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A huge amount of digital interactions and data touch points appear in marketing systems and platforms every single second. Via this, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. This is now, in real time: it is your customers’ interactions on your platforms, with your messages, sales offerings, and with your brand. But how do you do orchestrate all that? What does your ecosystem of marketing, IT, and business tools and systems look like? And what does your business require to map the real-time customer behavior into what you are offering the market?
It remains a fact that we are still trying to get control over and map out our customers’ journeys, chasing data and separately analyzing our sales and marketing activities. Yes, we are still working in silos and it is quite rare to not do so, with both our transactional and business data as an example. As salespeople, the marketer’s KPIs are not what we want, and in customer service, we absolutely do not care about the KPIs coming from IT. It does not make any sense to anyone to be measured in another phase of the work in the customer journey that you haven't been focusing on, because someone else owns it.
We’re now done with babysitting the data and chasing insights
But what happens when you can holistically visualize all that data available for everyone in your business? If you, as a loyalty manager, suddenly know the exact point when a customer makes the decision for the very first time to click the ad, the first move of a long brand relationship? What would you do for that customer to build an even stronger relationship when you can clearly see the whole journey via all the datapoints of interactions in real time? What extra customer value would you bring and what business value could that end up in?
Now compare that with your daily way of working: babysitting your data, chasing insights. Since that particular technology is here now, it is up to us to follow it up and start planning for how we can ensure that the customer insights are really being taken care of. But for most organizations, this is still the beginning. As an example, we are not talking about marketing automation and segmenting email lists anymore, we are talking about interacting with customers in real time and having 1-1 dialogues via something called Customer Data Platforms (CDP). A CDP is, as you probably can guess, a big opportunity for you to really start to unify your data and take actions that trigger the next behavior for your customers.
So, regarding this technology shift, either the work could start with internal initiatives in the organization or iterations and tests towards customers directly for quick results. The main purpose is to understand which glasses we should put on when we are looking into that data and, of course, this is dependent on what scale you want to work in and what type of business you are running.
Three tips on how to prepare to start using Customer Data Platforms
Curious about how to prepare for working in a CDP? To give you some tips to start with, here are three things for providing better internal understanding of your data flows:
1) Map out your ecosystem of tools
Via enriching our customers different datapoints with both transactional and business data, everything from social interactions to seconds browsing on your site and searching for specific products, we can easily build customer data profiles via datalayers that don’t compete with your other tools or platforms. From that, you can get a complete view of your customer over your entire digital ecosystem, as long as you know the different roles of your current tools, and without putting together a whole team to explain the pros of integrating yet another tool for data analysis.
2) Let everyone know about your customer’s journey
Every customer is unique, but talking about marketing tools, what impact do you think a loyalty manager could provide the customer by knowing what’s happened in the very first interactions? Exclusions of ideas and possibilities prevent innovations, and right now we are in a time that we have to be creative to stand out. We must lift everyone’s ideas to really get the best-of-breed solutions to adapt your offering to the exact right customer with the right message in the right time.
3) Secure channel attribution
An example of data for business goals could be anything from dynamic pricing via real-time price comparison to direct, personalized dialogue on a 1-1 basis, or even digital signage in stores displaying highly personalized messages. Yes, you get it, we are not talking about dealing with analyzing separate channels anymore, because we now have artificial intelligence to do that for us. Your main focus should be mapping out the channels that can strengthen your brand.
Trend identification and really fresh data in real time
As well as providing and detecting trends in the dataflow, a CDP is also essential as it provides one single view of the entire customer journey. This is what we call data anomaly, and it is the datapoint that can help you make truly data-driven decisions. It does this by identifying patterns using media attribution and data modelling, for example, together with open API solutions for your web to provide you with really fresh data in real time. Using a CDP, you can apply different rules for your data that will help you decide when and how to communicate better with the customer.
“Recently” is a data rule that gives us insights on when we are providing the customer with a new or an additional message, for example. The other rule is “frequency”, meaning data that is giving us insights into how many times we should reply, promote or expose our brand to the customer. Also, communication with low reach and high personalization combined with recently and frequency provides us with better results in media buying and a lower cost per acquisition. Nice huh?
Let’s bring the future on!
We’re eager to give you our inspiring thoughts about what's growing within the user data area, and also opportunities within prediction of customer behavior before you even start to build a brand new landing page, app or social account. Cause there is quite a lot buzzing around audience scoring and profile enrichment for predictive audience modelling... Let's see what the future brings!
One thing we’re sure about is that now we can provide our customers with enough data for you to make even faster and better data-driven decisions for improvement and development of your business growth. Want to have a discussion about opportunities within handling user data in your business?