The Customer Data Platform (CDP) journey is one that reflects the growing needs of the e-commerce world. As website activity grew alongside a growing range of touch-points, including apps, emails and social media, eCommerce marketers needed a platform that could bring together consumer data and create a single source of truth.
First-generation CDPs somewhat served these purposes. Yet where they stumbled was in the creation of building individual customer profiles, with this process requiring data scientists to manually analyze masses of data. This meant less time afforded to understanding the data and making it actionable. Crucially, this generation’s practical use was too finely focused on marketing — it didn’t encompass the overall customer experience to create consumer profiles that could be used across company divisions.
But now we have second-gen CDPs, also known as Customer Intelligence Platforms (CIPs). This generation of CDPs not only uses zero and first-party data to deliver insights, but leverages AI for data analysis, cross-channel orchestration and predictions on consumer behavior.
It’s a hub of data accessible company-wide.
Not having a CDP means you’re missing out on the wider picture, operating in data silos and without the means to automate processes. It’s a loss of time, insight and value. Furthemore, with third-party data’s use nearing its end, accessing and using zero-party data has become even more essential.
It’s why a modern CDP is so important.
Customer Intimacy: Know Your Customers Better Than Your Competition
The eCommerce world has evolved into an environment where customers expect to be shown a product they like before even knowing it themselves. This ability comes from data. A second-gen CDP can reach data from every touchpoint in the omnichannel experience, from all corners of the business (and even from legacy systems like CRMs), and bring it all together into one platform.
This self-learning system gathers first and zero-party data and sorts it into unified 360-degree customer profiles. This data is information collected directly from your audience. For example, a profile could show both how long a customer viewed a certain product on your website and also that they completed an email survey asking to hear about the next season of items. Crucially all departments have sight of the same profile.
Where second-gen CDPs really differentiate themselves is through their ability to use AI to analyze data and tackle identity issues. There may be a customer who has two different email accounts, for example, and AI can link these to the same profile — essentially, it does the manual work for the data analyst.
Through AI and 24/7 data enrichment, you can also keep on top of customer preferences with real-time insight on their preferences and how they engage with your website, with visitor identification, behavior and tracking data updated on the platform.
Precision Execution: A New Level of Communication
With this knowledge, the platform is able to segment customers and their value in relation to a range of characteristics, including the cost of transactions, frequency of purchases and number of website visits. This analysis alongside other factors such as location and demographic means you can produce campaigns dedicated to different groups with different activity levels.
Subsequently, AI algorithms can predict and enhance key marketing factors such as conversion rate (CR), average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV) to help break down audiences on a granular level. Not only can you target select groups, but also deliver one-to-one tailored communication to individual customers: you can choose to up-sell certain products, for example, offer personalized discounts on your website and automate relevant messages accordingly. This hyper-personalization can be achieved across the omnichannel experience.
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Precision execution allows you to communicate with a human relevance that helps build customer intimacy, loyalty and, ultimately, strengthens the brand-to-customer relationship. Its intrinsic value is in the stats: 71 per cent of consumers expect personalization, and companies that excel at it achieve 40 per cent more revenue than their average players.
Growth Intelligence: Continually Improve and Innovate
Now it becomes a case of making sure you can continually grow, add new strengths and innovate. The platform is able to generate AI-based guidance and bring this together with human intelligence on what communication strategies are working, what isn’t landing with customers and guidance on the next best steps to develop your marketing process. This allows you to maximize efficiency, budgeting and strategy without any IT teething troubles.
It means you can continually assess processes against company goals to dramatically increase the chances of not only meeting these targets, but exceeding them. This forms part of a unified growth intelligence methodology that allows you to have full control over your revenue outcomes.
The Lean Approach With a CDP
The next-gen CDP epitomizes the wider strategy of doing marketing the lean way. Through leveraging these CDPs, you can streamline your entire data collection, analysis and communication process, removing any costly inefficiencies. Through this, you can gain unparalleled insight into your customers, helping to create a hyper-personalized experience and the tools to continually advance this process.
To meet the growing demands of the eCommerce world, you need a streamlined, sustainable and cost-efficient strategy that can react to evolving customer trends.
A Customer Data Platform creates this for you.
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