Author Archives: Paola Magni

Data-driven marketing: learn how to work it with your customers

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Data-driven marketing belongs to a new customer service approach that unleashes companies’ potential to make better, scalable marketing decisions and benefit from higher marketing ROI. It represents the future of customer experience and meaningful branding messages.

You already know what people say: Knowledge is power. Facts, information, and skills acquired through experiences are gold mines for every company that wishes to stand out and stay relevant in their customers’ minds.

Customer data platforms tells marketers everything they need to know about their target audiences. Through digitalization and its multi-channels, it became possible to trace people’s actions across the digital and physical worlds to optimize the process of offering customized products and services that match individual needs.

However, these days, data must be smooth to access and easy to visualize. This happens because customers want quick responses, which timing and effectiveness are highly affected by delays and assumptions.

In this unforgiving environment, are you confident that your marketing decisions are based on facts? When important events on your field take place, how quickly can you respond to them? How many customized experiences do you actually deliver to your customers?

If the answers to those questions concern you, you’re at the right place, at the right time. Get ready to know how data-driven marketing can take you closer to the answers you wish you could give.

In this article, you’ll find out:

  • What is data-driven marketing;
  • Data-driven marketing benefits;
  • Impacts on customer experience;
  • How to work data-driven in consumer segmentation;
  • And examples of data-driven culture.

With that in mind, let’s move forward.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is a strategy that uses customers’ reliable information to personalize whole marketing communications and experiences. From buying journeys to targeted media and in-store service, data-driven marketing accesses massive information to leverage decisions and make the right judgment about what customers need. This helps marketers to refine strategies based on facts, not guesswork.

But where does data-driven marketing get all the information from?

When you use your phone’s mobile apps or desktop devices to web navigate, you’re leaving traces all around the internet. The applications you use are designed to send data to companies so they know what websites you access, with who you’re interacting with, the locations you have been to, and more relevant information that clarifies your individual preferences and lifestyle.

Many organizations are already worried about data, but we must call attention to the fact that data-driven marketing goes beyond data itself.

The many devices, platforms, and other types of media you use are surely whispering into marketers’ ears over and over to help them build fact-based decisions that match your expectations. Even so, data-driven strategies merge a high-powered amount of digital and offline channels to give context, collect information, and arrange it in ways that are easy to visualize. Data-driven marketing aims at amazingly-designed customer experiences, but influences internal operations in ways companies have never seen before.

With so much information being generated at all times, data-driven marketing unites the right tools to track, segment, and optimize strategies. When used right, this groundbreaking approach will help you to invest in the right interactions to increase customer retention and bring you more marketing ROI.

Data-driven marketing benefits 

Now that you know the importance of data-driven and how it is revolutionizing marketing strategies, it is time to highlight some of its many benefits.

Segmentation

Data-driven marketing is the key to build marvelous customer experiences based on well-designed segmentation. The first step is to select the right customer segment to drive marketing efforts into. After that, you will be prepared to work on specific, tailored tactics to sharpen your customer touchpoints, whether they’re potential or not.

By segmenting a target market, it gets easier to develop products, solutions, and approaches that will attract the right people to your brand. Segmentation also provides transparency when you wish to know how your campaigns are resonating with the public and gives you a better understanding of particular users’ behavior.

Customer acquisition

Four essential questions must be answered very carefully when you decide to attract target audiences and contact potential customers:

  1. What message will you tell them?
  2. How will you communicate with them?
  3. When will you reach out to them?
  4. Where will you find them?

In a data-driven approach, all of these questions will be respectively answered based on:

  1. Goals and pain points;
  2. How they behave;
  3. The best timing according to their routine;
  4. And the digital and physical places you’re more likely to meet them.

Even if you have a large number of customers, it is possible to combine data to deliver special, tailored touchpoints that match their behavior and preference. It could be an e-mail, or an SMS, or a live event. Possibilities are countless, but you will surely pick the best ones once you know what customers expect from you and how to engage them.

Data-driven marketing works efficiently when it comes to continuously deliver interactions to match customers’ expectations throughout their journey. With so much information at the palm of your hand, you will be ready to transmit the right message (what) at the right time (when) and place (where).

Revenue

Every company director loves it when technology saves the day by cutting costs and returning investment. Gladly, this is pretty much the case with data-driven marketing.

According to the Forrester report “Insights-Driven Businesses Set the Pace for Global Growth“, data-driven organizations grow 30% per year more than companies that don’t base their strategies on data.

When we take a good look at different markets, it gets even clearer that data-driven strategies embody assertive communication that makes ROI possible.

Custom-made marketing campaigns reach proper audiences, which leads to customer acquisition, which leads to customer engagement – and ROI is coming back to you in each one of these stages. Not to mention the revenue currency that comes from these approaches.

Revenue is also possible by cutting costs, reducing churn, and democratizing information through different companies’ sectors.

Upgrade your marketing strategy

Automation was already a buzz when CRMs arrived to transform the way marketers dealt with customer data. From purchase details to personal information and preferences, CRM was and still is prepared to collect digital data at higher levels. This allows big data to play a more predominant role in marketing: Data is now at its core, deciding the directions companies should take to reach their goals.

It must be said that collecting data became a more complex task, especially when you take the number of multi-channels available these days. Still, this complexity isn’t an excuse: If brands don’t automate operations related to those channels, they will lose way too much time putting effort into what can be automatic, and marketers won’t be able to strengthen their creative side and propose remarkable tactics.

Fortunately, there is a considerable amount of data-driven tools that optimize, clean, and filter important data from multiple sources, whether they’re 1st (directly extracted from customers) or 3rd party (found in the market).

Data-driven marketing automation saves you time, money, and free your team to focus on more important tasks that require human abilities, such as creativity. That is how you truly upgrade your marketing strategy: By quickly analyzing qualitative data and returning a creative response to customers’ issues.

This means a wider customer reach, more relatable content, targeted ads, and personalized customer journeys – to only quote a few.

Don’t forget that numbers and reports play a crucial role in data, but the outcome will only be useful if the human eye analyzing them gets the right insights and develops accurate replies to get closer to customers.

Impacts on customer experience

Lincoln Murphy, known as the Customer Success guru, says that Customer Success is only achieved by combining what customers need to an appropriate experience while delivering the right interactions. As you know now, this has everything to do with data-driven.

Data-driven marketing is a new shift in customer care. It prioritizes customer experience in smart and strategic ways, such as we have never seen before.

Many marketers around the world have embedded data-driven strategies into their routines, taking their time to analyze information that will drive to ideal customer experience. With so many benefits, data-based decisions impact consumers on profuse levels. Take a look at some of the impacts:

Personalize customer interactions 

Needless to say, real engagement is closely related to giving customers a personal touch in everything you do.

Irrelevant content, general messages, and ordinary offers will only frustrate the current consumer. People expect brands to customize every touchpoint and suit them to previous steps of their consumer journey. This means companies need to enrich and individualize communications that work in a one-to-one approach to get in touch with customers and prospects.

While 74% of consumers feel frustrated by irrelevant content, 56% of them would reward personalization with a purchase.

