Customer Data Platform: Everything You Need to Know as a Marketer

Technology as the Foundation

The current generation has a much shorter attention span. The consumer decides within microseconds whether something is relevant or not. Generation X grew up with digitization, fast internet, and mobile phones. They rely on technology to meet their needs, going beyond the technical gadgets they can buy. Information, services, and marketing advertisements must be of a higher standard. This is the only way to be relevant to the consumer for a business.

Personal and Relevant Is Not Enough

To get noticed by your customers, you have to stand out and grab and hold their attention. This is only possible if you offer them something that appeals to them. Personal and relevant advertising may sound like a culprit, but it's all about the extent to which you do this.

Making marketing and advertisement personal can be done in different ways:

• Basic Personalization

You can address your recipients by their first name when e-mailing them. This is basic personalization.

• Personalization

If you take the next step in personalization, you approach the customer with an offer that's relevant to them. Think about an advertisement for a particular brand of shoes that the customer has already bought before. You are not looking at only personal data but also their behavioral data such as (purchase) activities.

• Hyper-Personalization

Hyper-personalization goes even further. By looking at personal data, past activities, and current behaviors, you can respond to latent needs. Using analysis and predictive models, perhaps automated by machine learning, you can assess which offer, or promotion suits best for the customer. You will surprise your client with marketing offers that he didn't even think of and still serve him well.

All Data Structured in One Place

Every marketer wants to be able to apply the highest level of personalization, but how do you work towards that? To use personalization beyond the basics, you need a good foundation first. Because even though we already talked about machine learning, personalization doesn't happen by itself! Data is at the heart of all digital marketing.

Many marketers face the problem that customer data is scattered across different data sources. Think, for example, of your newsletter lists, purchasing systems, social media, or other channels. All these sources contain highly relevant data about your customers. But only when you bring them together and obtain real-time insights can you get started. Traditional solutions take a lot of IT time to bring data together from different sources; it costs a lot of money and is often over-complicated because they are not explicitly intended for marketing.

Marketers Can Do It Themselves With a Customer Data Platform

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can offer a solution. A CDP enables hyper-personalization by bringing together different data sources. By unifying these into one profile per customer, you gain insights across your data sources. A CDP ensures that you, as a marketer, will be able to get the most out of all data. The great thing about it is that CDPs have been developed for marketers and are therefore focused on marketing.

An excellent example of this is the dashboard, a good starting point for gaining insight into all your data. The dashboard shows at a glance:

• Personal data
• Real-time activities
• The underlying behavior

This is very important for you as a marketer because it shows you who your customers are. You will probably also see what target groups you have. A target group contains similarities in the profile or behavior that you as a marketer can respond to. By segmenting these target groups and responding to their behavior, you make full use of all the possibilities of the CDP. Moreover, CDPs such as Mobile Marketing Cloud, have a marketing automation element. This allows you to set up automatic marketing flows with all omnichannel communication channels.

Data-Driven Marketing

Do you, as an organization, want to make a difference? Then you have to approach your customer in a relevant and personal way at the highest possible level. You do this by having your data - from all relevant data sources - in order in one central place. A Customer Data Platform gives you an overview of- and insight into your customers. As a marketer, you are in control, easily using customer data to develop relevant, creative campaigns. You can automate and monitor these campaigns to focus more on the customer and creativity in campaigns.

Are you interested in a CDP for your organization? Don't hesitate to contact us; we are happy to think along.