“But they’re already my customers. Why should I tag them?” – Anonymous SaaS Owner
Well my friend, that’s what I’m here to talk to you about. Tagging your customers can have numerous different benefits from preserving ad budget to calculated expansion. But let’s jump into how you tag them really quickly, then we’ll get into the why.
Customers vs. Converters
Often times, advertisers will add a conversion pixel to a Thank You page on the site and consider those folks “customers”. In reality, these folks are actually just “converters”. Both audiences have their roles to play, but I believe the customers list to be extremely powerful. Here’s why:
SaaS businesses are different than most. Customers don’t simply come to the site, make a purchase, and move on with their lives. It’s not like ecommerce. SaaS customers receive their value by logging into the system regularly to use the software. They actively use the product/service on a regular basis. These folks are your customers, and you can tag them as such.
To segment your converters from your customers, add a second tag to the dashboard within your software, after the user logs in. This ensures you’re not only tagging folks who are your customers, but you also have tabs on the group of customers who actively log in and use the system. These are the people you want to find more of. Not simply the folks who will be interested in your solution, but those who actively use it and depend on it to get the job done.
Now let’s get into what you can do with a customers audience and how it can impact your advertising efforts.
Excluding Customers
No surprises here. It’s a well practiced strategy to exclude your customers from your advertising campaigns. You don’t want to pay again for someone you’ve already brought in. But here are a couple of reasons you might not have thought to exclude them before that might convince you of it now:
- Non-traditional lead gen channels: depending on how your business gathers lead info, you might not have this person already tagged as a “converting visitor” to the site as they may have moved to that status on a phone call.
- Cookie Windows: they only last for so long. Your customers could pre-date your advertising accounts so tagging them here will preempt them from being in your ad channels.
- Cross Devices: many SaaS solutions can be used on all devices. If that person converted on their computer, but then uses their mobile devices to conduct searches, they might be seeing your ads without you knowing they’re customers.
Lookalike Modeling
We’ve already discussed how a customers list is more highly targeted and valuable than a converters list. So when utilizing an audience to build a lookalike model from, it only makes sense to prioritize the customer list over the converters list. Sure, you may run into some issues with audience sizes being large enough at the start, but if you’re doing your job right, those lists should grow over time. If nothing else, get these pixels put in place and start accruing audiences. Utilize your converting audience first, then when your customers list is large enough, start testing audiences built on those users instead.
Incentivize Your Customers
There are numerous reasons why you might want to reach out to your current customer base through targeted campaigns. Maybe you want to survey them about satisfaction with the product or ask them for a product review. You may want to offer a product discount if they refer new customers to your service. Maybe you want to upsell them on the next product level by letting them try it out for two weeks. No matter what your motivation is, there’s certainly benefit to being able to target your active customers. But beware: If you target these folks too often, you can start to generate ill-will behind your brand and your loving, active customers will become your customers who can’t wait to stop hearing from you.
What do you think? Do you tag your customers differently from your converters? How do you use those audiences to impact your advertising efforts?
