Look-Alike Customer Targeting
Look-alike targeting: find the households that resemble your best customers
A digital reconstruction of your customer or employee database: a demographic profile of the best of them, then the look-alike households or candidates to reach by mail, online or both.
Your customer file knows who buys from you but not why. Reconstruction fills in the rest: each name and address is matched to demographic data, and the file becomes a profile of age, income, home value, household makeup and where your customers live. Read across the whole file, the profile shows what the best customers have in common, and that pattern is the most accurate description of your next customer you will ever have.
The pattern then becomes a list. We select the households in your area that match it but are not yet customers, the look-alikes, and mail them, show them ads through addressable geofencing, or both. The same program works on an employee file: profile the people who stayed and did well, and the look-alike list becomes a recruiting mailing to people like them.
What does database reconstruction mean?
Rebuilding a thin file into a full one. A customer database usually holds a name, an address, perhaps a phone number and a purchase date. Reconstruction runs it through a proprietary matching program and appends what the file lacks, demographics for each household, so the records can be compared and grouped. Your own file is left as it is; the profile is built from the reconstructed copy.
How is a look-alike audience chosen?
From the traits your best customers share more often than the households around them. If your customers are far likelier than their neighbors to be homeowners in their fifties with homes above a certain value, those three traits become the selection, and households that match all three but have never bought from you make the list. The tighter the pattern, the smaller and better the list.
Can look-alike targeting help with hiring?
Yes, and it is one of the less obvious uses. A business that profiles the employees who stayed longest and performed best can find people who resemble them within commuting distance, then mail a recruiting postcard to their homes. It reaches good candidates who are not looking at job boards, and there are many of them.
Once the look-alike list is built, it goes out as postcards to targeted households and online through addressable geofencing.
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Answers
Look-Alike Targeting: questions people ask
What is a look-alike audience?
A list of people who resemble your existing customers in the ways that matter: age, income, home value, household makeup, location. It is built by profiling your customer file and selecting the households that match the profile but have not bought from you.
What do I need to start look-alike targeting?
Your customer file with names and addresses, the bigger and more recent the better, and the area you want to reach. If you can mark your best customers, by spend or by how long they have stayed, the profile is built from them.
Can I use look-alike targeting for recruiting?
Yes. Send an employee file instead of a customer file, and the look-alike list becomes people near your locations who resemble your best employees, ready for a recruiting mailing.
Is look-alike targeting direct mail or digital?
Both. The look-alike list can be mailed, reached online through addressable geofencing, or both at once, with the ad and the card carrying the same offer.