This article originally appeared on Emarsys on August 15, 2023. Written by Sophie Sui, Strategic Partner Manager at Criteo.
Anyone can put an ad on the internet: Pull some copy together, throw in a graphic of a product and model, and spend those ad dollars. In fact, that’s exactly what a lot of people do, which is why internet ads are so prolific… and why consumers have learned to tune out irrelevant ads.
To truly capture your audience’s attention and drive real actions and engagement, it’s essential to put the customer at the center of your marketing, and by that I mean engaging them with the right content at the right time.
Achieving that level of sophistication for digital ads requires knowing your customers inside and out, like the back of your hand, and that’s where the real challenge lies. You have to be able to identify your customers, reach them on the right channels, and understand their complete customer journeys from end to end. On top of that, competition is always lurking, fighting to claim your customers’ attention and business.
My name is Sophie Sui, and I’m a Strategic Partner Manager with Criteo. I want to tell you a little about how the Criteo and Emarsys partnership can help you build a comprehensive understanding of your customers. I’ll also show you five ways that you can use the enriched data achieved through madtech, the union of online marketing and advertising technology, in order to create better shopping experiences for your customers and drive stronger performance outcomes.
Uncover the Power of Enriched Data
Marketers today have amazing tools at hand, including automation and AI. With powerful madtech capabilities like these, you can predict customer behavior and act on it accordingly, using automation to scale your efforts and machine learning to power personalized customer experiences.
Criteo and Emarsys are both outstanding tech platforms in this regard. Criteo specializes in digital advertising with deep commerce expertise and insights; we help you scale and activate first-party audiences with the Commerce Media Platform. The Emarsys platform, meanwhile, enables you to create audiences and connect to multiple activation channels with automated, AI-driven tools.
Both Criteo and Emarsys depend on a critical component: Customer data.
By using Criteo and Emarsys together, you’re able to enrich your data and build a comprehensive view into who your customers really are. Understanding what excites them on the path to purchase enables you to improve how you speak to them, using relevant content no matter where they’re at in their customer journey. This level of detailed discovery is essential to putting your customers at the center of your marketing and creating meaningful experiences. And those experiences are what it takes to build lasting relationships, which will have a positive impact on your long-term business and revenue.
When you integrate Criteo and Emarsys, Criteo benefits from enhanced data that Emarsys has to offer, so that your digital advertising on the open web is more targeted and more relevant. This helps you achieve that golden target: the right message for the right customer at the right time.
On the other side of the integration with Emarsys, the Criteo Audience Node allows you to manage your Criteo audiences directly from Emarsys Automations, adding and removing contacts and creating entire audiences. Criteo becomes the incremental channel that you can use alongside email, web, and SMS.
“Working with both Emarsys and Criteo has been incredibly valuable in our efforts to reach the right audience at the right time, with the right message. The seamless connection allows us to use our audiences to maximize on engagement and revenue. Leveraging Criteo’s Lookalike technology, we are able to find new site visitors and customers efficiently. The integration also helps us deploy our first-party data. We are looking forward to more success using our CDP audience on the Criteo platform.” — Orthofeet
5 Use Cases for Enriched Data with Criteo and Emarsys
When you’re equipped with enriched data and a 360-degree view of your customers, plus the automation and AI functionality necessary to create great experiences, suddenly you have a lot of options at your fingertips for creating digital ads that stand out.
“We’re very excited to bring the Criteo-Emarsys connector to the market. Customers can engage hyper-relevant audiences actively, by easily finding consumers in a buying mind-set, and target them with personalized campaigns without relying on third-party cookies. This is a partnership that will greatly benefit both Emarsys and Criteo customers.” — Kris Dimitroff, Global Director, ISV Partnerships, Emarsys
Here are five ideas to inspire your next targeted, digital ads campaign with all the power of Criteo and Emarsys to back you up.
1. Use lookalike audiences to acquire more valuable leads.
When you can take customer data and figure out who your most valuable customers are and who’s likely to engage with various types of content, you have a much better chance of standing out from the competition.
With Criteo’s lookalike modeling, you can identify shoppers who have the same traits and characteristics as your existing loyal customers. Using data from both Emarsys and Criteo, you’ll be able to build lookalike audience segments, ones that continuously refresh, so your strategies can adapt to your consumers’ behaviors.
You can:
- Model lookalike audiences based on spending data of existing customers, to help you better target your ad spending.
- Provide targeted product recommendations to lookalike audiences based on past purchases of existing customers.
- Engage lookalike audiences with limited-time offers that are likely to be relevant to their interests.
2. Engage inactive email contacts with ads for better retention.
Sometimes even contacts who opted in to receive emails from you will go quiet for one reason or another. However, that doesn’t mean your relationship has to end there. Targeted, relevant digital ads can help remind existing contacts about your brand and why they love it.
You can:
- Push an Emarsys segment of lapsed email contacts into Criteo in order to access more filtering options.
- Engage these segmented contacts with highly targeted, personalized digital ads.
- Constantly add and remove customers from the inactive email contacts with updated customer conversion data.
3. Re-engage one-time customers and nurture them to drive a second purchase.
According to a study from McKinsey & Company, 78% of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases from companies that personalize their customer engagement.¹ For this reason, savvy marketers take the time and effort to nurture the second purchase, establishing an ongoing relationship and increasing brand affinity.
You can:
- Promote complementary products based on the buyer’s first purchase.
- Drive one-time customers to educational content that helps them appreciate, care for, or make the most of their purchase.
- Invite your one-time customers to join your loyalty program.
4. Re-engage members of your loyalty program.
Customers who have opted to join your loyalty program are a special audience in their own right, but even your loyalty members can sometimes lapse. It’s important to achieve a good cadence of communication—too little communication leads to forgetfulness, but even worse, too much communication can lead to the customer opting out altogether.
You want to strike the right balance, and enriched data can help you ensure that your engagements are relevant and timely.
You can:
- Remind loyalty members that their rewards are available and waiting to be claimed.
- Inform loyalty members about loyalty promotions for the products they love most, such as bonus reward points for purchasing their favorite goods.
- Promote exclusive “loyalty members only” experiences or offers.
5. Retain and grow in-store buyers during peak shopping seasons, like Black Friday.
Digital ads aren’t just for digital shopping! Modern consumers like the flexibility of doing discovery online, but many will still make their final purchase in a physical store.
When peak shopping seasons come around—like Singles’ Day, Black Friday, or other special holidays—be sure you’re prepared to engage with these omnichannel shoppers. By creating a seamless customer experience and catering to the customer journey from online to in-store and back again, you can retain and grow the loyalty of your in-store buyers.
You can:
- Advertise for in-store-only sales or other limited-time events.
- Offer a “Check for In-Store Availability” button in your ad.
- Promote a convenient in-store pickup option.
- Advertise special in-person services, such as holiday gift wrapping.
Also consider using targeted web ads to promote complementary products based on the customer’s past purchases.
Expand Your Growth Potential with Emarsys and Criteo
Change is constant—martech and adtech continue to evolve over time because consumers continue to change their behaviors based on their preferences, the economy, their stage of life, or even the season. Fortunately, by using tools like Criteo and Emarsys’s solutions, as well as the enriched data you achieve from integrating them, you can adopt agile marketing strategies that help you better understand your customers and meet their demands. That’s how you show your customers you’re invested in their satisfaction, driving true loyalty and the outcomes that will grow your brand and business.
Learn more about Criteo! Talk to a Criteo expert, or visit the Emarsys Criteo partner page.
Ready to dive even deeper? Visit Emarsys Help to learn about the Criteo Audience Node.
¹McKinsey & Company, The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying
