The road to maximizing ROAS
In the eCommerce kingdom, a singular goal reigns supreme: maximizing Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). If you’re a marketer reading this, you will understand that ROAS is the true measure of success of your paid advertising campaigns, and that it holds the key to unlocking unparalleled growth and profitability in the fiercely competitive eCommerce realm.
However, the road to maximizing return on ad spend comes with some bumps along the way. As consumer behaviour continues to shift, achieving maximum ROAS requires innovative strategies that adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape and grab the full attention of your audience. This is where the power of customer data enters the stage.
Imagine a world where you can streamline your customer data, optimize your ad spend, and deliver captivating experiences to any target audience, all while achieving extraordinary returns on your investment. Well, this world exists and is waiting for you to enter it.
The time has come for you to seize the opportunities of your audience and unleash the power of your ad campaigns. In this blog post, we will shine a spotlight on leveraging customer data to segment your audience with precision in order to optimize your ad spend for remarkable returns.
Along the way, we’ll showcase how our marketing automation platform revolutionizes your eCommerce operations, helping you target with more precision, leaving a lasting impact on your customers, and propelling you ahead of the competition.
Why should you care about ROAS
ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend, is a vital metric that measures the revenue generated compared to your advertising spend. But why is tracking ROAS so crucial for marketers?
- ROAS provides an efficient and insightful way to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns. It helps you determine if the resources you’re investing in a campaign are yielding the desired results. By tracking ROAS, you can identify the campaigns that are worth the effort and those that need adjustment.
- ROAS enables you to monitor the impact of targeting changes made to your ads. This invaluable feedback allows you to assess whether your adjustments are delivering the expected outcomes. By staying on top of your ROAS, you can optimize your targeting strategies for maximum impact.
- ROAS provides real-time visibility into the revenue generated in relation to costs. This allows you to swiftly assess whether a new campaign is delivering the expected returns. If a campaign falls short, ROAS empowers you to pivot quickly, making necessary adjustments, or cut your losses and explore alternative strategies.
Put simply, ROAS serves as a compass to calculate your ad return, revealing how efficient your strategy is in generating revenue. When your ROAS value is high, it indicates that your customers are increasingly purchasing your products or services as a direct result of your paid ad campaigns. By bridging the gap between the customer and your offerings at a reasonable cost, you’re well on your way to discovering a winning formula.
Improving your ROAS
According to Gartner, brands that lack personalization in their marketing efforts stand to lose 38% of customers, but when they provide a more personalized experience, 80% of consumers are more likely to engage with the business and make a purchase.
With this in mind, the best way to increase your ROAS is by running the right ads that speak directly to the right audience. To do this, you need to start by gathering and analyzing all of your customer data in order to understand who you are talking to, including demographics, interests, purchase history and more, and then target specific audiences with specific messaging.
Static segmentation used to be enough to give your audience the personalized experience they wanted, such as targeting a group of customers with the same ads because they have similar interests. However, today’s consumers expect more.
Smart segmenting your audience
Your audience wants you to communicate with them personally—they don’t want to be thrown into a segment just because they once bought something similar to someone else. Therefore, to embark on a successful ROAS optimization journey, it’s crucial to go further than basic segmentation. Creating more advanced audience segments allows you to better understand your customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors.
By going beyond segmenting based on basic demographics and purchase history, your eCommerce can benefit from:
Enhanced Personalization: Smart audience segmentation enables you to tailor your marketing messages and offers to individual customers. By considering factors such as browsing behavior, engagement patterns, and interests, you can personalize your campaigns and messaging in a way that resonates with specific target audiences, increasing the chances of conversions and customer satisfaction.
Behavioral Insights: Advanced audience segments provide valuable insights into customer behavior. By analyzing patterns such as frequency of visits, time spent on site, or interaction with specific content, you can identify your high-value customers, the customers you’re about to lose, or even any you’ve already lost and optimize your marketing strategies accordingly.
Customer Lifecycle Management: Audience segmentation based on customer lifecycle stages can help you effectively target prospects, engage new customers, nurture existing ones, and re-engage dormant or churned customers with tailored and relevant messaging specific to each stage and optimize your customer acquisition, retention, and win-back efforts.
With Customer Data Platforms like Connectif, you can easily build and benefit from a smarter audience segmentation strategy thanks to the extensive range of data points and insights from your first-party data. From advanced behavioral data, purchase history, channel interactions and metrics including CLV and RFM, you can create audience segments that go way beyond typical demographics, such as:
- Loyal customers
- Discount lovers
- Buyers of a specific product category
- Big spenders who are often absent
- Indecisive visitors
- Inactive customers
- Cross-channel shoppers
- Most valuable customers
- Social media engagers
- Abandoned cart users
And so much more. The only limit is your creativity.
