Is Email the Future of Major Network Display Advertising?

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article hinting Google will soon unveil an offering that allows advertisers to leverage email lists to target audiences via display ads. The program rivals the advertising technology of another internet giant: Facebook’s custom audiences tool. Now email is hopping back into its spot as the most popular marketing vehicle and, once again, email marketers everywhere are saying “told you so.”

Last week, we published a blog post announcing our newest service: lookalike modeling, and last month we published about the next big marketing buzzword: hashed emails. Now let’s talk about what all of these updates mean for you, your customers and the future of display ads.

Emails and Display Advertising 101

We’ve talked about how email is the holy grail of digital marketing. It’s a powerful little piece of information that acts as a key to a vast landscape of additional data, such as demographics, household income, social behavior and more. Facebook (and soon Google, apparently) offers advertisers the opportunity to upload email lists, and lists of encrypted email, and re-target those users with display advertisements.

How Do Hashed Emails Factor In?

You use your email address to log into your social accounts, online shopping accounts and various other web and mobile applications. Your email, in many ways, is your passport to the internet.

Hashed emails, the hexadecimal string that encrypts customer email address, allows marketers to obtain insight into consumers online behaviors so they can send them offers most relevant to their interests without obtaining your actual email address. This ensures consumers not only enjoy advertisements targeted to their wants and needs, but do so while keeping their email address private.

TowerData’s lookalike modeling tool considers your best customers and identifies other consumers in our database who have similar interests and demographics to your best customer segment. We then provide these hashed emails to you to upload to your preferred retargeting platform, and voila! You’ve instantly broadened your reach.

Wait, What About Cookies?

If you’re thinking this all sounds awfully familiar, it’s probably because, well, it is. For many years, publishers and advertisers relied on third party cookies to provide information about online behavior. Until recently, cookies were the heart of display advertising. But, when mobile devices became more popular, everything changed. Third party cookies are only partially supported on most mobile devices and on the mobile Safari browser (which comes as the standard on the world’s most popular smartphone: the iPhone.)

In other words, when it comes to display advertising, hashed emails offers unparalleled access to sticky data points. By utilizing these digital fingerprints, you can improve cross-channel engagement and reach more prospects than ever before.

Interested in getting started with hashed emails in display advertising? Contact us to learn more about our new lookalike modeling tool.