9 out of 10 small businesses aren’t collecting customer contact information. If they are, it’s usually no more than a sporadic activity on a Sunday to fiddle with Mailchimp.
I want to tell you — no, I NEED to tell you — that collecting names and emails is about SO much more than simply building your email list. The names and email addresses of your customers form crucial parameters to specifically identify your customers on all the major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Youtube.
Why Emails Matter
If you’re a business owner or a marketing manager you’re probably familiar with running Facebook and Instagram ads, as well as Google Ads. What you might not know, however, is that on all these platforms you can specifically target “custom audiences”. What are “custom audiences”? These audiences are lists of people defined by pieces of data that you supply like their first name, last name, and email addresses. Facebook and Google use this data to find your customers in their databases, and then serve ads directly to them over their social media platforms.
It’s Not Just About your Existing Customers
But it doesn’t end there. With Facebook and Google, you can also target new customers by asking them to show your ads to “lookalike” audiences that share the same interests and demographic profile as your customer base. So, in a nutshell, you use the names and emails of your existing audience to create a profile of the wider audience that you’d like to target, and based on the assumption that people who share the same profile as your current audience are more likely to want to try out your business.
How Do you Collect Customer Data
We think loyalty programs are the most effective way to incentivize customers to volunteer their names and email addresses to you for marketing purposes. It is an easy to understand quid pro quo. Customers get special treatment in exchange for information about their identity and their spending habits. Most customers are willing to make this exchange in order to enhance their experience.
Using a digital loyalty app like Flex Rewards can help you collect the data you need to create custom audiences on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. In fact, we even use the specific Facebook, Google and Apple IDs of your customers to create an account on Flex Rewards so you get the most accurate customer data.
Now that you know the value of emails and names, you should start looking for the best ways to collect this information for your business.
