A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is an essential technology for building personalised and effective customer experiences. We explain how a CDP can help you build more satisfying, relevant and personal customer experiences and show you 3 ways you can personalise the customer experience using a CDP.
As we mentioned in our last post —What Is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) And Why Do You Need One To Be Customer-Centric?— the personalisation of the customer experience is one of the most important trends of the last 5 years.
Brands contacting us using our name and recommending specially selected products for us when we browse through an e-commerce website no longer surprises us. The first forms of personalisation of sales strategies and the customer experience emerged years ago and have become so established in our lives that we can no longer conceive of shopping without them. In fact, 86% of consumers believe that personalisation has a strong impact on their shopping experience and 31% of customers say they prefer personalised customer experiences (Infosys).
What years ago seemed almost impossible is now part of the customer journey. The personalisation of the customer experience continues to evolve and it is now the clients themselves who expect us to send them relevant and personal messages at every touch point of the customer journey.
However, it seems that customer expectations are moving faster than companies. Although consumers are clearly committed to personalisation, most companies are still failing to build a fully personalised customer experience and to leverage their customer data to apply the right strategy or send the right message at every touchpoint.
Until now, most organisations have relied on CRM systems or data management platforms (DMP) for their CX strategy. However, these tools have not been able to meet companies' customer intelligence needs.
In recent years, a new platform has emerged, the Customer Data Platform (CDP), the only technology capable of overcoming the limitations of CRM and DMP in integrating, analysing and activating the data needed to build personalised, satisfying, innovative and relevant customer experiences.
How does it work? Find out everything you need to know about Customer Data Platforms in our e-book "CDP: Towards a centralised view of the customer".
1. Leverage the power of customer data
Nowadays, any optimisation strategy —especially in digital marketing— relies on data. In fact, we are already talking about marketing intelligence and marketing automation.
Today, customer data is the basis of any commercial, marketing and sales strategy. Knowing the customer and gathering valuable information (find out what is an insight) that help us build complete profiles of our consumers is the first step to promote any type of innovation in the customer experience.
Nevertheless, according to statistics provided by Invesp, 87% of marketers say data is the least used asset in their company and more than 50% claim they have difficulties in implementing data-driven marketing due to the poor quality of their data.
All of this can be solved with a Customer Data Platform (CDP), a type of data repository that builds single customer views and by integrating all customer data. A CDP generates a unique identity for each customer and distributes the information to all platforms and systems in the organisation. With a CDP we can build 360° customer profiles. The great advantage of the CDP is that it is capable of integrating all types of data, thus enriching existing and potential customer profiles with information that goes beyond geolocation and other basic attributes such as name, age, profession, etc.
A CDP is built so that organisations can identify the preferences of each customer so that they can drive customer segmentation processes and extract valuable information for the creation of personalised experiences in each of their communication channels.
2. Relevant content in real time
As we have already mentioned, when interacting with a brand, customers expect to receive information that is relevant to them at every touch point. In fact, sending inappropriate or uninteresting content to customers is one of the worst possible marketing strategies. A recent Forbes survey found that 91% of customers say they are more likely to buy from brands that send them personalised content and offers. In addition, 66% of customers say they stop buying from a brand when they send them content that is not relevant to them.
In this sense, we can use the active customer segments in our CDP to send personalised content to each customer in the right channel for each type of audience. This exercise is also crucial to get rid of content that does nothing for our customers. By doing this, we will avoid annoying our customers and hindering their experience. In addition, we will save resources and time in the creation and development of content, actions and campaigns that do not build customer loyalty. By focusing on relevant content for each segment, we can significantly reduce the costs of acquiring new customers and the costs associated with retaining existing customers.
Beyond content, timing is key. The success of our efforts is not only conditioned by the type of content we send, but also by the time at which we send it and the channel in which we do it. Another great advantage of CDP is that it incorporates real-time analytics and can even be used for predictive analytics. Through real-time dataflows and historical data, we can create personalised experiences in real time.
3. Multi-channel experiences
Consumers are no longer satisfied with receiving relevant content in one communication channel or touch point. Forbes notes that while 71% of users prefer multi-channel experiences, only 29% of companies provide them.
It is now essential that all communication channels and touch points are integrated and work as part of the same journey. With a CDP system we can create multi-channel customer journeys for different customer profiles according to the characteristics of each segment. By measuring the performance of different stages of the customer lifecycle at different touch points, we can implement a process of continuous optimisation and further personalisation based on the results obtained.
Personalisation of the customer experience is increasingly becoming the winning strategy of market-leading companies. Customer data is at the heart of the strategy and, despite the fact that more and more data is becoming available, companies are still failing to harness its potential.
The consolidation of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) represents a turning point in the way companies manage their customer relationships. Customer data that is scalable, high-quality, accurate, integrated, accessible from any system and in real time. CDP is, without a doubt, the leading technology in the customer strategies of our time.
In addition to the creation of personalised experiences, CDPs have many other possibilities and use cases - we tell you all about them in our exclusive e-book on Customer Data Platform!