Activate an Audience Externally

Activating an audience externally is all about using customer data from MXO in conjunction with your existing data to decide who to engage with and when. It's all about connecting and conversing with the right customer at the right time.

Including shared data from MXO in that process provides you with access to highly relevant, contextual and behavioral information based on actual customer intent enabling you target them in a much more nuanced way than when using traditional marketing personas.

You might want to know who in a cohort of customers to target in an external system. Sharing customer data with that system provides you with that information, enabling you to contact only those customers who have shown relevant and recent interest in, for example, a specific product or service.

Why share customer data to activate an audience?

Using Dynamics Audiences sharing capabilities provides you with an easy way to get customer data from MXO into your existing systems either for use on its own or to augment your existing data.

Use Case: Marketing Automation

You want to use shared data from MXO when deciding who to target in an email campaign or to augment the data in your DMP before targeting specific customers in an online advertising campaign.

It may be that those marketing automation systems do not support connecting to MXO using our APIs or that creating those connections is not a priority project for your brand.

Sharing customer data enables you to pull that information into the relevant systems without the need for any development time.

Use Case: Manual Data Processing

You want to use shared data as the basis for creating a follow-up call list but are required to go through a manual process of fine-tuning that data before using it to connect with your customers.

For example, where you need to remove customers from that list for compliance reasons to ensure any communications are in line with their saved contact preferences.

What does sharing customer data to activate an audience help me achieve?

Sharing customer data helps your brand in several ways:

  • You have more relevant and engaging conversations with your customers, based on their actual interests and intent.
  • You see improved KPI's based on, for example, click-through rates from campaign emails or online ads because of more nuanced customer targeting.
  • Shared data enriches your existing systems, making them smarter. You can harness the power of those existing systems and tap into the extra data MXO provides whenever you need it.

What's the process for sharing customer data to activate an audience?

The high-level process for sharing customer data to activate an audience is shown in the diagram, below:

TB - JTBD Activate

  1. Think about the job to be done. This will influence the query you write in Step 2.
    • What is your use case?
    • Do you want to activate an audience containing all customers or a specific cohort of customers?
  2. Write and process your engagement query. Be sure to use the discover journeys query type.
  3. Think about the data format required by your final endpoint.
    • Does that endpoint require data in CSV or JSON format?
  4. Create an audience destination for the shared data. That destination specifies when shared customer data is stored. You can pull data from that destination into the final endpoint, when required.
  5. Decide whether you want to share customer data with your systems manually or on a schedule.