Data-driven tactics are the perfect response to this personalization requirement. It allows you to incorporate consumers’ inclinations, pain points, and attitudes to deliver personalized experiences both in digital and physical fields.

Content personalization also turns your communication more persuasive, improves customer conversions, and boosts engagement.

Improve products and services

Products and services can also be personalized and better designed to respond to buyers’ expectations. Analyzing clear data will help you understand whether you need to develop a new product or give an existing one new functionalities to match your customers’ needs. This kind of information also guides you to make the right decisions on when to invest in innovation and when to change small details that make a difference.

Besides, data-driven marketing ensures companies always keep an eye on the market to launch tailored, untried products. Data will assist you in when to launch something new, to know how much people are willing to pay for your products and services, and what can be enhanced to increase customer satisfaction.

Ask for feedback 

Another way data-driven marketing impacts customer experience is via feedback. Remember that people use social media to discuss brands and experiences, and when they talk about your company, you should be the first to know. Practices like social listening will help you monitor what people say on social media networks and collect precise data to gather feedback and insights into what’s working and what needs refinement.

Predict customer trends and market changes

Customers are avid for brands that can communicate and act based both on their individual preferences and what’s going on around the globe. Sustainability, social responsibility, storytelling… These are all actual trends that brands should pay attention to while planning their year. Closing your eyes to the market and only focusing on customer behavior is dangerous, as the external environment can dictate what trends will create buzz and what you can do to make people more interested in your brand.

Data-based predictions are important to keep you one step ahead of your competition, especially in times of change. Timing is crucial: Losing the chance to reply quickly to changes and real-time events might harm your brand in ways you never thought possible. With that in mind, make sure you use data to be prepared for change.

Reach customers where they are

Uncovering the best channels for promoting your brand can be a challenge, but data-driven marketing clarifies what those channels are and how your customers use them. This will prevent you from investing unnecessarily in channels that have bad ROI and planning media usage poorly.

With a more concise understanding of trends, you may get a broader view of channels’ tendencies to use them correctly, building more responsive communications. Batches of customers will also benefit from an enhanced content distribution from your part.

Make customers more engaged

Data automation is the ultimate principle to direct creativity into engaging strategies. In the past, marketers could only deliver a few types of customer service — versions back then didn’t vary, and general communication was even acceptable. Nowadays, though, our hectic and ever-changing routine requires more from brands. If you want to truly engage customers and make them loyal to your brand, you better start seeing data as the main resource to achieve better engagement rates.

More interested in experiences than in products, customers these days expect to be listened to and empowered by appropriate brand responses. Not only people are willing to pay more for better experiences — engaged customers are ready to invest emotionally in brands, and this is vital to any long term customer relationship.

Besides making you relevant in consumers’ minds, engagement pays your bills. Companies that have improved engagement increase purchase frequency and order sizes. This keeps revenue coming in and customers satisfied with relevant buying and connection experiences.

How to work data-driven in consumer segmentation

To apply data-driven marketing in your company, you need to be ready to extract, treat, compare, and analyze digital information from multi-channels, transforming it into knowledge.

We know this multi-channel information means millions and millions of data coming from social media, website analytics, cookies, CRMs, consultancies, market data, competitors, and more. But, thanks to technology and digital transformation, data-driven companies use analytics and algorithms to filter and select types of data that matter the most to them.

There are data-driven solutions — software and methods — that will help you segment your customers and visualize information in intuitive reports. With the advances of machine learning and artificial intelligence, machines gather data around and bring it to you whenever you need it.

One of these tools is the Customer Data Platform, also known as CDP. A CDP should provide you with the right insights to create personas, attract and qualify leads, create new content strategies, and develop customer relationships.

Be aware that marketing segmentation is a key-strategy when it comes to the data-driven mindset. Separating customers by interests, job titles, age, location, gender, and more is an amazing strategy for companies that wish to come up with outstanding marketing strategies instead of sending mass emails and trying to acquire leads through general advertising. Segmentation will pull you closer to generate real-time audience engagement.

For example, in 2015 Very.co.uk combined customer preferences with data about the weather to create personalized homepages to attract consumers to their e-commerce. In the process, 1.2 million versions of the website could be displayed, matching customers’ interest. For example, if you were looking for homeware, your homepage would bring special promotional messages that had everything to do with the products you were looking for. It is completely personalized — and that was only possible because Very.co.uk data scientists created complex algorithms to predict customer behavior.

Nubank, the largest Fintech in Latin American, is another company that embraces data-driven marketing to customize the customer experience. Nubank created ‘wows’, the name given to specific gifts customers receive when assistants feel a special type of connection while serving them.

Every gift is designed especially to the customer, considering their preferences and context. Nubank recently gave a consumer that owns 85 dogs a box full of dog toys, bone-shaped letters (written to the customer herself), and a device that throws dog treats in the air.

Examples of data-driven culture

Data-driven marketing has been so relevant it is leading a policy of its own, known as data-driven culture.

Data-driven culture allows organizations to replace opinions and guesswork with data-derived facts. Here, data is the main resource for collecting and leveraging insights in every company’s department. For this reason, all operations and routines will revolve around it, creating a new decision framework that relies on collaboration to move, integrate, and combine data more efficiently.

This means information must flow effortlessly through people, processes, and solutions so decisions can be made in a matter of seconds. There is no time for waiting: Business intelligence, technology, sales, product, marketing, and many other teams must have quick access to data to enhance customer interactions as swiftly as possible.

To give you a real case example, The Coca-Cola Company in Brazil assembles a data-driven culture to machine learning and AI to analyze its market and consumers. From three to three months, Coca-Cola employees set goals based on data and measure their progress through indicators and continuous information exchange.

It is also interesting to mention that Coca-Cola uses digital as a leading measurement tool and values people diversity to boost collective learning.

Worldwide, Coca-Cola is also known for its successful data-driven campaigns and agile mindset. In practice, data helped Coca-Cola deliver the Cherry Sprite flavor, which was inspired by the fact many customers mixed their drinks in self-service drink fountains. It also drove the company to create personalized AI assistants for vending machines that can behave differently and allow consumers to personalize drinks.

To mention one more example, Coca-Cola has been using data-driven marketing to track photographs of its drinks on social media, using image-recognition technology — this allows the company to target customers and deliver more efficient adverts, considering their consumption behavior.

At the end of the day, it’s clear to see that companies that have absorbed data-driven culture are completely different from companies that haven’t. Data-driven companies achieve tremendous results by dealing with complex multimedia channels — like videos, social media, ads, email, and liveblogs; — to reach customers with the right message at the right time. This ability is closely tied to automation and analytical approaches, which permits operations to be optimized, and audiences to be attracted more effortlessly.

Data-driven marketing is the future 

We know making the best marketing decisions is a challenge as much as it is a basic requirement. Moreover, facts tell us the future of organizations will be decided by the ability to use data wisely — and we know you don’t want to be left behind.

Arena helps media companies all around the world to encourage engagement and streamline customer data to smart marketing campaigns.

If you’re willing to be assisted by a Customer Data Platform to boost your audience and work data-driven marketing with your customers, get to know more about how we can create powerful experiences for your users.

Real-time audience: everything you need to know for your business

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What do you know about real-time audiences? Here’s all about it and how to use this strategy to make your brand a reference online.

Did you know real-time audience monitoring is a must on marketing strategies? It’s basically a way to see what your public is doing and talking about your brand at the right moment the discussion is happening.

Certainly, everyone working in a marketing team knows the importance of controlling audience engagement. However, given the newness of this innovation, some professionals might not quite understand the significance of real-time audience tracking yet. Just a few years ago, marketing tools gave complete reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis about the brand’s audience.

Nowadays, some tools like the Customer Data Platform enable us to observe in actual time what are the company’s mentions throughout the internet. Because of this, a few things become viable, like improving customer segmentation, finding ways to have more engagement, and gathering more data on customer online behavior.

Since more data is available, that means better content and offers can be created for each consumer and segmentation group. Moreover, live content is also a new thing in the market. Although you might think of videos when you hear this term, blog posts, chats, and even more are a part of it too.

Experience dictates that consistency, frequency, and quality are what it takes to be successful in a digital marketing strategy. But now, that should be completed with real-time conversations that attract people’s attention and make them eager to have a conversation with the brand. 

In order for that to happen, the first thing you need is to understand the concept of real-time marketing and its benefits. Keep reading to see what we’re talking about.

Importance of knowing your audience

Communication is not easy work. Even when it comes to our families and close friends it’s common to get things wrong. And these are people who we spent most of our lives talking and getting to know each detail or their personalities. So, as a company trying to reach out to a customer, you can see how the conversation could be inaccurate if not done the right way.

That’s why it’s extremely important to work around the customer. Knowing who is your audience will help understand what they like and want out of your business. In order for that to happen, you need more than a name. That is, to gather information such as demographic and online behavior. From this type of data, it’s possible to be aware of how to deal with the brand’s public.

As a result, this is a crucial factor to provide better results. Some platforms even allow real-time data collection, which means the information will be stored from the first visit a person makes to your online page.

From this, new strategies based on real and accurate data can be planned, giving the customers what they want and the company better outcomes. Ultimately, there’s no point in having the best solution ever and the most perfectly designed products if you’re not getting the right people to see and try it out.

Real-time marketing benefits

Real-time audiences is not the only real-time strategy to work with. In fact, these days it’s possible to keep track of everything at the moment it is happening. Naturally, you need technology assistance for this purpose. It’s inconceivable to have a group of workers trying to handle all of the real-time data and its analysis hand-operated.

Still, with a CDP solution (for example), the company gets everything under control. The benefits of obtaining a real-time strategy include:

  • data collection from the first visit;
  • data analysis and storage;
  • real-time action and content;
  • customer segmentation;
  • personalized content;
  • increase in audience engagement.

First and foremost, real-time data collecting happens when a software,  like the CDP, starts gathering information about a visitor from the first moment they enter the company’s page. Even if they don’t interact or buy anything, their behavior is already being observed and stored in a database. 

Better yet, real-time action can be taken too. If you notice a visitor is acting in a way you can intervene and have them closer to taking action, that’s possible.

For example, someone clicked a product and added it to their cart, but gave up when they saw shipping costs were high. If the marketing team notices at the right time (a.k.a., real-time), they can work to create and send a real-time offer to that customer saying something like “hey, did you know you can get free shipping on purchases over $20?”.

Solutions like live blogging and Live Chats are also included under real-time marketing strategies. These attributes give your brand better outcomes by adding value to your product and content; increasing team productivity; improving customer experience, and building a follower base that’s more loyal to the brand.

More than that, all of the customer behavior will be kept in a database for future plans, such as knowing and finding new segmentation groups. Working with a system like a Customer Data Platform, the process, and the separation of single customer profiles into larger groups with similar interests will be automatized. So, not only you can work with a group segmentation, but also with personalized exclusive content and offers for each individual consumer.

Hence, this will assist in defining the target audience for each ad campaign the marketing crew has in mind. Real-time data collecting will also lead to an audience size increase while allowing the company to identify who are customers and who will be classified as leads — certainly, this will broaden the understanding of your audience.

Have you heard about liveblogging? Because real-time content should also be considered an advantage for a marketing group. It is the perfect way to share breaking news, talk about events that are currently happening, and even behind-the-scenes content. It doesn’t necessarily need to be planned ahead, it’s a kind of content that should be simple, spontaneous, and time-saving.

That’s exactly why it will catch people’s attention, it’ll make your brand more humanized with a language that’s closer to the audience’s day-to-day life. It’ll make them relate better and feel a part of your business — thus, increasing audience engagement. Besides, real-time content yields more audience insight, which will lead to learning what are the audience’s favorites, analyzing new data, and creating new compatible segmentations.

Of course, a balance between planned and previously written posts plus real-time content needs to exist. At the same time, you need to create a brand that’s first-hand connected with the audience, you should keep providing personalized and SEO optimized content. The combination of real-time data collection and real-time content will definitely improve your overall strategy.

How a CDP will support communication

To understand better how a Customer Data Platform will help in this case scenario we’re talking about, here is some important information about it.

By using a CDP solution, a company will have lots of valuable data. Yet, there’s even more to that: this software already processes data to analyze what is relevant and useful information and what is not. The type of data a CPD collects can include:

  • customer identity (name, age, demographic);
  • hobbies and interests;
  • online behavior;
  • how much time was spent on a page;
  • what products were bought;
  • what products were returned;
  • number of abandoned carts;
  • etc.

Much more information can be absorbed, but the important thing to keep in mind here is what you can do with all of that data. As a head of marketing, having the perfect image of a consumer makes a total difference in conversion rates. Of course, because that knowledge makes it possible to create the most accurate content for the brand’s audience.

Instead of waiting weeks to see monthly results and create new plans to improve a marketing strategy, real-time audiences and segmentation allow to act upon immediate results.

This not only gives the company equipment to work with but causes an impact on the audience with that real-time action speed. Live-blogging and live-chats features are also a part of what a CDP solution can offer your company.

Surely, there’s the need to see how your company can manage real-time marketing. Will the team be able to keep track of the information? Will they be able to act on immediate results? Will real-time audiences and segmentation bring better results? Once there are positive answers regarding these questions, you’ll know the Customer Data Platform is what your brand needs to reach new levels of audience engagement. 

How data can help create new approaches

Real-time data is a valuable resource for your brand’s marketing strategy. People notice it when a mark does their best to communicate efficiently with their customers. Using real-time information makes the company look active and on the spot, so people will pay attention to that.

When thinking about a solution to collect real-time data, it’s necessary to remember other details. For instance, is it important to work with real-time audiences? What about a Live Blog? What features does the software need to make a difference in your company? It’s important to recognize these factors since they’ll be decisive. 

A Customer Data Platform solution has all of that and more. From this type of system, you get a deeper understanding of the customers and are able to grow your follower base.

Optimize campaigns

The thing is, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before: by delivering the right content, to the right person, at the right time, and through the right channel, your conversion will most likely be a successful one. And how is that mission possible? With data usage.

When you have complete information about the people who are interacting with your brand, you not only get to know them better. You understand them so well that you can actually anticipate customer behavior and actions, something that is essential to optimize ad campaigns.

