How Customer Data Platforms Can Help You Weather Business Crises
Customer Data Platforms (CDP) is a growing trend in marketing because of its use in modern marketing strategies. According to Toolbox Marketing, CDP “helps present a unified, persistent, and updated view of an individual customer, based on data from interactions across multiple channels, platforms, and devices.” When compared to Data Management Platforms (DMP), CDP is more individual-centric, helping marketers manage profiles, one customer, at a time, while DMP is more concerned with segments of anonymous customer profiles.
In essence, CDP is an evolved form of a marketing database that suits well with different marketing technology stacks when combined through an API. Businesses that use a variety of tools to track customers, databases, information, and other marketing tools benefit greatly from CDP, especially during business crises.
With the rise of customer-centric marketing and with more and more people going online, it gets easier to track the right customers that can help increase your ROI and make your business thrive.
Here are three ways CDPs can help your business grow despite any crisis:
1.Boost the marketing team’s efficiency and effectiveness
One of the problems that marketing teams always face is that data can be very muddy and fragmented. Instead of focusing on strategies and campaigns, marketers need to clean up and unify data to make them relevant to company plans and campaigns.. CDMs help marketers create a more personalized and relatable campaign that helps your company have a better connection with your audiences.
Forbes reports that teams that are able to harness the capabilities of CDP are able to increase their customer lifetime values by 250 percent as opposed to their competitors. Video game manufacturer MobilityWare has used CDP effectively by knowing what their players want and how to keep them playing while reducing their churn rate. They determined the reasons that made a player quit, as well as the kind of rewards that incentivized the more dedicated ones to keep on pushing themselves to get higher scores.
2.Create a gold mine out of online data
Now, more than ever, online business has seen a huge uptick despite the crisis. CDP can help you know more about your customer by collecting data from online touchpoints like social media pages, websites, email and other platforms where the audience interacts with your company.
Having CDP capabilities can help in understanding where these online customers are and what they do online. Wickes, a home improvement retailer, used CDP to tailor-fit their email messages to their customers decreasing cart abandonment. By combining and creating a better picture from the data they gather from their customers, they are able to craft messages that get their customers to buy from them.
3.Empower your existing online tools
The more marketing tools your company employs, the more you want to get ROI out of them. When information from these tools are easily taken and digested, the more ROI can be achieved at faster rates. This means that your company doesn’t have to shoulder much of the cost for too long even with a business crisis dragging on.
Advantage Rent a Car understood this and built a constantly updated unified marketing profile. They were able to improve the number of indirect bookings by 25 percent and optimize ad spend through better cross channel segmentation.
Marketers and business owners must understand that CDPs are not the silver pill. However, they are a great tool for collating the best information from already available resources, and when utilized well, brings many benefits to your brand.
A 360-degree view of the customer is invaluable and one of the many benefits that this technology can bring to your company. This allows you to track every part of the buyer journey, the product they buy, and their transactions. All that data can help you gauge what is important for them during this pandemic.
CDP also enables you to gain insights into your campaigns so marketers can analyze and improve on their previous attempts, which can increase conversion rates.
As a third benefit, CDP can also help you locate new audiences that may have been overlooked. With data from CDP, marketers might find new possible audience segments where targeting can become more specific, creating more opportunities. As the new normal shifts the perspectives of people, new markets and opportunities may open up for your business that you have never thought of before.
