Get to know your customers with a CDP
The marketing power of a customer data platform
By Mike Deinlein, Logan Patterson, and Morgan Richardson
Digital marketing strategy is at the forefront of marketers’ minds with the goal of both retaining current customers and expanding their customer base for revenue generation. Studies have shown that the ability to personalize marketing content has a major impact on customer retention and conversion; however it’s not always easy or straightforward. According to a recent Gartner survey, 63% of digital marketers still struggle with personalization.
As a CMO or marketing manager struggling with this same problem, you may be asking:
- Do I need better branding?
- First-party or third-party data insights?
- Should I focus on lead generation or nurture?
- How do I get better insights?
- Should I ramp up my marketing stack and purchase new and improved marketing technology?
- Would real-time activation be an effective strategy?
The answer to all those questions may be yes, but solving those problems starts with better customer data. To effectively market to individuals, you must know who they are and what they’re interested in. This is where a customer data platform (CDP) comes into play.
What is a CDP?
“A customer data platform (CDP) is simply a marketing-focused technology that unifies customer data from multiple sources and makes it available to marketers for customer segmentation and activation across marketing channels.” — Unpacking the mysterious world of the customer data platform (CDP)
Consider the different systems collecting and storing customer data across your organization: a call center CRM, an account management system, a loyalty program, a mobile app, among others. How do you create a seamless marketing experience for the same customer who logged into her mobile app, signed up for the loyalty program, contacted the call center to resolve an issue, and made a purchase online? In order to create a seamless marketing experience, you need to reconcile all those interactions and data points to a single customer identity. This is identity resolution — a core offering of a CDP and a crucial step in improving personalization to drive brand loyalty.
Slalom and Amperity
Breaking down data silos to create a unified and comprehensive customer profile leads to better analytics, audiences, predictions, and therefore, better targeted marketing. According to Forrester research, organizations typically have a legacy or homegrown system in place with similar functionality, but experience issues with duplicate records, incomplete profiles, limited insights, lengthy development time, and a lack of agility to meet changing needs of the organization. In order to help our clients face these challenges and gain efficiencies, Slalom partnered with Amperity, a leader in the CDP space, with the shared goal of helping people use their data to best serve their customers.
“Companies that fail to show customers they know them and their buying preferences risk losing business to competitors who are more attuned to what their customers want.” — Harvard Business Review
Amperity addresses challenges from identity resolution to assembling and accessing the elusive Customer 360, to uncovering and activating the customer intelligence that matters. What sets Amperity apart is its patented machine learning probabilistic matching algorithms that leverage both customer attributes and internal primary keys to unify data. Moving away from deterministic, rule-based matching enables Amperity to make connections even when data is a mess. Think typos, junk emails, nicknames, last name and address changes — Amperity’s algorithm sifts through the noise, connecting hard to identify dots to deliver an actionable 360-degree-view of your customers.
In summary
Having a holistic view of all customer touchpoints is the tip of the spear not only for MarTech but teams across the organization including IT, data analytics, and customer success. It is also the foundation on which marketers need to build their personalization strategy. Working with a CDP to create a full picture of your customers, allows you to be in tune with their wants and needs—leading to revenue generation and increased return on ad spend (ROAS) with a best-in-class marketing experience. Building brand loyalty and growing your customer base are at the finish line, but effectively leveraging your most important asset, customer data, is the start of marketing success.
Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Learn more and reach out today.