Promote better content sharing

Having enough data about your audience, it’s possible to show people that you care about them and you want them to have the best experience ever. You want to show them you’re not just another company trying to sell at any cost.

This is why it’s important to plan your content in a way to have more engaging materials than selling ones. However, this doesn’t mean real-time content should be left aside. Both varieties of content need to be a part of the brand’s approach.

Work with stages of awareness

Creating methods to be closer to the client and more assertive with content creation should be part of the main marketing strategy. As marketing professionals, some other things we worry about include increasing social media engagement, promoting events, and, more importantly, identifying who are the visitors prone to becoming new customers and which of those can become brand promoters.

That means analyzing real-time audiences to discern who is ready to make a purchase and who is just looking to learn more about your solutions — understanding the customers’ stages of awareness.

In addition, checking and connecting with who has already bought, approved your product, and is interacting with your brand online by giving good references, especially if those people are social media influencers.

These are just some ways a group can work with data collection. Realizing what is the best trajectory for the company will be the responsibility of the marketing manager. Whether it’s getting new followers, making people share more content, or simply optimizing ad campaigns.

Technology is essential to get the job done

Everything that has been said so far can be summed up in a few words: communication is more effective when you know your audience. Plus, technology is a must-have.

There’s no way you can get to know your public if all employees need to be constantly collecting and analyzing data by hand. Acquiring an automation tool is by far the best decision to enhance your whole marketing processes.

To clarify that fact, these are some of the things a marketing team will be able to achieve with software that gathers, analyzes, and stores data:

  • find the best approach for each customer or segmentation group;
  • know what type of content to create;
  • understand what kind of visual elements will work better;
  • learn the best language to use (slangs, formal, etc.);

As it was mentioned earlier, data collection implies knowing the audience. Because of that, a platform with this purpose will help recognize the best communication path to follow. Including every little detail from the tone of the company to the type of visual elements used. Creating a persona out of this material is ideal.

More than that, technology is necessary to get more tasks completed, such as monitoring social media posts. After all, that’s the communication channel where most of the engagement happens.

Having blog comments and forums supervised as well will permit you to see what the audience wants to know, what their questions are, and what are the gaps you can cover. It’s one of the best sources for inspiration content.

That means there should be constant monitoring of real-time audiences. This way the marketing team will always be precise and straight to the point with the public’s interests. They’ll be able to create content answering exactly what the audience wants to know. Even more, a real-time strategy will boost engagement with the brand.

Despite that, quality content doesn’t do the job by itself. It’s required to know SEO tactics that will improve reach — therefore, increasing shares as well.

Social media is the main channel to have real-time audiences interacting with your brand while making it more humanized. That’s something acknowledged brands are doing in the market, such as Coca-Cola and Airbnb. It’s a way to connect on a personal level with customers and prospects.

The streaming platform Netflix is a great example we can think of because of how they act online. Even though there are many people behind their strategy and social media control, their communication is flawless. 

Every post and every response they write to their fans, whether on Instagram or Twitter, has the same tone and exposes a strong personality — in spite of the company not having a face and body to show “behind the cameras”, you can practically see who Netflix is through their social media work.

Of course, the personality of your brand will depend on the type of service, and the target audience the company works with. For Netflix, that witty and fun characteristic works because it’s an entertainment business focusing on interacting with their young adult fan base.

Then again, this is the reason knowing your customers matters so much. The moment you get to know them, how they act, and how they talk, you have what it takes to transform them into brand advocates.

Are you ready to reinvigorate your marketing strategy? Arena has all we’ve talked about, from real-time audiences and segmentation to live-blogging solutions and more.

The Difference Between Data Management Platform (DMP) and a Customer Management Platform (CDP)

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A data management platform works as a warehouse, collecting, organizing and activating third-party data in a single place. Keep up and find out how to benefit from it!

Data is a crucial resource in this business era. However, it can be useless if the company doesn’t know how to professionally manage all that amount of information, wasting thousands of dollars advertising to an incomplete or insufficient database usage.

In a digital world of first, second and third-party information, a Data Management Platform, also known as DMP, can transform piles of databases into profitable resources. Take a look!

What is a Data Management Platform (DMP)

Customer experience is not a linear walk. They will leave crumbs of information all the way along their relationship journey with a company. That process results in the accumulation millions of data throughout the years from multiple sources.

Most times, those data can seem random, incoherent or fragmented. That may happen when there is no right management of it.

Then, some questions become trivial:

  1. Who are the visitors on my website?
  2. What are they looking for?
  3. How can you have direct contact with them?
  4. Why they are not making deals with me?

A data management platform (DMP) is a tool to filter all those pieces of information into organized profiles for audience segmentation or insights for decision-making.

After that, your company will know exactly who they supposed to talk to; how these audiences behave; what is the best approach along the sales funnel to them; if the investment made in advertisement campaigns has the appropriate segment and more.

You can even create cross-media analysis, which is when multiple platforms, on and offline, can support the same campaign.

How Does a DMP Work?

Operating as a central intelligence system for digital marketing, a DMP creates a perfect definition of your ideal customer by organizing millions of information into demographic, consuming habits, interests and so on.

You can obtain new forms of segmentation through DMP, such as a non-dependent on the context or content one. This new segment is now based on the profile of the audience, regardless of the advertisement subject or the platform displayed.

To function, a data management platform operates in four steps:

Collect

It all begins with data collection, third-party information acquired by relevant partners with similar or identical market spaces. These data can be provided from CRMs, customers’ registration, e-mails, website data, previous purchases and whatever more relevant material is available.

Even though DMP is made to operate third-party data, it also supports some first-party data to improve the information given.

Organize

In this step, the DMP classify the info into categories, grouping them as clusters. Clusters are a type of audience segmentation that combines customers with similar marketing sales behaviors in one file.

For example, it is possible to create a group of customers who has made most of their purchases by ad clicks, or those who spent a certain amount of money in a product or service related to yours, who has more visits in a specific category in a website that might fit your business, etc.

Activate

Now, it is crucial that the data management platform used is agnostic, which means it will be compatible with any digital platform. So, if the company wants to run a campaign for the brand in social media, websites, search engines, etc, it will be just fine. The activation itself happens when the campaign is on.

Learn

By analyzing the return over the investments made on the ads, it will be possible to understand the depth of cluster segmentation. The company will have more domain over the results acquired since the data is much more precise than any other type.

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What Can You Do With a Data Management Platform?

One of the main benefits a DMP provides is the cluster: high-detailed information about customers so you can create hyper-targeted ad campaigns, delivering more conversion rates and increasing the ROI of your company.

Using a DMP, you’ll be able to create accurate segmentation, making the proper usage of your third-party data by giving your audience the right message.

Practical Example

Imagine you run a dental clinic and want to expand your qualified leads base for a specific segment, let’s say dental implants. That is one of the most expensive procedures you have and it is not salable to any type of customer.

Typically, you would create a campaign based on people interested in dentistry or dental implants in a wide range, fitted in average age, near your clinic.

