Salesforce.com has launched a new tool that syncs its customer relationship management (CRM) data with Facebook, so its users can send targeted ads to their customers on the social network.
The Marketing Cloud Active Audiences feature for synchronizing CRM with advertising placements on Facebook, Twitter, and the entire app ecosystem.
The tool means that Facebook ads can be based on consumers’ interactions with marketers on other platforms, such as brand pages, ecommerce sites and email click-throughs.
“Marketers try to show the right digital ads to customers primarily using Web cookies, an unreliable approach with extremely low engagement, especially compared to Facebook and Twitter ads,” wrote Liam Doyle, VP and GM of advertising products at Salesforce, in a blog.
Doyle notes that, as an alternative, marketers manually upload lists of email subscribers to the social networks to make accurate matches.
The new Active Audiences product, he explains, automates this process to scale and keeps customer data confined to a trusted system.
Salesforce claims that its new service presents marketers with the ability to connect with customers across any device at scale for the first time. It claims that, in a beta test, a large retailer used it to integrate its email and advertising campaigns and extended the reach of its email program by 77%.
“With Active Audiences, which we’re announcing today, you can take your existing customer database and target specific contacts within it with ads,” said Eric Stahl, senior VP-product marketing at Salesforce, referring to the product’s name.
Giving one example, Stahl said a hotel could set up a rule within Salesforce to show ads to customers in its loyalty program who haven’t booked a room for a few months. The product can also be used to try to re-engage customers and prospects not interacting with email marketing by serving them paid ads in other channels.
“You are targeting specific people with ads based on who they are and what you know about them,” Stahl said.