Both mail domain targeting and CRM lookalike audiences can be useful for performance marketers looking to reach their campaign goals with increased numbers of users. Mail domain targeting is an email marketing strategy designed to create multiple domains for outbound email campaigns, while lookalike audiences are a feature within CRM systems and advertising platforms that use AI functionality to create new segments, based on existing customer data.

Here’s more on each of these options, how they work, and when to use them.

Mail Domain Targeting

Mail domain targeting can be useful for marketers and advertisers expanding their company’s reach. Let’s get into the details.

What Is Mail Domain Targeting?

Mail domain targeting is a way to use email marketing techniques for cold outreach to prospects. It’s useful for businesses facing spam risks and that want to experiment with new audiences or increase email volume quickly.

Mail domain targeting creates alternative but still on-brand domains, such as store.company.com versus company.com to send outbound emails. This is ideal if a business wants to protect the primary domain from spam filters when scaling up email volumes, or experiment with new formats or audiences in their email marketing campaigns. It protects the core brand while allowing for new approaches to email.

How Mail Domain Targeting Works

There are several ways to approach mail domain targeting, depending on your existing tools and the associated goals.

• Domain segmentation: With this method, you create a segmented list within an email provider based on industry domain, such as .gov or .edu, or a specific company’s domain.
• Geographic segmentation: This method segments users based on the country domain, like .uk or .in, to then target emails according to regional preferences.
• Behavioral or intent targeting: Incorporate data from user interactions, like past purchases or web visits, to target the specific domains or high-intent users likely to convert.
• Sub-domain segmentation: This refers to using subdomains within a company’s primary root email domain to send targeted emails to specific audiences. This can help improve sender reputation and tailor messaging to keep it from being too broad.

Benefits

Mail domain targeting can be a very useful way to boost existing and new or desired audiences through email, particularly for B2B marketers. You may, e.g., want to explore whether those working in higher education are a good target audience for your company’s product, and thus create a targeted email domain for .edu recipients. Mail domain targeting also allows marketers to create focused, relevant messaging for different audiences to increase reach and conversions.

Additionally, this method is useful when you’re scaling up an email marketing program or making other changes in strategy, and want to ensure the protection of your domain name and associated brand identity.

Considerations

Keep in mind that mail domain targeting requires the same attention to regulatory compliance as any other email marketing program. In addition, mail domain targeting can be onerous to set up and carry out manually if your marketing technology platforms don’t include the feature. It’s also limited to outbound emails, so you’ll likely want to use it as part of a broader performance marketing strategy that includes open web, social and search, and other motions.

For larger companies or those with multiple, unique audiences, mail domain targeting helps differentiate messaging and offers. Consider your in-house and platform capabilities, the variety of users and audiences, and number and breadth of products before setting up mail domain targeting.

Use Cases

Generally, mail domain targeting is useful for tailored B2B outreach, improved email deliverability, and segmentation by characteristic, like behavior or geography. Here are a few common use cases:

• ABM: For account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, you might target specific high-value corporate domains in order to find and personalize outreach to the relevant decision-makers.
• Competitor conquesting: This option identifies and targets users who have interacted with competitors’ domains.
• Improving cold email deliverability: Rotating email domains can help avoid spam filters and ensure the email reaches inboxes.
• Specialized or targeted offers: Mail domain targeting allows you to customize and personalize content based on industry, company size, or location, then send appropriate offers.
• Sub-domain email strategy: Creating separate domains for separate email types, such as marketing versus transactional, can help manage the sender’s reputation and assure delivery.
• Domain activity: This is useful for segmenting by domain-specific activity, e.g., if an email provider’s users are becoming inactive, or if a certain amount of time has passed since users have engaged with the business.
• Engagement segmentation: For lead nurturing, you may create domains to target users who have engaged with content in order to follow up with tailored offers.
• Retargeting: This type of domain targeting is useful to re-engage users who have abandoned their cart, so you can send personalized reminders and offers.

CRM Lookalike Audiences

Using your CRM system or advertising platform to create lookalike audiences can help expand your campaign reach, by finding new audiences modeled on proven customers, or by finding similar users to those you already have. This lookalike audience method also helps capture incremental reach and improve relevance as you’re driving toward campaign success.

What Are CRM Lookalike Audiences?

A lookalike audience is essentially a customer database made up of a group of people who have similar characteristics to your ideal customer, or one of your ideal customer types, depending on the breadth and variety of your business. Modern ad platforms or CRM systems incorporate AI to analyze audience data and create the lookalike audiences, saving users a lot of time.

Lookalike audiences might include users with similarities like purchasing behaviors, preferences, and characteristics like location and other demographic details. Then, marketers can direct tailored, personalized messaging and offers to each audience accordingly. Lookalike audiences can start with a small percentage, reflecting how closely you want the new lookalike audience to match the source audience.

Types of Lookalike Audiences

There are a few types of lookalike audiences to consider.

• Conversion-based lookalikes: These audiences are created based on actions that users have taken — filling out a form, visiting a campaign landing page, or subscribing to a newsletter.
• High-value modeling: These audiences use modeling to group and target users that match high-lifetime-value customer profiles.
• Segmented lists: Similar to mail domain targeting, this type of audience is based on specific customer segments, such as those in a particular country, demographic, or in a particular product category.
• Seed optimization: This refers to continual refining of the source (or “seed”) customer data list, which is essential for AI tools to accurately predict new lookalike audiences.
• Combined or stacked lookalikes: These audiences are combined out of several different lookalike audiences, such as people who have attended an event combined with people who work at financial services firms. This helps expand reach while maintaining relevance.
• Engagement-based lookalikes: These audiences incorporate users who are similar to those who have interacted deeply with a brand, whether that’s filling out a form, visiting the website, or watching videos.

