Customers are the lifeblood of any business. It’s only natural then that every company’s function is driven by what its customers need, want, and expect. That also requires the industry to know and understand its customers well. For marketers and multiple other stakeholders in a company, a customer data platform bridges that gap.
Customer data platforms attempt to collect data from the audience directly, translating it into first-party data. Many argue, and rightly so that this is the best type of data a business can have about its customers. CDPs collect many first-party data through pixels, tags, and other tracking tools.
In contrast to CRM tools that track and process data entered manually for each customer, CDPs track online and offline data for multiple customers and prospects mainly in an automated manner. They’re also designed to track and analyze customer data from various sources, which means you have greater odds of better understanding your entire set of customers and audiences.
With that thought, here’s what you can do as a marketer by leveraging customer data platforms –
Customer segmentation in God mode
By categorizing prospects into different sets based on their engagement with your brand across other channels and assigning behavioral scores to the possibilities, you can target the most recent and highly engaged set(s) with ads aimed at closing them using limited time offers to drive sales quickly before they’re lost to the competition for good.
Thanks to such precise audience segmentation, you can also drastically reduce the cost of customer acquisition by as much as 80%. You can imagine the effect that will have on your RoAS metric (return on ad spend). Additionally, you now have an extra budget to drive higher conversions and bring in more customers.
Customer suppression like Hades
For set(s) that are currently not engaging with your messages, you can do what Hades (the God of the underworld) would do and stop running your advertising campaigns to these audiences, at least for the time being.
Showing ads to audiences not meant for the buyer stage, they’re in can come across as pushy, which even us marketers can agree upon as being annoying. For example, how often have you been presented with an ad from an organization although you purchased with them less than two days ago? I’ve had my fair share, and it blows my mind how good organizations waste their advertising dollars.
That’s why it’s also essential that we understand when to stop selling. That’s where customer suppression becomes crucial for excluding these audience sets from ad campaigns. Go back to the drawing board, drum up different, relevant messages for these audiences or focus on contextually relevant messages to the prospects that are yet to purchase.
Leverage the omnichannel superpower of integrated marketing campaigns
To target audience sets that are showing increasing engagement with your brand in the recent days but are also about 30-40% into the average buyer journey, CDPs can help build omnichannel customer journeys. You can then sort by high-value channels and shortlist those that complement each other to create campaigns designed to drive higher conversions at lower costs.
Also, it’s important to note that not every channel will be relevant at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Further, if your brand has an offline presence and your products or services convert better once the consumers touch and feel them, your digital channels might want to drive store walk-ins for audiences close to the store.
Brands that influence buying experiences across channels have proven to drive more excellent brand recall and customer confidence, which results in customer loyalty. In today’s day and age, that is one ‘moat’ that every brand is vying for more of.
Harness the power of trust for GDPR and CCPA compliance
By 2024, 80% of organizations worldwide will need to comply with data protection and customer privacy management requirements. So, it’s imperative to deploy a CDP that supports privacy compliance right out of the box. A customer data platform that centralizes your customer data and preferences across all sources in compliance with the GDPR and CCPA requirements, i.e., a CDP built with protecting PII (personally identifiable information) in mind, is crucial.
For brands that focus on the US, it’s important to note that the entire world is still looking up to GDPR because of its absolute determination to protect citizen privacy. CCPA is one such compliance requirement around citizen and consumer privacy that continues to evolve. It’s on the cusp of transforming into CPRA (California Privacy Rights Act of 2020) and is set to effect from January 2023 onwards. This will transition CCPA compliance (or CPRA compliance) into something that comes the closest to GDPR.
Even if your brand has no business in the US or the EU, your evaluation of a CDP software should have privacy and data protection as a mandatory prerequisite.
Throttle it up
With a well-thought-out customer data platform deployment strategy in place, your marketing department can do more. To learn about many other things, you can do through a CDP, we suggest you book a slot with us, and we will be able to help build your high-gear growth plan.
