Less than a month after the release of tailored audiences, Twitter announced yesterday that the feature will now help brands advertise to groups of current and potential customers more flexibly by utilizing CRM and email databases. ExactTarget Marketing Cloud is proud to be one of the select partners that helped bring this Twitter product to market.

As a long-standing Twitter partner, the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud now has the ability to help brands leverage their CRM or email contact databases to create defined audience targeting.

The goal is to help businesses increase ROI by serving content to potential and existing customers in the right way by targeting ads and messaging to customers who have shown interest in specific brands or categories.

Here are a couple of ways this new feature can help brands increase ROI:

CRM audiences define segmented groups of customers from existing email data for a highly targeted message. For example, if an airline wants to advertise special flight deals on Twitter to airline club members only, the airline - with the help of the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud - can define a target audience of strictly club members from its existing email database. Behind-the-scenes, unreadable scrambles of existing email addresses are matched to Twitter accounts of users who then only see a Promoted Tweet with the special flight details.

Exclusion targeting gives marketers the opportunity to exclude audiences based on email addresses from Twitter's existing targeting options based interests, keywords and TV. With the ability to create audiences from customer email databases, marketers can also segment these groups out and eliminate them-adding even more flexibility to audience targeting.

This addition to Twitter's existing features is an exciting new step for Twitter and Salesforce as partners. Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud is already a both a Twitter Certified Product and Ads API partner (Social.com).

It also aligns with our vision of making it possible for marketers to create a single view of every customer, manage the customer journey and deliver optimized content on every channel and every device.

As Twitter said in its blog post launching these new features, "The combination of these tools enables a highly relevant and useful message for the user and creates the opportunity for you to reach these known audiences on Twitter with more efficient campaigns."

We couldn't agree more.