In the SAP Customer Data Platform, customer interactions are driven by two primary features: Audiences and CX Journeys. This lesson focuses specifically on Audiences, which are essential for targeted marketing campaigns.
Creating Audiences
Objective
After completing this lesson, you will be able to discover and evaluate ways to ensure customers are grouped into Audiences and then exported to destination applications.
Introduction
Understanding Audiences
An Audience is a group of customers classified by specific criteria. For instance, you might group customers who are under 30 years old and who have made a purchase in the last 30 days. Groups of this kind help marketers target their campaigns effectively by segmenting customers using what is known about them: their profile attributes, activities, indicators and segments.
How Audiences are Generated
Audiences can be created out of Customer Profiles or Groups.
Each audience is processed through a batch file mechanism and sent to destination applications. Importantly, only customers with an active processing purpose, such as marketing consent, are eligible to be part of an audience.
Configuring Audiences
When setting up an audience, there are several critical elements to consider:
- Selection Criteria
- Define potential prospects or group-based criteria through customer exploration (explained below).
- Profile Attributes
- Consider the processing purpose of properties or attributes when determining which ones to include.
- Processing Purposes
- Consider the consent provided by customers, such as marketing terms and conditions.
- Transfer Frequency
- Decide how often the audience data will be exported to external applications, enabling versatile marketing strategies such as social media campaigns or targeted email promotions. For a streamlined process, you can set up recurring schedules for these exports to various platforms, ensuring timely campaign execution.
Customer Exploration is designed to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of your potential audience. It empowers users to delve into various entities, including groups, profiles, activities, indicators, segments, relationships, and purposes. By leveraging these elements, users can assess the number of groups or customers that could potentially constitute their audience.
When constructing or editing an audience, the Activation Exploration tool allows users to interactively explore and decide which attributes and segments they wish to include. These may range from demographic details and customer behaviors to specific activities and relationships between entities. As users explore, they are presented with an interactive canvas that visually represents these attributes, making it easier to understand and navigate through the complexity of audience data. Audiences can then be generated out of any of the cards shown in the screenshot above.
Visualizing Audiences
The Audiences Dashboard provides insights into:
- Total Customers
- The estimated number of total customers within the audience.
- Selected Entity
- The entity (unified, contextual, and group profiles) scheduled for export upon audience activation.
- Change History and Activation Details
- Information on when the audience was last modified, next activation date, and the last activation date.
- Activation Insights
- The number of customers activated during the last activation cycle.
These metrics empower marketers to refine their strategies and optimize audience targeting.
Managing Audience Activation
Once an audience is created, you have options for its activation:
- Editing
Modify audience activation exploration, action selection, and scheduling configurations through the Edit Audience Activation screen.
- Activation Status
- Manage schedules, manually trigger activations, or review execution results. Filter by execution status (e.g., in progress, completed with errors, etc.) to promptly identify and rectify issues.
Action Selection
To maximize the potential of your audience data, it’s crucial to select and configure actions appropriately. After identifying your target audience through activation exploration, you’ll need to add at least one actionable item to move forward.
The CDP provides a visual representation, illustrating the portion of audience instances influenced by your selected actions compared to the entire entity. This helps you immediately grasp the impact of your actions.
Scheduling and Activating an Audience
Effective scheduling and activation of an audience is pivotal in optimizing the timing and effectiveness of your audience interactions and ensuring seamless data integration with destination applications.
Scheduling your audience actions ensures that data export and audience enrichment occur at optimal intervals. By setting up a recurring schedule, marketers can align their audience data with various downstream applications.
Here’s how marketers can leverage scheduled audience actions:
- Social Media Campaigns
- Exporting audience data to social media platforms allows for the execution of precisely targeted marketing campaigns.
- Search Advertising
- Use updated audience insights to refine targeting in search advertising, improving ROI and engagement rates.
- Email Campaigns
- Deploy email campaigns informed by real-time customer actions and preferences, enhancing engagement through personalization.
Another way of exporting data to destination applications is by activating an audience. This can be done instantly to serve various purposes, from testing to enriching group data.
Here’s how audience activation can be utilized effectively:
- Instantaneous Activation
- Quickly export audience data for immediate testing purposes, ensuring configurations and data flows are correct without delay.
- Data Enrichment
- Use activation to enrich and update group data, which can enhance customer profiles and improve overall data analytics.
By leveraging these features, marketers can create precise, dynamic audiences that drive effective customer engagement and ultimately enhance marketing outcomes.
The Creating Audiences – Demo
Summary
In this lesson you learned how to generate an Audience, and how to use Customer Exploration to assist you in doing so. You also know how to use the Audiences Dashboard to visualize your audiences, and understand how to activate an audience, either manually or by defining scheduled actions affecting that audience.