Feature Spotlight: Lookalike Audience Activation

As consumers demand more personalised experiences, brands face difficulty understanding their behaviour in a privacy-conscious era. Privacy regulations like GDPR and phasing out of third-party cookies make it harder for marketers to acquire the customer data they need to create personalised messaging.?

Lookalike audience creation and activation is a powerful tool that can help marketers reach new, high-value customers who are more likely to convert.

What is a Lookalike Audience?

Lookalike audiences are a type of audience targeting typically used in digital marketing and advertising. The idea behind a lookalike audience is to find new potential customers who are likely to have similar characteristics as those in a target group, whether it be similar interests, behaviours, or purchasing patterns. In the case of data partnerships, lookalike audiences can be created between organisations using a wide range of unique data attributes from one organisation to predict target segments from the other. The models to predict lookalike audiences can be created from the set of common customers that have been identified using approaches like DataCo’s Privacy Preserving Customer Matching.

By identifying lookalike audiences, organisations create targeted campaigns more likely to resonate with the people they want to reach; leading to higher conversion rates, more sales, and greater customer lifetime value.

Real-world examples

To further explain lookalike audiences and their potential value, we will work through a couple of examples of industry use cases.

Tailored Lookalike Audiences for Brands through a Retail Media Network.

Large retailers who are setting up retail media networks have a range of interesting data points on their members that can be used to create tailored advertising products for brands. Say a small clothing brand looking to purchase advertising through the Retailers’ Retail Media Network, but wants to target potential customers who look like their high-value customers to date. Lookalike modelling can be used to identify the most relevant characteristics from the retailer's business data that predict high-value customers for the clothing brand using data from the customers they have in common. The retailer then applies the model across their entire customer base to identify the best candidates to be shown the clothing brand offer through their retail media network. As the clothing brand knows the audience can produce higher quality leads, they are happy to pay a premium for the specific advertising campaign.

Differentiated Points Offer for Bank and Airline Loyalty Programs

Banks and Airline Loyalty programs have been partnering for years. Still, the effectiveness of programs can be called into question if the right customers are not onboarded into joint propositions, such as rewards credit cards or home loan offers with bonus points.?

The Lookalike model allows loyalty programs to leverage the wide range of data they hold to create models to predict who could be in a particular segment the bank is looking to market to. As this type of model only relies on data from the loyalty program as input, it is not restricted to only common customers. It can be used to identify potential cross-sell candidates across other loyalty members who have consented to be provided with new marketing offers.?

As these candidates have been identified as having a high likelihood of being within the strategic segment, the Bank and Airline may make the offer more attractive by increasing the loyalty points available compared to a generic campaign.

DataCo’s Automated Solution makes Lookalike Modelling Accessible to all Businesses.?

Accessed via the DataCo Collaboration Platform, the Lookalike Audience Creation Engine is an intuitive no-code interface that leverages AutoML to automate several steps involved in the lookalike audience modelling process, such as feature selection and model training.

By automating many of the steps involved in the model creation and training, our Lookalike Audience Engine makes the process faster, more efficient, and more accessible to people with limited analytics expertise.

To learn more, book a live demonstration with the DataCo team?here