To activate Digital Ads in your Emarsys account, please contact your Success Manager, who can provide you with access and pricing details.
What is Digital Ads?
Emarsys Digital Ads is an integration between Emarsys and the supported social and advertising networks (ad networks). It allows you to leverage the rich behavioral data and other information collected about your contacts in Emarsys to support your ad targeting on these networks.
Digital Ads also allows you to reach contacts who have otherwise proven difficult to reach, who do not interact with your website, or who cannot be reached through other channels. By using Digital Ads as part of an omnichannel strategy, you can significantly increase your reach by switching channels and targeting contacts on ad networks who have not responded to other methods.
Each ad network may provide individual functionality, which are described in the network-specific pages. These basic functionalities that are available for all networks:
- Capture new leads directly from the ad networks (Lead Ads forms) and add them to your Emarsys database.
- Add or remove contacts to or from specific audiences existing on the advertising network.
- Create new audiences on the ad network and link them to existing campaigns.
- Display campaign performance data reported by the networks on a unified dashboard in Emarsys.
Emarsys Digital Ads currently supports:
Before you start
Watch the Summer Release 2023 video about Digital Ads:
Before you start, why not watch a short video about the basics of working with Digital Ads?
How does Digital Ads work?
Digital Ads matches your Emarsys contacts with their existing profiles on these networks and allows Emarsys to create custom audiences for you. These custom audiences are dynamic and, once created, are updated in real-time.
In other words, Digital Ads finds your existing customers on the ad network and allows you to effectively target individuals in real time through automated and ad hoc data-driven advertising campaigns.
Digital Ads works in five easy steps:
- Create a segment in Emarsys.
- Digital Ads (securely) sends a list of contact identifiers (e.g. email address or phone number) to the network, which checks these addresses against the data held in its own user profiles and creates a custom audience from any contacts that match. This match rate is displayed in Digital Ads reporting.
- You create an ad campaign and target the custom audience in the network.
- Once the ads campaign is activated, neither you nor Emarsys play any further part in the campaign execution. The ad network will target the selected audience with the adverts you have created, according to its own algorithms, until your monthly budget limit has been reached, or the campaign reaches its end.
- Emarsys pulls the performance reporting from the ad network and displays it in your Emarsys account.
Alternatively, you can create an empty audience that the Automation Center will populate by adding contacts to it when they reach that particular node in their journey. The Automation Center can also automatically remove contacts from this audience after a certain period of time or a defined action on their part (e.g., a purchase).
Budgeting and campaign management are managed directly in your network advertising account.
Why should I be using Digital Ads?
Digital Ads goes beyond the inbox, extending your reach across multiple ad networks. Your most valuable customers are at your fingertips, in your contact database. It is far more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one, yet many companies still spend the majority of their marketing budgets on lead acquisition and conversion, mostly through display, search and retargeting. This can only be profitable if balanced with a strong retention strategy, but retention is often limited to active and opted-in customers.
Digital Ads are not limited to opt-ins or inboxes; they allow you to drive your message to wherever your customers spend their time online in other words, the whole Internet. By merging your CRM marketing data to your ad strategy, you can unleash the full potential and reach of your contact database.
Naturally, you can still use Digital Ads to power your acquisition strategy by segmenting for your best customers in Emarsys and targeting lookalike audiences on the ad networks that you know will be more receptive to your message.
How easy is it to set up?
Once the module has been activated for your account, all you need to do is use our interface to connect to your existing ads accounts for each network.
Common Use Cases
Some common use cases covered with Digital Ads:
- Automatically create lookalike audiences using key contact attributes.
- Streamline new leads acquisition from ad networks via Emarsys Lead Ads.
- Add a new channel to multi-channel engagement campaigns.
- Activate current customers and former customers.
- Show display and paid Search ads to people you know and automate the process for a perfect customer journey.
- Keyword expansion - If you are selling X Brand shoes, bidding for X Brand shoes might not be very effective (since many other businesses bid for it). Now you can individually target (or increase the bid for) your Digital Ads customers who have searched for this brand and who you know are much more likely to purchase.
- Exclude current customers from acquisition campaigns - Running a promotion for new customers only? Exclude your own customers.