Custom Audiences support a customer-centric marketing strategy

If you’re looking for one audience solution that can help you achieve success with your customers at any stage of the marketing funnel, Custom Audiences may just be what you’re after.

What are custom audiences?

Custom Audiences are audience segments that you can create from your first-party data and leverage across the logged-in environment of email. With Custom Audiences, you can target or suppress your exact audience to help drive specific actions and move the needle on your business.

When paired with email newsletters, Custom Audiences are particularly powerful as they enable you to reach your specific audience in a channel where they’re most engaged — after all, they did sign up for the newsletter in which your ad will appear. By reaching your audience when they’re in an engaged mindset, in a less-crowded, more premium environment than other channels, they’re more likely to notice your ad and take action. This approach, coupled with a message that speaks to where they are in their customer journey, is a winning strategy.

How to build Custom Audiences

The concept of how Custom Audiences work is simple. All you need is a list of customer IDs, in the form of email addresses, mobile ad IDs, or even cookies. Equipped with this list, you can leverage our Audience Manager tool to onboard your data to our platform. Audience Manager will automatically hash any raw emails and match them to the email subscribers in our exchange. If you prefer, you can also send us this data directly from your DMP or other internal systems using our API connection.

When to use Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences have several use cases ranging from customer acquisition, retention, and re-engagement. Let’s dive into each of these.

Custom Audiences for acquisition

If your goal is to reach entirely new audiences who are not yet customers, then you can use Custom Audiences to suppress your existing customers across your campaigns. With this approach, you focus your media budget on expanding your customer base instead of wasting acquisition dollars on current customers.

Custom Audiences for retention

Whether you want to encourage a recurring purchase or sell additional products to your customers, leveraging Custom Audiences can help you refine your targeting and drive retention.

Say you’re a credit card company that recently got into the loan gig. With Custom Audiences, you can onboard a list of people who’ve signed up for your credit card in the last year and target them with offers for loans.

Custom Audiences for re-engagement

Custom Audiences are a powerful solution for reaching lapsed customers. Imagine that a segment of your customers hasn’t purchased or engaged with your brand in the last year. You can create a Custom Audience with that segment and target them with special promotions that encourage them to re-engage.

You may also have audiences who buy with you seasonally. Engage them with holiday promotions, or reach them during off-peak periods to catch their interest while the competition is low.

Bringing it all together

Targeting your audience is only one piece of the puzzle. It’s also important to consider your ad creative, placement, and the landing page to which you’ll drive your audiences. These are all, of course, dependent on your campaign goals and objectives. Consider, for example, a campaign that sets out to secure net-new customers and how different the creative messaging and landing page experience might be from a campaign that aims to drive retention amongst existing customers.

Custom Audiences are versatile and enable you to harness their power to best support your goals and foster meaningful relationships with your customers with relevant ad experiences. Reach out to [email protected] to learn more and start using Custom Audiences.

The last installment of this content series will focus on how to activate Custom or Lookalike Audiences in your email campaigns with LiveIntent. We’ll talk about all the different ways you can send us your data, and how you can use your preferred DSP partner to target your audiences.