Businesses are swimming in customer data. To make the most of that data and in order to create highly personalized experiences for their customers, business and marketing technologists are investing in CDPs (Customer Data Platforms). But having automation alone isn’t enough to drive successful interactions with your customers, CDPs need to be optimized in order to get the best results.
Where can you use a CDP?
Business and marketing technologists recognize Customer Data Platforms for the value they deliver in creating lasting relationships with their customers. CDPs that are combined with machine learning, offer a complete view of your customers that also enables you to engage them across the channels of their choice in real-time. In short, a Customer Data Platform truly makes your customer data actionable.
-Customer Lifecycle Automation: CDPs can leverage all of your client data to identify, understand, grow, retain, reactivate, and nurture both lapsed and active customers continuously via A.I. powered customer analytics. This enables individualized interactions for precisely the right offer, at the right time, through any channel, for all customers across every stage of the life cycle and buying journey.
-Personalization: CDPs can build custom audience segments for precise targeting on data characteristics such as purchase behavior, communication preferences, location, basic demographics, and more. With a Customer Data Platform, you’ll build a complete profile of your prospects; making it possible to market what they need and how to reach them.
-Cross-sell / Up-sell: A trained resource can show you the next best product or offer to cross or upsell to which customer. But with a CDP that uses AI, you can see beyond the obvious recommendations and gain the benefit of deep patterns and trends that drive meaningful cross- and up-sell opportunities with precision.
What should you look for in a CDP?
The Customer Data Platform Institute lists three types of CDPs.
- All CDPs include a focus on building the unified customer database. Data Access CDPs functionality includes standardization, transformation, identity linkage, aggregation, segmentation, and data sharing.
- In addition to building a database, Analytical CDPs provide capabilities such as predictive modeling or machine learning outside of segmentation. Specialized analytical features include data visualization, attribution, product recommendations, forecasting, among other advancements.
- Campaign CDPs build a database and have analytical features plus are enabled to select messages for individuals. This differs from CDPs that offer segmentation which only create lists.
Selecting a Customer Data Platform that meets your needs is important but regardless of which type you choose the benefits derived from having a unified view of your customers are enormous. Here’s what that could look like from Zylotech’s self-learning platform, an advanced analytics CDP.
When you’re working with complete profile information and are able to achieve accurate targeting, you can turn your customers into product evangelists, save marketing spend that was previously hamstrung by ‘dirty data,’ and offer lucrative deals to customers just as they are thinking about making a purchase.
What are the results you should be aiming for in a CDP?
A CDPs performance should be measured through a combination of its monetary impact, the efficiency gain it brings, and the business KPIs it helps attain. Meaningful customer data provides strategic advantages to businesses. With CDPs, marketers can now interact with customers in a consistent, context-rich way that cultivates genuine loyalty and engagement.
Christina Tramontozzi leads branding & demand generation at Zylotech. When she’s not geeking out on the latest marketing trends and sales cycle processes, she keeps a beach bum profile in her seaside town. An avid health food junkie, she says that daily green smoothies help her to keep up with her little boy and two dogs.
If you liked this post, check out our other blog post: How to go from bad data to good quality data in your business.