With a DMP, the depth of your segmentation reaches this: men and women, from 40 to 70 years old, who have downloaded some white papers about dental implants, researched a number of keywords that demonstrate the need for professional information and live within 5 km of the clinic.

Here are some possibilities your company can reach with this type of segmentation:

  • Retargeting: easily implement personalized retargeting campaigns based on specific activities and behaviors online.
  • Prospecting: integrate with third-party data sources for the acquisition of anonymous data, achieving greater precision and scale in online campaigns.
  • Website optimization: use your own or third-party data to provide customized content to different consumers when they come to your page.
  • Audience intelligence: cross your first-party data with other third-party to learn more about your audience and reach the people most likely to convert.
  • Better ROI: use an analytics tool that centralizes online campaign performance data to determine which audience segment performed best and where to focus your efforts in the future.
  • Productivity increase: eliminate the bottleneck of needing IT to reach out for your data and have all your teams able to take them out, ready to use.

DMP Benefits for Companies

So far, we have seen in order to escalate your business, having the right audience to talk to is fundamental. This is market intelligence. Your company can no longer have a vague idea of who their customer is. It is necessary to personalize and amplify to get the following benefits:

Cost-Effective Advertising Campaigns

When you have this level of audience segmentation, you can spend every dollar of your budget on better-targeted prospects. Get the return on the investment you need to.

Lower Technology Investments

To run a DMP, you won’t need an extra support. Your whole team, from customer success to follow-up sales, can easily operate the system. As we mentioned before, there is no need for IT.

First, Second, and Third-Party Data Combined

No data is left behind. Even a messy pile of customer information can turn into gold here. As this platform gathers and organizes party data, every piece of a database is important, nothing is wasted.

No Data, No Success

Regardless of the type of industry you are in, uncountable amounts of information are huddled and enter your company through different doors: billing spreadsheets, sales reports, feedback offered by different media, social networks, loss or conquest of new markets, CRM, etc.

Such a thing must be used to leverage business marketing strategies. That is the reason why it is so important to generate an efficient information collection, organization and analysis on a daily basis of a company, as DMP does.

From this, a strategy can be developed over decisions based on information, including those related to strategic and operational marketing. That is the Data-Driven Marketing.

Data-Driven Marketing

Data-Driven Marketing helps, for example, to create a guideline for campaigns using DMP clusters. Besides highlighting the features/benefits/quality/etc of a product or service, it enables a work of relevant engagement with your consumers, delivering exactly what they want.

As a result, communication is enhanced by user experience and becomes more aligned with the needs of its audience.

Strategies will be able to still cohesive and aligned even when using a larger number of channels. Marketing campaigns have been running more frequently in social networks, which is the place where interaction has a leading role.

It keeps getting more essential to own proper knowledge of the market slice you are in. Its audience and characteristics indicate the way your company should brand, advertise and sell their product.

Big Data

When we reach for the definition of Big Data, we find a true technological revolution, making more possible to qualify the results obtained. Big data is a master process of analyzing and interpreting a great volume of data stored somewhere remotely.

Information is available everywhere online in a non-confidential way. No matter how large the amount of information is, Big Data can reach and group them according to interests.

Big data can be used in several business routines. However, to use it properly, it is mandatory to have not only knowledge about the technology, but also to identify which are the touchpoints in your company that will be impacted by its implementation.

By that, it will be possible to make a more efficient allocation of resources and increase the return over the investment in those data analysis solutions. And that is how a Data Driven culture is established.

Thus, the company must act so all teams understand the importance of data integration in the definition of strategies and work based on that!

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How a DMP Can Boost Marketing and Sales Results

Marketing and sales work as the core of the data management platform. This is where it starts, through hyper-segmented audiences. One of the biggest mistakes –– and frequent too! –– of digital marketing campaigns is having an incorrect or too wide segmentation.

Besides impacting those who are not part of your true audience –– and might cause a bad reputation for you ––, there is going to be a significant waste of your marketing budget that may harm your ROI.

Every click or scroll on the screen can generate data. When your marketing strategy is aligned to DMP guidance, you hand over to sales team customers ready to spend their money.

DMP and Sales

At this stage, sales have a unified perspective over the data and better cards to play, such as real-time interactions.

This is a priority in marketing and sales now. A high-performance sales team, which are those with the upper sales amount, increase the chances of achieving their mark by real-time interactions with the customer.

But we are not talking about aggressive and unprepared approaches here. Sales’ strategy must contemplate the best ways to do it based on who is the audience. By that, the integration of the DMP with marketing and sales is crucial for higher performances.

The Main Differences Between DMP and CDP

There are a lot of similarities between Data Management Platform (DMP) and Customer Data Platform (CDP). But there are also some very specific characteristics we need to keep them well established. Here they are:

Data Collection

One of the main differences between CDP and DMP is that DMP uses cookies to track users’ movement and target marketing strategies more efficiently. DMP was developed to search for data on advertising networks.

On the other side, CDP is a technological advance that gathers customer data from different sources and use it to generate more appropriate content, email marketing or offers.

Objective

DMP was designed to create deeper segmentations for the marketing strategy. CDP focuses on improving conversion rates and customer engagement, creating a richer consumer profile with more information.

CDP is also able to capture information from different channels and devices, in an automated way.

Therefore, investing in a CDP or DMP allows you to transform your company, employing more resources and intelligence to the business, and promoting your brand to a great and higher level of reference and success in the market.

How about starting now? Arena has a Customer Data Platform solution for your company. Build your clusters, make better advertisements, and talk straight forward to the audience you need. Click here and visit Arena’s CDP page!

Complete guide to Customer Experience

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Customer experience is one of the new frontiers of marketing. Customers, in the market powered by industry 4.0, are more interested in the experience than in the product itself. In fact, according to a research held by Momentum Worldwide in 2019, 76% of the participants declared to prefer experiences over things. 

This is closer to our own lives than you might think. Have you ever felt so well treated by a company that you eventually became their client for life? Or that a salesperson seemed to know your needs so well that you made an impulse purchase right on the spot? 

On the other hand, have you ever found it so hard to navigate a website that you couldn’t find or buy what you wanted? Or had to wait so long for technical support on a product or service you bought that you never used that company again, nor recommended it to anyone?

All of those situations have to do with the same business aspect: Customer Experience. Miles away from that simple and old idea of mere customer service, it is one of the biggest marketing trends today. And it involves reconfiguring your whole business around the idea of providing a customer with what he wants and needs, before he or she even knows they might need it.

Want to know more of how that works? Don’t worry, we got a simple and complete guide to help you improve your “CX” in no time.

What is Customer Experience and why is it important?

Customer Experience, also known as CX, is the summary of every physical or virtual interaction a customer has with your business. It is the sum of what defines his or her perception of your brand, starting from the very first contact up to their level of satisfaction at the end of their experience.

Simply put, CX is one of the most fundamental parts of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) because it is what will decide if any individual that comes in contact with your business will become a repeat and loyal customer. 

From your website usability to how your employee treated them, and how satisfied they were with your product, every piece of the puzzle will define how happy your brand made them – and, most importantly, if they are willing to come back.  

In addition, a happy customer is not only a loyal one. Oracle conducted a global study in which 74% of senior executives stated a good experience will make customers become advocates for your business. 

