Put your customer register to work – target your advertising with pinpoint precision using custom audiences

February 3, 2025

Your current and prospective customers are a unique group of people whose shared characteristics go beyond simple demographics. With custom audiences, you can handpick who sees your advertising, create effective personalised campaigns, and better understand the motives of your target group.

Building custom audiences from your own customer register turns mass media into a channel of customer communications.

“This opens a host of opportunities. When you have a distinct message to share, it makes sense to find the key audience instead of investing in a TV spot for two million viewers,” explains Veli-Matti Nurmela, Business Manager, Data from Sanoma.

When working with Sanoma, the pseudonymised customers on your list are identified on Sanoma’s platforms by their email addresses and phone numbers. Logged-in users form a substantial part of traffic in Sanoma’s digital media which, altogether, reach 89 per cent of Finnish people weekly.

Five effective ways to utilise custom audiences

There are plenty of creative examples of how custom audiences can be used to reach the right people on your list at the exact right moment. Veli-Matti Nurmela shares a few:

Widen the reach and raise the impact of your customer communications. Lay the groundwork for an upcoming newsletter by advertising to customers who aren’t yet subscribed or are less likely to open the newsletter.

Build repetition without spamming. Instead of sending numerous emails or text messages, reinforce their impact with an ad campaign in your customers’ favourite media.

Make sure you’re top-of-mind when your customer is making a decision. Time your advertising to the moment a customer is about to renew a subscription service or refresh their supply of a product. Combined with direct contact, custom targeting helps you be present to your customer right when they are thinking of you.

Activate your passive customers. Direct your communications to customers who have left or are at risk of leaving. Catch the eye of Black Friday or Christmas shoppers in between seasons to show the value you could bring them year-round.

Create impressive B2B campaigns. Targeting is often a big challenge when it comes to B2B advertising on mass media. With custom audiences, you can run a 30-second TV ad targeted at 2 000 people on their smart TVs – while appearing like you’re running a nationwide campaign.

Give us a minute - In a minute long video Veli-Matti gives you more examples how to re-engage your customers with digital ads using your own data. Watch the video!

Amp up your customer understanding and acquisition

Custom audiences can also be turned into valuable tools for customer understanding. Through analysis, you can discover details your own data might overlook and create a better understanding of your customers’ motives.

“The purchase data of a travel agent, for example, might show two people buying the same trip to Barcelona. What it doesn’t tell us is that one went there to shop and party, while the other wanted to enjoy tapas and visit the Sagrada Familia. The motives are vastly different, as is the messaging that makes an impact on these two people,” says Nurmela.

Try out these analysis methods:

Look into other online targeting data on your audience as well as their individual media consumption to get an idea of their motives.
Compare your customers with your prospects to understand what keeps the latter from buying.
Create a lookalike audience to grow your customer base with the most potential people.

Keeping your customers’ data safe from start to finish

To get started with custom audiences in Sanoma’s media, you need 300 matches between your customer register and Sanoma’s. A B2C register of 1 000 individuals will get you that. In B2B, phone numbers are the best option as work emails aren’t often used to sign up to news platforms. Even then, a match rate of 25% is not uncommon.

“The number does depend on the register, though – I’ve seen match rates of almost 90% in B2C cases,” Nurmela says.

Dealing with people’s personal information always calls for a discussion on privacy. When signing a contract with Sanoma, you assure you have the permission to share your customers’ data. Sanoma’s UI makes it easy to keep your uploaded data up to date. If not updated in six months, the data is automatically deleted.

“It’s also important to keep in mind that we can’t enrich your CRM data. While we can analyse the data you shared to add to your customer understanding, we can’t return any data to you on an individual level,” Nurmela adds.

Advertise in the largest media in Finland

A Finnish company with servers in the EU, Sanoma is a valuable partner for many advertisers. Even if you’re already using custom audiences on other platforms, advertising to Sanoma’s customer base right next to high-quality journalism will add a new angle to your message and reach.

As the largest media house in Finland, Sanoma has one of the biggest customer registers in the country. Our digital media reach 89% of Finns weekly with 1,2 billion page loads a month. A large amount of the traffic consists of identified users.
Custom audiences can be bought on Sanoma’s Ad Manager, but they can also be combined with programmatic buying in a private marketplace.
Personal customer service and advice is available through chat, email, phone, or meetings – whatever suits you best.

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