Life Beyond Cookies: Email Match is What Performance Marketers & Advertisers from APAC Need

Understand why futuristic marketers need to shift away from cookies and instead embrace data-driven email identity matching. Read it if you are trying to find the right target audiences who have an intent match with your products and services. A glance through Span Global’s Customer Behavior Data reveals that the APAC region is witnessing record spikes in online B2B traffic and conversions across India, China and South-East Asia, Japan and Australia.

Our Indo-China and APAC geography customers were most receptive to launching innovative digital campaigns using personalized destination pages, webinars and enrollments for coaching or demo events. Most of these online campaign activations showed an upward swing to target B2B decision-makers through unique online storytelling with the help of and nurture through email marketing that has saved them thousands of dollars’ worth Ad spends that would have otherwise gone in experimental and broadside targeting. An analysis of all our launched campaigns for these target markets shows active purchase intent showcased by the target audience that we were able to channelize as website traffic.

A few interesting facts about the Indo-China and APAC Market:

The tech economy accounts for almost 40% of the Chinese GDP. A significant reflection of this trend is also witnessed in other regions of APAC and gaining faster traction in smaller nation-states like Singapore, Taiwan and cities like Hong Kong.

Stats by some of APACs leading marketing agencies powered by Span Global’s Lead Generation Digital Lead-Gen Studio suggested a significant rise in Singles’ Day traffic across Southeast Asia. While Malaysia and Thailand saw the highest increase in online indexed sales of 540% and 370% respectively, our Singapore region marketing agencies generated a 309% increase in sales.

Translate this trend to the B2B audience and the number of keywords that are today most researched and topping search engine charts belong to the technology genre. Some of the categories for which our surveyed clients are most eager to reach decision-makers across devices include audiences who are adopters of technology trends.

Popular B2B custom intent audience targets include:

However, the number one problem highlighted by our clients who want to target tech audiences in India, China, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia is Ad spend wastage due to irrelevant clicks.

This wastage is attributed to a complete lack of understanding about the active number of targets in prospective markets/Geos and incorrect customer identity (wrong contact details, email IDs, social IDs, etc.).

Almost 70% of our digital growth marketing client campaigns have begun with conversations along with marketing plans but when we did a deeper prognosis, our marketing teams found that the client CRM was loaded with duplicate records, redundant emails and details that made further tracking of interested customers, their IPs and re-marketing to interested customers extremely difficult.

The Solution: Run with the New Paradigm of Data-Driven Marketing

Choose email identity data and don’t just be dependent on Cookies or buying Third-Party Cookies. The ad industry is getting ready for Google to eliminate third-party cookies currently used to identify people online and deliver relevant advertising. Today, the industry is also looking to “identity solutions” to help with these needs, and it keeps the majority of the control within publishers’ hands.

That’s the reason why today’s leading performance marketers and advertisers need to crossover to email authentication and using the email addresses as an identity market across channels. Ever since the announcement back in January 2020, the ad industry is preparing itself for life beyond cookies. Google has made it clear that the third-party cookies used for website visitor identification and personalized ad delivery will be eliminated. Not only that, but the ad industry is also in search of “identity solutions” that will fulfil its needs while keeping the majority of the control in the publisher’s hands.

That’s the reason why today’s leading performance marketers and advertisers need to crossover to email authentication and using the email addresses as an identity market across channels. A recent customer survey conducted by Span Global Services sheds light on what marketers and advertisers have to say about their evolution with changing algorithms.

• Close to 80% of respondents from the ad industry expressed their concern over the changing technology impacting their buy-ins of third-party cookies. They are looking for more privacy-focused alternatives for identifying website visitors to enable marketers to still deliver relevant ads and see a positive ROAS.
• 95% of marketers surveyed were keen to run with visitors customer email ID/customer data and securely-hashed email addresses as a strategy that can pursue to improve Ad accuracy and cut cash burn from fraud clicks on the open web.
• About 89% of marketers said that they are not able to crack email-based identity due to challenges with their data quality. It would be pointless to use duplicate email ids for targeting the audience concerned – with ads on social media channels like Facebook and PPC with Google.
• Span Global’s Identity turns the email addresses that people enter on your site as a powerful tool for targeted advertising – managing the CRM database, weeding out the duplicate records, adding more details like accurate postal addresses and social handles for each customer.

With all the talk about third-party cookies these days, you might be surprised to learn that most CMOs interviewed during the course of this survey considered third-party cookies as not such a great way to reach the right audience. 

It’s time to move marketing teams towards email authentication as the gold standard for targeting. 

You must yourself be familiar with this – If you ever purchased (or at least saved your shopping cart) on a retailer’s e-commerce site, you must have had to log in or enter your email address to complete the transaction. This enables the company to send you updates on your order, right from its confirmation up until the time of its delivery. Not only that, but it also registers you in the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software so that you can be targeted with relevant ads going forward.

Now suppose you see an ad for a tempting sale on Facebook or some other social media platform posted by a retailer you recently purchased from. Upon clicking through, you notice that some of the items that you had just browsed through but never purchased are also highlighted in the ad.

Was it just coincidence or intentional?

If not a coincidence, was it due to your third-party cookies?

