user’s email address;

Products the user has bought

Their buying habits

Trends from your users

The next step is to plan how to split your email addresses into different groups as this will allow you to target each group correctly with an ad most relevant to them and, equally beneficial, it allows you to exclude audiences which you feel wouldn’t appreciate the ad.

The benefits of excluding an audience from your ads is that it allows you to make additional cost savings by ensuring your campaign reaches new customers only for example.

There is also an opportunity for you to review the ad copy being used based on behaviour patterns by testing Emotional or Rational ads for prospective and returning customers.

This post has been split down into e-Commerce and lead generation so that we can look at the different tactics you can adopt for each of these.

E-Commerce

Products

By segmenting your lists by product types you can target users with an interest in a certain category, making the ads more relevant to them.

Example:

Say you run a kitchen appliance shop, you can have an ad group for “electric cookers” and another for “toasters” with the relevant email list and ad text to target these.

Previously Converted

This strategy is particularly useful for those with big e-Commerce shops and would work well if one of your aims was to bring your previous customers back into your shop.

Example:

This is a fantastic strategy for a clothing shop. By knowing what a user has previously bought from you you can then direct them to the most relevant landing page. When writing the ad for this please be sure that you use highly targeted ad copy.

Average Order Values

Target those users who spend a large amount of money on your website and create a highly targeted campaign for them.

Example:

If you have a promotional code running on your website which offers 20% off all orders over £150 target it towards your higher spending customers to bring them back to the website to encourage them to spend some more money.

Lead Generation

Topics

When generating leads it’s good to segment your email lists by topic, that way you’re able to narrowly target the users who are interested in a certain section of your business.

Example:

A motor group could segment its email marketing lists on the basis of the different services offered such as ‘servicing’, ‘parts’ or ‘sales’.

Sales Funnel

A really well targeted approach is to identify the different levels in your sales funnel and then to target the user at each level of the sales process.

For Example:

If a user completes an enquiry form at their local gym target them to sign up for the gym’s full package of services. If the user filled out a form specifically for personal training sessions target them to sign up for PT sessions.

Last Action

Target a user based on the last action that they took on your website. To do this go into Google Analytics and analyse your “Behaviour Flow” data.

Downloads

Whitepaper downloads are increasingly popular in the digital world. If a user downloaded a whitepaper from your website, take their email address and add it into a list based upon their interests. For example, if the user downloaded a white paper about PPC, it’s highly likely they’re interested in PPC content, so drop them into your PPC segmented list for future content releases and target them with PPC specific ads.

What Else?

Why stop there? Creating a campaign that targets all email addresses means you can catch all traffic with a generic ad which simply describes what your business does. You don’t need to use bid adjustments on this specific list, but you could use bid adjustments of +5-10% on the segmented lists described in this post.

Another thing to note is that your email lists need a minimum of 1,000 email addresses per list in order to work with your AdWords campaigns. With that in mind, work out whether or not you have enough email addresses to split them out in the first place.

How Have We Implemented Customer Match?

Following the introduction of Customer Match in September 2015 one of our clients wanted to explore how they could implement Customer Match into their current AdWords strategy.

On their behalf we have created separate campaigns to target and exclude the audiences as broken down below:

Inactive customers – those who have not purchased for 6+ months Regular customers – those who have purchased in the last 3 months Prospects – those that have never ordered anything

If you’d like to explore the use of Customer Match in your AdWords account, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Receptional Paid Search team today.