Not only will they come back, but they will talk about you with their friends, family, coworkers. They will recommend you, defend you, and bring you new business. They will become your marketing tool.

The importance of CX can be summed up in a simple idea: without customers, you don’t have a business. And an American Express research found that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. This is why your main focus should be on investing in that experience, so you retain the ones you have, while also attracting new ones. 

Why should your business focus on CX?

In an ever more scattered and competitive market, Customer Experience is set to be the defining factor that makes someone opt for your brand, and not another. A third of customers will quit buying from a business after their first bad experience. On the other hand, half of them are likely to splurge on an impulse purchase if they receive a personalized treatment from an employee, or even an online interface.

And if a customer rates your company 10/10 on a satisfaction level, he or she will probably spend more than twice as much on your brand. Their  loyalty may last for over five years. When you are happy with a product or a service, you don’t quit them.

Talking in money figures, according to a study by the Temkin Group, businesses that make US$1 billion a year can increase that number by US$ 700 million in three years, simply by investing in CX. The reason is, by doing that, they attain higher customer satisfaction rates, reduced customer churn and, consequently, increased revenues.

If you want to make that kind of money, that means you cannot ignore your customer needs, their emails, feedback, queries, and expectations. You have to listen, understand, and act based on what they tell you.

That is why a Bloomberg Businessweek survey revealed that great customer experience is a top strategic objective right now for any kind of company. It is the most effective way to beat your competitors, and get your customer to not only come back and spend more, but to become your marketing tool, through word-of-mouth, positive online reviews, and recommendations to their friends and acquaintances. 

Is customer experience the same thing as customer service?

Absolutely not! Customer service is when a potential client interacts with one of your employees, in a store, online, or on the phone, for example. And that is just one part of the customer experience.

If you go to a restaurant, and your order is served quickly, and tastes delicious, that is good customer service. But if you become a regular at that particular restaurant, the chef knows that you are allergic to onions, and does not use them in your food without you even having to ask, that is great customer service.

Because that is the heart, the central element, of CX: seeing and treating your customer as a human, an individual, and not a simple source of money. Customer experience is all about providing a human and authentic connection, one that does not feel run-of-the-mill, nor a script from a production line. It feels unique and personal.

Technology today, such as a CRM software, has made it possible for that individual experience to be executed in many different ways. Predicting future purchases and needs based on the customer’s history, or delivering targeted email marketing campaigns are good examples. However, it is still about seeing each one of them as an individual, listening to them, and anticipating their expectations and needs.

That does not mean customer service is not important. On the contrary. Providing assistance, answering every email, complaint, or question – and quickly – is more imperative than ever. But that is only one part of your customer experience, that has to start positively from the homepage of your website and last long after a purchase is made. 

What makes for a good customer experience?

Exactly because good CX must feel personal and unique, there are no automatic formulas or guaranteed recipes. The one key element that is at the beginning of every good customer experience is: listen.

Know how to listen

Listening to what your customers are saying to your business, and about your business, must be your top priority. Every feedback, email, technical support call, or online review must not only be dealt with quickly, but also used as raw material to create a strategy in reducing friction and providing better and more personalized service for your customers.

Have a good system

In order to do that, a system that puts all that feedback and information together, and analyzes it, is essential. The logic is simple: create channels that make it possible for your customer to tell you what he/she wants, likes, or does not like, acknowledge and understand their demands; then act on them.

If you are not doing that, the alternative result is quite clear. Your complaint and purchase lines are clogged, and your customer is frustrated with long waiting times – which is the number one cause of bad customer experience. 

The dialogue does not flow organically because your employee does not understand what your customer needs – which may make your employee’s frustration come off as rude or angry. Consequently, your client support is left with many unresolved issues and complaints. And your customer is dissatisfied with automated responses, and the lack of a personal, human, component. Those are all the roots of bad, or terrible, CX.

Mock up your typical consumer

Know, though, that it’s not easy. Most companies still don’t provide good or excellent customer service. In order to change that, your CX policy must come from the top of the chain, expressed in clear and public guidelines, available and known by everyone in your business.

For example, create personas, so your employees know whom they will be dealing with. Provide training for those same workers. And listen to their feedback, too. They are the ones on the frontline, so they are in an ideal position to see and feel what your company might be doing right or wrong – and how to improve it.

Always ask questions

Finally, never hesitate to ask questions. Use your chat platforms to better know your customers and their current experience with your brand. Follow those conversations up with emails. If necessary, outbound calls are not off the table. 

And remember: it’s all about empathy. Emotions play a huge part in customer experience. It is precisely the emotions that will determine if your customer wants to remain in business with you or not. 

But how do I measure if all of this is working?

Measuring and analyzing is one of the most challenging parts of customer experience. That is why a number of different metrics and tools were created to assess the quality level of CX in a particular company.

With them, it is possible to evaluate the effectiveness of specific strategies, as well as how they improve or not the customer’s perception of, and relationship with, your brand. The four CX measuring tools that are most used in the market today are listed in the following topics.  

Customer Effort Score (CES)

It measures how easy, or difficult, a consumer’s experience with one of your products or services was. Here’s how it works: a customer made a purchase on your website, for example, and you wish to know how easy it was for him or her to navigate the e-commerce platform. 

So you send a CES survey after they are finished, asking questions like “How easy was it to complete your online purchase”, or “to navigate our website”, with a rating scale from ‘1: very difficult’ to ‘7: very easy’. Pretty straightforward.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

We all have answered a Net Promoter Score survey before. It measures a customer’s loyalty score, by asking a variation of the “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” question.

In addition to being very simple and straightforward, that numerical score is a quite good assessment of customer experience. That is why the metric, created by Rob Markey and Fred Reichheld at Bain and Company, is favored by many boards and executive committees, being one of the most used by businesses in the world today.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

While Net Promoter Score evaluates the satisfaction with the whole brand, CSAT surveys the customer’s experience with a specific product or service. The metric system, though, is pretty much the same, usually providing a scale from 1 to 5 or 7 – where 1 is very unsatisfied, and 5/7 is very satisfied. A yes or no answer may also be used, however.

Due to its specificity, and for how it makes possible to analyze each different point in the customer experience chain separately, most CX leaders in the world choose CSAT as their top metric.

Time to resolution (TTR)

One of the main sources of customer frustration, and bad experience, is waiting a long time to get a response. For that reason, TTR is a very important metric. It measures, in average, how long it takes for a customer’s issue or ticket to be solved by a company’s brand after it’s been open. 

The result may be provided in days or business hours, being the product of the whole sum of time spent in resolution divided by how many tickets and issues were solved. The logic here is pretty obvious: shorten your TTR as much as possible, if you want to increase the likability of having return business from a customer. 

CX trends

Good Customer Experience results all over the world have come from companies who have been following a certain set of practices. The first one is that they are customer-centric, instead of profit-centric. 

That means their top priority is providing an outstanding experience, focusing more on retaining and satisfying their current customers than on attracting new ones at any cost. Second is that good CX usually comes from old school methods. Yes, again: human interaction. 

