What happens when you click on a product, make a purchase, and then continue receiving many messages asking you to repurchase the same product? Odds are, you’re annoyed. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence—one that your customers may well face when paid media campaigns operate in a silo.

At best, this is a missed opportunity to engage customers with another product or service you offer. At worst, it’s wasted ad spend that cuts into your bottom line and drives down the ROI of your customer engagement programs. Siloed data sources and workflows can also get in the way of delivering relevant digital experiences to customers, which can undermine your longer-term monetization and retention goals by reducing brand loyalty.

To fix this marketing gap, think proactively, not reactively. Certainly, you need to find ways to hold onto the customers you acquire. But if you wait until you acquire the customers to think about their experience with your brand, you’ll miss opportunities and let issues fester. To help out, let’s dig deeper into this issue and how Braze Audience Sync can help to address it.

Why Alignment Between Engagement and Paid Teams Matters

Brands are operating in a world where customer acquisition costs are on the rise and competition is only getting more intense. On average, merchants are losing $29 for each new customer they acquire, a 222% rise from ten years ago—and a major threat to their bottom line. But the issue isn’t that acquiring new customers is intrinsically a problem; it’s that the costs associated with adding new users tend to be concentrated up front, while the pay-off usually comes over time, creating a dynamic where brands that aren’t being mindful about their customer engagement efforts can accidentally drive up costs without seeing corresponding returns.

To avoid this outcome and make the most of your budget, you need a coordinated approach. Sharing metrics helps teams work toward the same goals. And working toward the same goals helps drive more impact and pool resources.

Ideally, different teams should be sharing data, goals, and strategies, all of which help to generate a greater impact with your resources. Organizing your teams around channels (e.g., email, mobile, paid) doesn’t help you create a smooth and consistent customer experience; after all, your customers don’t know that different teams are running different channels and won’t understand why they’re getting contradictory or inconsistent experiences. The smart move here is to focus on aligning your teams around data and goals—and use that data to achieve those goals.

For example, you can align teams around owned and paid channels or around shared tools. This framework allows marketers to collaborate for improved effectiveness and efficiency, and to avoid engaging with customers with outdated or irrelevant messages. After all, you don’t need to waste money on users that are already engaged.

How Audience Sync Supports Cross-Team Alignment and Coordinated Campaigns

Braze Audience Sync, a feature built into the Braze platform, can make it possible for brands to maximize marketing effectiveness by bridging the gap between teams focused on paid channels and those focused on owned ones—or between teams centered on acquisition and retention, respectively. With Audience Sync, your acquisition and retention efforts (or your email messages and Facebook ads, for that matter) aren’t happening in silos; they can be part of a larger, coordinated customer journey that makes cohesive sense to each individual user.

Audience Sync allows marketers to automatically deploy targeted, in-the-moment ad campaigns across advertising channels—including Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, and more—in response to real-time customer activity:

• Brands can use Audience Sync to dynamically suppress ads the instant a customer converts, keeping the conversation going on more cost-effective channels. (See how Classpass did just that as part of a successful effort to boost paid ROI.)

• Marketers can reduce customer acquisition costs by removing new or existing customers from all acquisition campaigns.

• Plus, you can use real-time suppression lists to turn off expensive and irrelevant targeted ads when customers complete actions like placing an order, upgrading service, or other high-value conversion activity.

Common Audience Sync Use Cases and How They Work

Audience Sync is a multifaceted feature, capable of supporting a wide array of different use cases and campaigns. For instance, if a customer abandons a shopping cart on your app or website to do more research on Google, you can use Audience Sync to reach that customer with a sponsored Google Ads campaign related to the items in their cart. Another possible use case? If a formerly active app user hasn’t logged in in a while, marketers can use Audience Sync for retargeting campaigns on social media, encouraging users to log into the app again.

Audience Sync can also help you find new audiences even as you shut down targeted campaigns for newly acquired customers. For example, you can serve relevant ads across leading advertising platforms using trusted first-party customer preferences, behaviors, and cross-channel interactions, and create lookalike audiences to find new customers similar to your existing high-value customers.

You can also use Audience Sync to trigger personalized ads on various popular social media and advertising platforms (including Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, and more). Doing so can drive higher conversions with relevant ads based on customers’ real-time behaviors and preferences, without relying on third-party cookies; that’s especially important as Google and others take steps to phase out the use of these cookies. All in all, it’s a smart way to use your powerful first-party data to reach users where they are, and where they’re engaging.

To dig a little deeper, let’s explore a few examples of how Audience Sync can work to support effective customer engagement:

1. Seasonal Promotions

By leveraging Audience Sync, fictional apparel retailer Flash & Thread is able to expand a one-off seasonal email send into a more impactful cross-channel experience that uses coordinated paid ads to pull in potential customers who might otherwise have missed the promotion.

2. Customer Acquisition

One of the most impactful things about Audience Sync is its ability to leverage insights from nuanced first-party customer data to power highly relevant acquisition campaigns. By using Audience Sync, fictional financial services brand Pyrite Financial is able to precisely target Google Search ads to bring in individuals who are likely to become high-value customers, increasing ROI and boosting their overall bottom line.

3. Free-to-Paid Member Flow

For brands with a subscription model, finding ways to encourage members to upgrade to paid status is one of the most important drivers of long-term business success. Audience Sync can help support this key action by allowing marketers to seamlessly remove users from paid advertising flows after they convert, reducing marketing spend and providing a responsive user experience.

Final Thoughts

One team, one dream. By tying together acquisition and retention and owned and paid channels, Audience Sync isn’t just stitching together the customer experience into a cohesive whole; it’s making it possible for different departments and functions to collaborate more effectively and drive stronger outcomes across the board.

Interested in learning more about Braze Audience Sync? Check out the Audience Sync product page.