Have you ever gone to a brand for customer support -- already disgruntled and annoyed -- only to open Facebook that afternoon and see an ad for that brand right in your face? So have we, and that shouldn't happen in today's world of the connected customer. Instead, your digital advertising should integrate with your customer support.

If it doesn't, you risk irritating, and then losing, customers at the moment you most should be working to win them back. Why's that matter?

Salesforce's newest State of the Connected Customer Report includes several big headlines for customer service, and digital marketers need to take not in order to align their advertising to their company's customer service efforts. According to the report, 71% of consumers say that customer service provided on any day, at any time influences their loyalty. Additionally, 73% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company provides inconsistent levels of service across departments.

It's not just research from Salesforce; Dimensional Research and Zendesk have found that 66% of B2B and 52% of B2C customers stopped buying after a bad customer service interaction. When you visit a brand's website to get customer support, you're probably already unhappy with that brand. Something's not working, and you just want it fixed.

The last thing you want after a poor experience is to receive a bunch of advertisements for new offers when you're already considering switching to a different company entirely! But that's exactly what happens all too often. Many brands target each and every person who comes to their website, perhaps with a YouTube pre-roll. These ads can be a very effective strategy for customer acquisition. However, when a customer comes to you for support, that's the last time you should target them with ads -- or at least the same campaign as everyone else!

Let's say your brand runs a promotional campaign to all current customers. You're planning on sending a 20% off coupon for holiday shopping targeted to all existing customers in a Facebook ad campaign, targeted with Custom Audiences. This is a great way of getting people to come back to your site. But what happens when the customer who is are already frustrated and working through a customer service issue? You may have already offered a discount, or free product to win them back? They'll probably be frustrated.

If your company uses Salesforce, you can solve these problems by excluding everyone who's currently in a customer service interaction from all ads from your brands. Not only can you suppress them from your advertising, you can also go even further, and create custom win-back campaigns just for this audience to help show the value of your solution that specifically aligns to the pain they have experienced.

It's easy -- whenever anyone starts a customer service interaction in Service Cloud with your brand, their contact information can automatically go into a continually updated Marketing Cloud Data Extension. Then, use Advertising Studio to exclude them from all ads across Facebook, Instagram, Google (Search, YouTube, and Gmail), Twitter, and the entire display advertising ecosystem (or show them an unique campaign), for specified period of time.

It costs between four and 10 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one, so if your advertising contributes to lost customers, it's a major problem. Work with us so that advertising never costs you an existing customer.

To learn more, check out The Future of Advertising eBook!