Connectif also leverages machine learning and predictive modeling to help you uncover hidden patterns in your customer data to suggest, create and optimize your audience segments dynamically.
Target your segments strategically
Once your audience segments have been clearly defined, it’s time to supercharge your paid ad campaigns with smart, precise and relevant content. Export your audience segments to your campaigns in Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok etc and get going. In fact, with Connectif, you can benefit from automated synchronization of all your audience segments with Google Ads and Facebook to launch highly effective paid campaigns in an instant.
Define your ad campaign by choosing the target audience and tailoring the messaging and content of your ads in a way that truly speaks to them for maximum engagement. Let’s take some of the audience segments we discussed previously, and consider some ideas for communicating with them effectively with your paid campaigns.
- Loyal customers: Take advantage of the close ties you have formed with your loyal customers by offering them exclusive access to new product lines or offers. Share personalized recommendations or ideas for upselling based on recent purchases they’ve made. Think that they are customers who already know you, trust you and buy from you, so they can be a good target to focus on for maximizing ROAS.
- Discount lovers: Focus ads that promote hot discounts and sales campaigns to customers who you know like bargains and offers. They will no doubt be receptive to any campaigns promoting sales or discounts in your online shop. Automate recommendations with products that can later be used to follow an up-selling or cross-selling strategy with these users. In other words, it makes them buy items on sale today and spend more in the future by acquiring other complementary ones.
- Buyers of a specific product category: Stop promoting products willy-nilly to your audience, hoping they will engage. Gain impact in your ad campaigns by promoting products of a specific category to customers who you know are interested.
Big spenders who are often absent: Focus your ads on increasing the purchase frequency of those users that you have already shown that they are willing to buy the more expensive products from your store. Make them aware of your big-ticket items that are on sale or ply them with ads of high-value products with limited stock to encourage them to increase their recurrence and your average ticket.
Reduce wasted time, effort and costs
As well as having the power to target your loyal customers and big spenders with more ease and precision to boost conversion, you can also use your eCommerce data to identify and target audiences that need handling in a different way, or perhaps avoiding completely. As bids in advertising get higher and higher, you will gain better control of your ads and of your costs thanks to the visibility and power to invest in those customers that are of interest.
For example, if you know you’re going to be targeting customers who haven’t shown their face in a while but used to buy products from your brand, you can go the extra mile by adjusting the campaign to include effective incentives to win them back before they’re gone for good. Remember, it’s more cost-effective to win back an existing customer than start again from scratch.
Alternatively, by identifying a group of customers who you’ve already lost, or have a very low Customer Lifetime Value, you can tweak your paid campaigns to avoid targeting customers who you know won’t bring value to your business.
Don’t forget the rest of the journey
The story doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, end once a target audience engages with your campaign. To really set fire to your ROAS, you also need to think about the rest of the journey your customer is about to embark on, and any other channel they may come into contact with, once they have clicked on an ad.
From landing on your website and checking out your products, all the way through to check out and beyond, the performance of your paid campaigns will truly reach new heights if the entire experience with your brand is seamless and personalized to each customer, as well as being fully consistent with the campaign that led them to your store in the first place.
This level of personalization increases the likelihood of conversion and boosts ROAS by providing customers with a positive experience from the moment they see an ad to the point of purchase and beyond. The better the experience, the more they are likely to become loyal customers and repeat buyers.
A customer-centric approach that focuses on personalization and a seamless experience also leads to higher customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers are more likely to leave positive reviews, recommend the brand to others, and become brand advocates. This, in turn, can drive organic growth and attract new customers.
What is more, when customers have a positive experience throughout the customer journey, they are less likely to churn or switch to a competitor. By fine-tuning the entire omnichannel experience and providing personalized recommendations, relevant offers and personal touches to your customers, while also increasing ROAS you will be building long-term relationships with your customers.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You have officially embarked on a transformative journey towards maximizing your ROAS through smarter audience segmentation. It’s now time to dig into your customer data, choose a platform that will allow you to implement smarter segmentation for better paid campaign targeting, and get ready to witness the exponential growth in your ROAS.
Get started with Connectif today to explore smart segmentation opportunities to increase your ROAS by giving your customers an eCommerce experience tailored just for them.