Companies that privilege one-on-one personal conversations over chatbots, market research (such as customer calls) over predictive analytics and social media, as well as investing in talent on board, often present the best customer experience results. It is not about being state of the art, or overtly technological, but about the willingness to provide good, satisfying service.

Number 3 is something we have already said, but can never overstate: these companies are listening. The base for their CX strategies is the feedback from their customers. Not only they collect it, but they have put systems in place to properly analyze it, and turn the conclusions into action.

Next, they acknowledged the importance of their employees in implementing good customer experience. Not only did they provide specific and individual training, based on different departments’ and workers’ needs, but they also got all their workforce involved in their CX strategy effort.

Finally, no matter how well they are doing, Customer Experience leaders in the globe keep increasing their investment on CX initiatives.

So, how do I Improve my CX strategy?

A good CX strategy consists of guidelines and actions that start from the very top and involve the whole company. It must be assimilated by every employee because to a greater or lesser extent, they will all eventually play a role in the customer’s experience of your brand.

These guidelines and actions must come from a very simple customer-centric principle: make your employees understand they should treat a customer the same way they would like to be treated by any business. 

In order to do that, make your customer feedback – that same one you already collected and properly analyzed – available for everyone in your team. Let them see and know how they can improve those experiences you have surveyed.

And that is ever more effective the sooner it starts. Your workers should be informed of your customer policy as soon as they are hired. And through training and support, they must be updated and refreshed on those practices as often as possible.

There are two powerful tools that you can incorporate to your strategy and will make your brand step up its game regarding customer experience. We are talking about live blogs and live chats. 

Live chats

Most companies use live chats as a customer service channel. But did you know it is also possible to use this tool to generate an experience for our consumer? 

Some platforms, such as Arena, allow you to create live group chats. This means your audience will be able to comment on your event, exchange impressions and also very valuable information. 

Depending on the profile of your audience, you can promote this space as a powerful networking opportunity for them to connect with people who have similar interests and valuable contributions for them both personally and professionally. 

On the other hand, you, as a brand, will receive immediate feedback from your customers. This will allow you to know exactly what they like and dislike, which gives you the opportunity to redefine your course of action immediately. As a consequence, you will offer an even better experience to your audience, making them loyal to your brand and the content you produce.

This is customer experience to its core, generating true value for your public and allowing your brand to be a vector for meaningful relationships. 

Live blogging

Live blogging is a new approach to content marketing. As the name suggests, these are platforms that allow you to create content as a particular event or set of events unfold. It gives your audience (or public, as you might want to call) a chance to have access to things they otherwise wouldn’t. 

There are basically two ways in which you can use live blogging. The first one is to provide a full coverage of an event. This means that people who haven’t been able to attend feel like they are actually participating. Big tech events make full use of this technology for this kind of use. 

The second way in which you can benefit from live blogging is to broaden your user’s experience. Let’s say, for example, your company is promoting a big event with celebrities and big names of the area. 

In this situation, you can use a live blogging strategy to grant access to the backstage or to have specialists commenting on the theme of the event. You can also directly interact with your audience by publishing trivias and reposting what they have been saying about the event online. 

Live blogging is a fine way to deliver a greater customer experience to your public. By adopting this technology, you are giving them the opportunity to have access to exclusive content, personalised interaction and relevant content. 

Lastly, because it all comes down to this, and you have to remind yourself of that every day, all the time: in order to provide a great customer experience, listen to your customer and their feedback. 

Create channels so they can speak to you. Listen to what they want, need, like, and don’t like. Use that in your favor. Engage in the conversation, ask questions, try to understand them better.

In short: see them as human, as an individual, as your business partner. Speak their language, with them, not to them. And be quick. Don’t make them wait. Nobody likes to wait.

If you want to start testing some of the tools that will allow your brand to offer an even better customer experience, here’s what you can do: create an account at Arena and implement our freemium version of the live blog and live chat!   

20 Ways to Boost Results with CDP

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From personalized advertising campaigns to attribution modeling, CDPs can help you extract the best out of your organization’s data

“Data is the new oil”, says the business cliché. No matter the sector your company operates, it certainly collects data from a number of sources – from unstructured qualitative data (from social media and call centers) to quantitative insights on paid campaign efforts and sales channels.

Marketing executives have increasingly more customer interactions to be aware of and are required to get a broad, deep picture of the audience’s needs and pain points.

A few years ago, it would have been enough just to have a DMP and CRM tool to manage customer data. They are still important today but hold limitations in capturing users’ journeys and profiles as standalone platforms.

A 2018 survey made by Forbes with 400 marketing leaders showed that most of them saw a gap in data management in their organizations, which is still true today. Only 19% reported having a robust set of analytics and technology tools to support customer-data-driven decisions. Besides, sometimes it can be challenging to make data accessible (and actionable) for marketing teams.

That is where customer data platforms come to play, with the purpose of connecting the dots between different data sources. Last year, the Gartner Institute pointed customer data platform as one of the four main emerging trends for marketers in 2020, along with blockchain, AI, and real-time marketing.

But what exactly is a CDP (Customer Data Platform)?

A Customer Data Platform is a software capable of unifying customer data from various sources, gathering quantitative and qualitative customer information across multiple touchpoints. It aggregates first, second and third-party data, as well as information collected from multiple channels, systems, and devices. 

If you lead marketing at a large company, you know how difficult it can be to connect user’s data, once the customer’s journey has become more complex with so many devices and channels available. 

With that in mind, we have prepared a list of 20 ways customer data platforms (CDPs) can improve your marketing strategy and results. 

1) Generating accurate customer profiles

CDPs can basically spot who your customers are – almost literally. They are able to filter all collected data through algorithms to determine unified customer profiles. In a single platform, It compiles identity, descriptive and behavioral data that can give you context on current customers and prospects, making it easier for marketers to build accurate personas. 

The type of data your team chooses to collect will vary according to your business and industry. If you work at a media company, for example, you’re probably more interested in customers’ preferred media channels than details about customer’s cars, information that would be crucial for car dealerships, on the other hand.

2) Accessing updates in real-time

Marketers know that customers’ preferences evolve over time, but most data management tools can’t always spot those changes. In CDPs, the processing of data happens in real-time, which makes it possible to spot changes in customer behavior in both the short and long-term. 

If a prospect stops using YouTube and migrates to Twitch, for instance, your team can quickly detect it and redirect campaigns.  

The long-term approach is also possible because CDPs can hold data for long periods of time, unlike data management platforms (DMPs), which usually hold data up to only 90 days (a cookie lifetime).

3) Avoiding data silos

Much of the data from an organization is generated and stored in different systems and departments, which makes it rarely accessible to other parts of the company. The result? A less collaborative corporate environment, less productivity, and less accurate customer profiles.

With CDPs, a great deal of a company’s data can be stored in a single, user-friendly interface. 

4) Giving marketers control over data management

For marketers, relying on other departments for reports and insights can be time-consuming and unproductive, since not everyone is on the same page about marketing needs. In that sense, CDPs also optimize the work of marketing professionals, because they can be managed by marketing teams instead of adjacent teams (like sales) or third-parties. 

