Twitter first started talking about tailored audiences back in July. Last month, they decided to give it to everyone. These tailored audiences included retargeting options and finding people who have shown interest in your industry outside the realms of Twitter. This week, Twitter did it again. They released a new set of tailored audiences, which have the power to use CRM data to find your existing customers.
What’s Does This Mean?
You have the ability to exclude or target by email addresses and Twitter IDs. By targeting email addresses of already existing customers in your CRM database, Twitter accounts will be matched up to the email addresses that were provided. The benefits are pretty straightforward. If you have a promotion for past customers or if your product has a timestamp and it is about expire, your promoted post is going to find the perfect audience. It is people that know you and have already been sold by what you’ve had to offer in the past.
Twitter’s example was to target existing card members with promotions that speak to them. This is the type of tweet that you wouldn’t have wanted to put out there before:
While you might have found existing customers (or in this example card members) by targeting the right keywords, only a small percentage would actually benefit from this promotion. There would have been no way to tightly refine your audience, even with the first round of tailored audiences. Now, it’s another possibility.
Part II of the new set of tailored audiences has to do with Twitter IDs. With the CRM system, a list can be created of Twitter IDs that meet any of following targeting options: follower count, verified status, profile bio and past tweets. By focusing on follower count, we can promote specifically to people that have a large range of influence in Twitter.
Part III of the new tailored audiences is the feature that I found to be most useful. There is now the ability to exclude. For any lead generation account out there, we all know that two of the same lead actually equals one. While you can now target specific email addresses, you can also exclude them or any Twitter IDs from the existing targeting options. We can do exclusions with interests or exclusions with keywords or exclusions with audiences. Anywhere that you want to exclude, you can.
What’s the Catch?
And yes, there is a catch! You can’t just login and start excluding your existing clients. While being able to exclude audiences would prove super useful and targeting past purchases could really help personalize that ad, your CRM system might stop you. When the first batch of tailored audiences were released to everyone in December, you had to work with any of their ad partners to get started (Adara, AdRoll, BlueKai, Chango, DataXu, Dstillery, Lotame, Quantcast, ValueClick, and [x+1]).
It is going to be the same thing for this new set of tailored audiences. This time, Twitter partnered with Acxiom, Datalogix, Epsilon, Liveramp, Mailchimp, Merkle and Saleforce Exact Target to make this happen. If you want to take advantage of the second version of tailored audiences, you will have to go through one of Twitter’s partners.
*The featured image for this post is by Joy Zeng, supplied by flickr.com.
