GOODBYE COVID
As the world emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic, there is pent up consumer demand for experiences that weren’t possible over the last few years—but the most savvy companies understand that the digital commerce experiences—like curbside shopping and direct-to-consumer websites—aren’t going away.
MORE E-COMMERCE MEANS MORE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT—NOT LESS
Today, e-commerce is the biggest driver of sales growth. Companies can no longer consider having an online presence as optional. At the same time, customers are expecting personalised, connected experiences. To earn and sustain customer loyalty, brands need to create outstanding, personal experiences.
TOO MUCH DATA—TOO MANY PLATFORMS
But, there is an issue: data is no longer forming a picture that companies can learn from or act on, and as the legality around cookies becomes increasingly complicated, (cookie deprecation, anyone?) first-party and zero-party data becomes absolutely crucial. Current solutions, however—such as in-house CDPs and niche offerings—have not generated desired results, due to their inherent limitations.
In this macroeconomic environment, a company’s ability to deliver those exceptional experiences is ultimately dependent on the quality and relevance of the data a company has—but most companies have customer data spread across systems, devices, and teams. As a result, the task of unifying customer data sources—in ways that provides a complete view of the customer journey—seems impossible.
REALIZING THE IMPORTANCE OF A SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH
That’s where a CDP comes into play. A CDP is a piece of marketing tech that acts as a centralised hub for all your marketing data. By unifying customer data sources, a complete picture is drawn of the entire Customer Journey—effectively solving one of the top challenges facing global marketing leaders.
Understanding your customers is a puzzle. It requires connecting thousands of disparate pieces of information to put together a complete picture. Doing this for one customer would be challenging, but doing it at scale for tens of thousands of customers can seem impossible.
A CDP makes it possible to piece together the data puzzle to create a clear picture of your customers. Not only that, it allows you to then take meaningful action based on that data – which helps you create a better customer experience and, in doing so, drive more revenue.
This is achieved by identifying each individual customer through the collection of data from all of a company’s different CRM platforms and customer databases.
Once a unified customer profile is created, the customer data in a business’s CDP is linked via different customer engagement platforms—including email-send engines, demand-side platforms, and content management systems, allowing marketers to personalise customer experiences in real time.
It then becomes possible—and simple—to see all of the data each customer shares, thus enabling you to track their whole customer journey. As your CDP collects and organises all of your customer data in one place, it becomes a reliable source of information that displays reach, revenue, and ROI of your marketing efforts.
Most exciting of all, the best CDP is augmented by the latest tech across AI and automation to deliver those real-time, personalised experiences that drive business efficiency. The full power of the CDP is realised when all first-party and related customer data, batch or streaming, gets connected to engage and transact.
A DEEP DIVE INTO THE HIGHLIGHTS OF CALCULATED INSIGHTS—ONE OF THE MAINY GEMS AVAILABLE THROUGH A CDP
As new platforms are rolled out, a quality CDP will work to implement them. Our extensive partner ecosystem plays an important role in this process, developing apps and solutions that extend and complement the power of a CDP. These apps and solutions help customers leverage the platform’s power to solve critical customer business challenges and create amazing customer experiences.
One of the best features within our CDP is Calculated Insights, which lets a business define and calculate multi-dimensional metrics from their entire digital state stored in all the CRM platforms.
Simply put, with Calculated Insights, you can create insights for unique customer profiles. In turn, these insights should allow you to measure areas of interest like a specific customer’s interest in and engagement with your brand, as well as their intent to keep engaging or buying.
And these are just a few examples of the data that Calculated Insights can track. Plus, recent updates have made this feature even stronger by improving the ability to enable or disable different insights, and by allowing your team to create user-friendly names for those insights.
The potential to use Calculated Insights to better understand your customers and create winning experiences for them as a result is limitless. So what’s the best way to dig in and start reaping the rewards? Here are three of the best ways to use the Calculated Insights feature, and harness the power of a CDP:
First, you can use Calculated Insights to identify, engage, and reward loyal customers. Calculated Insights supports these goals by helping you understand what actions and behaviours commonly lead to desired outcomes (like buying more and buying more often).
Specifically, it looks at what your existing customers are telling you, whether implicitly or explicitly, that leads to them being more loyal. Then, you can use that data to create and reinforce journeys that drive toward desired outcomes – like repeat purchases, upsells, or cross-sells. Calculated Insights can even help you make recommendations about which products pair well together to serve the best content to customers to drive those desired behaviours.
It can also help you reward customers at key points in time, such as a birthday, or an anniversary. This capability helps you better understand your customers and make them feel valued–which can lead to them buying more from your brand and sharing more information.
E-commerce is the biggest driver of sales growth in the post-pandemic world,—and effective use of a CDP gives business a leading edge in an increasingly e-commerce-driven world.