Yes, CDPs should be useful to a variety of departments within a company, but every team can adapt their use according to specific goals while having access to all kinds of company data. That way, teams can also quickly scale marketing efforts and get new processes started in days, not months.

5) Understanding customers’ motivations

These days, brands don’t want to know just how a customer relates to their brand and category, but also what are his or her life aspirations and beliefs. Beyond customer profiles, CDPs can provide personality and behavioral data about customers, helping you understand their inner motivations as people, not just as customers. 

Almost like a social listening tool, you can find out the subjects they are discussing, topics they search for, preferences on content, politics, or products.

6) Connecting online and offline touchpoints

In a recent report, PWC found that the number of companies investing in omnichannel experiences has grown from 20% to more than 80% in recent years. While some marketers still struggle to be truly “omnichannel”, CDPs are able to track both online and offline customer data. 

A good CDP can combine information from various online and offline tracking applications, to get a full picture of where customers go, what products they search for, what they watch, read, or buy. A regular CRM tool, as a counterpoint, cannot pick up on offline data unless it’s manually setup.

7) Tracking interactions across different devices

Connecting interactions across multiple devices is also crucial for marketers who wish to provide seamless experiences to the audience. The CDP can connect interactions from a single person across different interfaces. 

The platform captures information such as time spent on the page, email and cookies used. If a customer accessed your page through different browsers at a desktop, and then accessed again through phone, a few days later,  you’ll know it. 

8) Optimizing targeted advertising campaigns

A CDP can automate the usually manual process of creating advertising audience clusters. From there, your team can use data to drive campaigns and promotions across multiple touchpoints, creating highly targeted, personalized advertising campaigns (CDPs can be integrated to Facebook pixels and Google Ads, for example).

Without a CDP, building these campaigns for complex audiences would take a lot more time and effort. The CDP lets you access clusters of customers and acknowledge what products they show interest in,  as well as their purchase intent and how likely they are to churn. 

9) Attracting Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

A CDP is where Marketing, Sales Customer Experience and Customer Success meet. By centralizing information from these areas in a single platform, companies can optimize their marketing resources and efforts. If marketers can find out exactly where are the friction points in customers’ journeys, it’s more likely they will come up with the right messages and campaigns for every stage in the conversion funnel.

Ultimately, CDPs can support marketers in attracting more qualified leads. A study by Forbes shows that 53% of marketing executives are using CDPs to engage with existing customers’ needs, increasing the likelihood that they will become recurring clients.

10) Reducing operational costs and improving ROI

As customer data platforms can be considerably automated, they bolster efficiency and reduce operational costs. After all, if you know exactly who your customers are and can streamline the targeting process, it’s likely you’ll impact the right customers at the right moment with the right formats.

As a result, you can optimize Costs per Click (CPC), Costs per Impression (CPM), and Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).

11) Tracking customer engagement (or disengagement)

In the myriad of data collected by CDPs, there are also quantitative and transactional data that reveal how your customer relates to your company. From buying history to abandoned carts, email click rates and responses, website visits, product views and social media engagement, your team can get a better sense of how’s the relationship between your audience and your company – and then manage it effectively.

12) Improving overall customer experience

A Walker study discovered that, by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the main brand differentiator among customers. When we talk about big companies and huge data sets, the lack of a CDP can actually result in poor customer experience.

Not integrating data results in friction along the customer journey, no wonder customers often complain about emails suggesting a product they just bought, or say they were impacted by wrongful ads and recommendations. Nowadays, people simply expect your company to know about their journey across different channels, and CDPs can help you a lot with that.

13) Boosting predictive marketing

Predicting customer behavior and preferences is what built companies like Amazon and Netflix. Predictive marketing is now becoming increasingly used by all sorts of businesses. This marketing technique, which determines the probability of success of different marketing strategies, is essentially fueled by data. 

Armed with a CDP, data scientists and marketing analysts can gather data from several sources and apply predictive models with a great level of accuracy.

14) Improving attribution models

With so many touchpoints with the audience, It is often difficult for companies to build a proper attribution model. According to Google, almost 80% of all transaction value involves at least two marketing channel interactions.

The customer data platform can optimize the attribution framework since marketers can send attribution data to the CDP and have a more accurate view of campaign performance.

15) Helping set realistic KPIs

By having a more holistic approach towards data, marketing teams can use CDP to measure and adjust expectations about key performance indicators (KPIs). You could even find out that your team is not tracking the right indicators, and choose new ones according to your strategy. 

However, when it comes to KPIs, CDPs must be used thoughtfully: more metrics possibilities don’t necessarily mean you’ll understand your customer better, so beware of the data that actually informs your strategy.

16) Complementing and optimizing existing marketing software

At the end of the day, marketers want more control over events in their channels, and so CDPs allow companies to deploy customers’ profiles to other marketing tools. Customer data platforms can be integrated to “delivery platforms” or “engagement platforms” to enable the planning of campaigns and messages.

CDPs can integrate your company’s email marketing or marketing automation software, website or social media platforms, and also live chat, CRM, analytics, and SMS tools. The amount of tools companies connect to their CDPs has to do, again, with the specifics of their business. Large businesses are likely to connect more tools than small companies.

17) Complying with data privacy regulations

One of the challenges marketers face is to balance personalization with data privacy, considering emerging privacy regulations worldwide. At first sight, it might look like a CDP could worsen privacy problems, since it tracks all sorts of data. From a practical standpoint though, a customer data platform can actually help companies comply with data privacy laws. 

To start, it collects mostly first-party data, which is key to data privacy. Second, it offers privacy configurations that can enforce your privacy policies. And third, a CDP acts as a single access point for data, which is safer than having multiple access points.

18) Experimenting with lower risks

CDPs are also a key engine for experimenting with emerging technologies and services. Imagine your marketing team wants to test an integrated campaign with a voice assistant for smart devices. While voice-activated marketing is still limited and won’t bring you scale, for now, it is seen as a prominent marketing channel for the future. 

By knowing your customers’ profiles, you can spot promising channels and formats and test them out with a small cohort of consumers. While combining insights to A/B tests, you might also come up with new business solutions and even ideas for revenue streams.

19) Feeding content strategy

In the age of Netflix and Spotify, customers expect personalized content that matches their particular moment in the customer journey. In that scenario, marketers have the challenge of being relevant and timely in their advertising efforts.

CDPs can help brands discover the formats of content and notifications that are more appealing to each customer, as well as when they tend to be more receptive to brands’ communication. 

20) Getting insights for products and services

If you once needed full customer research in order to understand customers’ unique needs, CDPs can give you hints about their preferences and needs. Because CDP gathers loads of qualitative information, it can also guide your product strategy.

By checking users’ feedback regularly, you can prioritize your product and service offerings to more closely match with customers’ needs. Or, you can identify trends and come up with completely new products.

Interested in a CDP for your company?

That is a lot of information about customer data platforms, right? It’s a lot to take in, so take a deep breath. Now, If you plan to purchase a CDP for your company, the next step is to check out the platforms available in the market and consider which one is the best fit for your business goals.

You might want to check out the specifics of Arena’s CDP, one of the most robust tools in the market. Register to this link to talk to one of our consultants and find out how our CDP can help your business.