Possibly.

But it can also be due to your email address!

Because the company had your email address in their CRM after your previous purchase, they were able to target you elsewhere simply if the email address matched the one you used to log into the respective social media platform. Plus, you agreed to Facebook’s Terms of Service which includes what just happened.

Most advertisers have email lists that have been their go-to targeting option for years. 

And social media platforms like Facebook are only making this easier since they require an email address to log in. This has encouraged marketers and advertisers to increase their spending on these “walled” platforms. Since the open web makes it much more difficult to narrow down their precise targeting options, advertisers prefer platforms where using email addresses for logging in is a must.

Now, advertisers have relied on third-party cookies for a long, long time to understand their audience’s online behaviour and determine whether they’d be a good fit for their ads. This is mainly because not many good solutions were available to tie people’s browsing behaviour to a marketer’s leads contact database.

But with third-party cookies bidding their final goodbyes, the marketing landscape has changed completely.

Emerging identity solutions such as our partner, Span Global Data’s Traffic Solution, are continuously streamlining email-focused identity and also integrating the same with Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to enable advertisers to purchase ads based on the contact database a marketer owns as conveniently as they purchase ads on social media channels.

However, marketers need to be aware of the challenges with customer data quality that they will have to resolve before stepping up with an email ID based customer match on Google, a Custom Lookalike Audience on Facebook or a Lookalike Audience on LinkedIn.

Data authenticity and quality will hold the key to overcoming challenges of advertising accuracy and Returns On Ad Spend (RAOS).

Data Quality Challenges that you want to solve before launching an email ID mapped online campaign.

1. Cracks and Fractures

Brands still find inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and duplicities in their customer database to be one of the main challenges plaguing their email ID-mapped online marketing efforts. And the bigger their efforts, the larger these cracks and holes can become.

Common reasons for this include people using multiple email IDs for browsing, brands issuing multiple customer IDs, the temporary nature of cookies, and more. Moreover, some marketers solely rely on a home-grown database which gives them a limited view of their customers.

You can tackle this challenge by enhancing the value of your home-bred database with third-party data. This way, you won’t be depending on just cookies or device IDs but on reliable offline sources, enabling you to create real-time profiles of real people.

2. Connecting with Right Buyers at Scale

The question is not simply about owning a contact database of your leads and customers but actually being able to reach and engage them. But sadly, most marketers don’t even reach half their in-market customers. This is because your customer reach depends upon data accuracy.

Ask yourself – On a scale from 1 to 10, how sure are you that the database you’re using is enabling you to target relevant people at the right time? What if you’re simply connecting with the same person across 6 different devices and IDs?

To improve your identity matching efforts, approach a third-party data partner after thorough research. Plus, your focus should not be on the quantity (of leads) but the quality. Reaching 70 quality leads for every 100 contacts is better than reaching only 30 leads in a pool of 100. Save your time and resources.

3. Using Wrong Data Methods

Which is better: Building your house on concrete ballast or one made of sand? Similarly, relying on “probabilistic data” of your customers (device IDs, IP addresses, and browsing patterns) instead of “deterministic data” like transaction history, name, address, etc. for identity matching will limit your customer view. In the worst-case scenario, you will end up targeting the wrong people.

To achieve the degree of personalization you’re looking for with your marketing messages, only deterministic data which is based on concrete personal info enables identity management. Your confidence in identity management will determine how impressive and efficient your marketing is.

4. Data Norms Non-Compliance

Your customers are more than willing to share their personal info with you in return for a smooth and hyper-personalized shopping experience provided you take care of their privacy concerns. With norms such as GDPR, PDPA and CCPA coming into the picture, data privacy is a must.

Brands that fail to be good stewards of their customer’s information risk more than just profits and sales. They put their reputation on the line. All of this can be prevented by cleaning data of personally identifiable information such as names, financial accounts, and addresses. You can take the help of third-party data partners to ensure you meet all vital data norms.

5. Connecting Data-Driven Marketing Efforts with Sales Outcomes

Clueless shooting ads your customers’ way will not help you determine their efficiency. And neither will a look at overall campaign performance only. How will you determine whether the customer abandoned the cart because of a poor website experience or lack of multiple payment modes? By taking an individual-based measurement approach.

This way, you will be able to follow your customer right from the time of product selection up until checkout, attributing outcomes like sales to campaigns wherever required. Understanding how your marketing campaigns are affecting business goals is a must.

To sum up, by building real-time profiles of actual people that will stand the test of time, you can create connected customer experiences. Think it this way – How frustrated would you feel if after giving a decent introduction of yourself to someone, they had no clue who you were the next time you met them? If you’re neglecting customer identity management, you’re doing the digital equivalent of something similar. This will only diminish customer trust and make them unwilling to engage with your brand.

Not only that, you’d also be more efficient in your spending since you won’t end up targeting people who haven’t purchased previously or are simply not your ideal audience. Your marketing dollars will only be invested where they’ll have an impact.

Finally, you’ll also drive better engagement and sales since you’d be holding the key to best customer interactions – intimate knowledge of their behaviour, preferences, and purchase history.

2022 is fast approaching. Are you ready to not just survive but thrive in a marketing world without third-party cookies?