How CRM Lookalike Audiences Work

CRM lookalike audiences create new groups to target based on existing users. These audiences can be incredibly helpful in expanding reach and meeting campaign goals by driving new, high-intent visitors to your site or other destination.

There are multiple ways to create and use lookalike audiences, including site visitor information through tracking pixels on your website, like those that Realize offers. Without pixels, you can use information like email list signup or completed purchase. Or, upload data directly from your CRM email lists and then create a lookalike audience.

Once you’ve created a CRM lookalike audience, you can apply it to a new campaign, or to an existing campaign that aligns with this new audience group. Make sure you optimize the ad creative to match, then monitor metrics like conversion numbers or return on ad spend (ROAS) and refine accordingly. Or, let your ad platform automate this work for you!

Benefits

CRM lookalike audiences can be an easy way to find and target new, high-intent audiences for your brand. It can be a low-lift activity, particularly if you have a platform to do it for you, and newer AI capabilities can delve into data more quickly and at a broader scale than human teams.

Considerations

When you’re using lookalike audiences, make sure to keep these tips in mind:

Data is paramount: Marketing outreach with lookalike audiences depends heavily on up-to-date, continually refreshed contact data for customers and prospects. With AI capabilities, this is even more essential so that predictions are as accurate as possible.

Use high-intent lists: Lookalike audiences should include users who are most similar to those users who have recently converted, by whatever standard your business uses. You can also add users who have engaged with your business on outside media channels.

Get to know percentage modeling: Lookalike audiences work best when you start small and grow. So, try a 1-10% number first so that you get highly similar matches to those valuable prospects or customers. Then, expand the size and reach from there.

Use Cases

CRM lookalike audiences leverage first-party data to target new prospects who mirror high-value customers, driving higher conversion rates and reducing ad spend. Key use cases include targeting lookalikes of recent converters for acquisition, reaching high-lifetime-value (LTV) customers to boost revenue, and finding new users for specific products, like sustainable goods.

These are some common use cases for lookalike audiences:

• User acquisition at lower cost and higher quality: Lookalike audiences are similar to your existing high-value users and thus more likely to convert and engage more quickly. This costs less than broader acquisition efforts. Plus, you can more easily suppress lower-value users.
• Moving beyond saturation: If your targets are saturated, lookalike audiences can help find new leads that are similar to your current customer or prospect base.
• Increased intent or awareness: Using existing marketing data can be super useful in building more targeted, specific new audiences, whether you’re working toward higher intent leads, cross-selling or selling new products, or increasing brand awareness.

How Does Mail Domain Targeting Compare to CRM Lookalike Audiences?

Here’s a quick overview of what to expect from mail domain targeting and lookalike audiences when you’re deciding which to choose.

How to Decide When to Choose Mail Domain Targeting

Mail domain targeting is ideal when a marketing team wants to expand its email usage, whether for experimenting with new audiences or increasing volume. It works best for cold outreach or scaling sales efforts by email, while keeping your business’ outbound email reputation intact. It’s useful if the business is facing any spam issues, and to ensure deliverability.

How to Decide When to Choose CRM Lookalike Audiences

Choose CRM lookalike audiences when you’re working to acquire new users who are likely to convert. This is ideal when you already have a strong database of existing customers, and when your CRM or ads platform includes this capability. Lookalikes are ideal for targeted advertising, and for ambitious acquisition goals.

Key Takeaways

Mail domain targeting and CRM lookalike audiences are both important tools for modern marketers as they’re growing audiences and expanding reach. Mail domain targeting can help companies experiment and expand their email marketing programs intelligently. Lookalike audiences can take advantage of AI’s scale and depth to analyze data, and make predictions to help performance marketers and advertisers find users who are a good match for what the business is offering. For scale, improved ROAS, and better reach, these tools can open up new opportunities.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Which targeting method should I use to reach people who are already using my competitor?

If you know a group of people are already using your competitor, this is a great chance to use competitor conquesting. Try creating a small lookalike audience based on the information you’ve captured in a CRM platform. This can target those people who have used a competitor app or visited competitors’ websites, then tailor messaging, creative, and offers that highlight the value of your product or service. You can try a 1-3% lookalike audience to target the top percentage of people who match this competitor profile, then expand if needed later.

I have a list of my top 500 VIPs; should I use mail domain targeting or CRM lookalike audiences to use it?

Use CRM lookalike audiences to target this list of top 500 VIPs. This is high-intent, first-party data that represents your best customers, so you’ll be able to use the lookalike audience to find people who share these VIP characteristics. Try a small initial seed list to start finding new valuable users. AI and ML tools do better with groups of more than 1,000 users, but 500 is adequate for their capabilities to help you scale. Using mail domain targeting for this use case may be too broad, with lower-value users than your VIP list.

Should I use mail domain targeting or CRM lookalike audiences to target people subscribed to specific industry publications?

For this use case, try mail domain targeting for outreach to subscribers of specific industry publications. For B2B audiences, mail domain targeting can be very useful for reaching professionals in a particular industry, since you can tailor messages carefully. Of course, if you’re looking for people like those subscribers, rather than actual known subscribers, try lookalike audiences.