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Salesforce announced Advertising Studio within its marketing platform slightly over a year ago, and by all accounts it was a popular release. Advertising Studio allows marketers to manage, segment, and synchronise their marketing campaign data in real-time, and retarget customers across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and DMP’s like Krux. To make campaign set up extra simple for marketers - the platform even comes with pre-built audience segmentation templates.

Here at Cinder, we have seen outstanding results from our customers using Advertising Studio, particularly around retargeting and re-engaging inactive subscribers. And, that's just one of its many applications.

If your marketing team is not already using Advertising Studio, here are five reasons we think you should start using it now:

1. Facebook and email are better together

According to research conducted with Facebook, a combined approach of targeted Facebook ads and email marketing campaigns leads to email openers being 22% more likely to make a purchase. For any retailer with a decent sized send list (and open rate), this amounts to a significant bump in sales.

The ability to specifically target already-engaged consumers, versus taking a standard broad-brush approach, delivers massive cost effectiveness, compounded by advantage of speaking to the right person at the right time in their buying cycle.

Example - The Active Audiences Dashboard

2. Effectively reconnect with unengaged subscribers

Unengaged email subscribers were once a dilemma since there is no way to contact the individuals that are not opening your email and tell them what they're missing. With social and web retargeting, brands now have more options at their disposal.

Advertising Studio allows you to retarget non-responders with advertisements on platforms including Facebook & Google, using a segment defined as ‘unengaged’ (e.g., has not opened an email in 30 days). This gives marketers another channel option to connect with people whose email addresses may have changed, or whom may not be seeing emails due to them being delivered into spam or Gmail’s Tabs/Categories feature. Because you have the ability to retrieve more than one data point (such as email address plus mobile phone number), you can link subscribers on multiple levels, achieving  a far greater match rate.

It is also possible to suppress those who have unsubscribed (and therefore indicated they no longer want to hear from your brand).

Example - Active Audiences Campaign Builder

3. Reduce data vulnerability

Of course, Facebook ads are available without going through Salesforce. However, creating a campaign based on an existing database requires you to frequently extract and re-upload your data between systems. It’s a big task, and in some cases it requires the involvement of multiple teams within a business. It also creates a level of data vulnerability, internal time and cost which is increasingly becoming unacceptable for companies.

With Advertising Studio, data is transferred from Salesforce to the advertising platform without ever needing to be downloaded externally or made available outside of this secure ecosystem. There is no safer way to share your data with the ad platforms.

4. Maintain the single customer view

Another advantage to keeping the social retargeting part of your overall Salesforce CRM platform is that the single customer view is never lost. To lose customer data at a holistic level due to omnichannel marketing is to give up a competitive advantage.

Maintaining the single customer view not only allows the marketer to tailor the customer journey more efficiently, but also ensures the customer receives consistent and relevant content.

Example - Active Audiences in Journey Builder

5. Automate efficiency

A further advantage of using Salesforce for driving social retargeting is in its ability to automate. Marketers can easily define audience segment refresh rates and sit back to focus on the metrics coming in, rather than data downloading and uploading.

The data refreshes mean lookalike audiences are highly relevant. For example, using an automated feed you can ensure your email newsletter signup via Facebook ad does not display to existing subscribers, resulting in a more effective use of your media budget.

At Cinder, we have long been a proponent of using alternate channels to retarget unresponsive subscribers - Active Audiences now makes it too easy to ignore. We recommend learning more about how to make cross channel targeting part of your marketing strategy. Here’s some advice to get you started:

  • Facebook is the most commonly-used retargeting social media platform, but there are other options. Identify which social media channels your customers are active on, and are available for retargeting through Advertising Studio.
  • Then, look within your Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform. What segments are already identified and available for retargeting? ‘Unsubscribed’ and ‘Bounced’ are easy places to start. Defining the metrics around what constitutes an “unengaged” subscriber should also be a priority.
  • If these segments and alternate channels present a valuable group to your business, it’s probably time to talk to an expert about adding Advertising Studio to your marketing platform.

 

For more information you can download the Acitive Audience whitepaper here.