Category Archives: Customer Data Platform

10 Tips to offer Powerful Black Friday Customer Experiences

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2020 has been historic for many reasons, reshaping business behavior for good. Learn how to create a powerful Black Friday customer experience and get more revenue.

An expressive slice of the market hasn’t been able to deal with all this properly, whether because they don’t know what to do or they’re not doing it right.

People were forced to develop new buyer habits, overloading the internet with demands, and even better services. That is why customer experience became a required foundation for every company right now. More than ever, there’s no more space for those businesses that don’t put their client first.

And with Black Friday just around the corner, your success and profits depend on how much you are taking into consideration in improving your customer experience. That is the only way to stand out among all competitors on this huge battlefield. 

The impact of COVID-19 on Black Friday 2020

The worldwide pandemic caused a rupture on why people are purchasing something, how, when, where, and many other question-points. And you are just moments away from finding out all the answers.

Since some of the commercial barriers were taken down, shopping seasons also had their frontiers extended. People are already thirsty to live better experiences. So, why not anticipate Black Friday opportunities? Create scalable strategies to start increasing revenue right now.

You don’t have to wait until Black Friday reaches its peak to put out their great deals and offers. By that, you may get more buyers and compete with a less stuffed market.

1. Make It Easy For Customers To Reach Out To Your Company

Regularly, an expressive amount of customers would rather drop off the buyer’s journey at any point than spend their time trying to figure out an issue by themselves, even if the answer is right in their faces.

On Black Friday, that amount reaches sky-rocket levels, proving how frustrating and financially damaging a poor customer experience can be. 

It is essential to keep in mind that customers try to reach out to the company most of the time because they need something, not because they simply want to. 

And when you are not available, or there is no clear path to communicate with you, what kind of image do you think you’re building for yourself? So, there is no other way. Be available to your audience wherever and whenever they need you. Provide easy points of access, quick responses, and pro customer service.

Regardless of the reason, they need to reach out to you, having multiple communication channels ensures they will be able to contact you in their most convenient way. Also, different entries of communication give you multiple perceptions of customer behavior. 

2. The importance of Being Omnichannel

Customers can be anywhere, literally! Having multiple entry points is vital to your brand. And since you can’t predict which channel they are choosing to contact you, you better provide excellence in all of them.

When you have multiple communication channels, you combine their features into your strategy, delivering a personalized customer experience. As we mentioned before, digital has no border. 

Crossing different touchpoints create a narrative for your campaigns, promoting better engagements wherever your prospect may be.

Take a look at these omnichannel features your customer could get:

  1. Buy a product online that isn’t available in-store 
  2. Purchase on e-commerce and collect at the store 
  3. While collecting, being introduced to products or services to increase their experience 
  4. After the customer abandons their shopping cart online, send an email with a special condition to get their purchase interest back
  5. Get a shipping notification via email and SMS

3. Live Chat for Black Friday

It is very likely Live Chat becomes the best and most efficient communication tool during 2020’s Black Friday. Due to its practicality, Live Chat allows customer service to be in-depth, making it easier to deliver tailored responses quickly, creating a greater customer experience. 

Live Chat provides a more reliable way to build a customer relationship, creating momentum to strategically approach them while they’re browsing on your website. By that, you add much more value to the experience itself and your product or service, increasing the chances of making more and better deals.

This ultimate marketing and sales tool only takes three simple steps to start working:

  1. Create and personalize your Live Chat room
  2. Paste a single line of code on your website
  3. Start chatting and converting new customers

4. Using Engagement and Interaction in Real-time

In 2019, 61%; of Black Friday’s transactions were via mobile. This year’s anticipation is a significantly larger number, mainly because physical stores will not be operating normally. The best way to serve prime services and delightful experiences is having Live Chat strategically imputed on your website pages.

Your marketing and sales teams will be able to track customers through every step of their buyer’s journey on your website. See in real-time what pages they are browsing on, what product or service they are looking for, make proactive approaches to add more value to their experience to make upsells or cross-sells.

You can get your Live Chat service right now for free! Click here, build your own, and start using within minutes.

The Importance of Being Available 24/7

You can use data analysis to understand the best hours your customers are more likely to make a purchase, but you can not predict for sure. A 9 to 5 open store is not enough anymore. And if you are not available when your audience wants you, they’ll certainly spend their money on your competitors.

Understand that when you are offline, you are losing opportunities. And you don’t need to spend on bigger investments or hire new team members. You just need to optimize your services with Live Chat. A Live Chat agent can handle 6 to 7 simultaneous conversations. 

By creating shifts or calls, you can have customer service available day and night, always ready whenever your customer decides to reach out to you. 

5. Live Blog for Black Friday

Keeping the audience engaged is a very common challenge on digital right now. The user’s navigation journey is quite fragmented, and even though there is interesting content available, there are not enough motivations to keep them browsing and spending time on the website. 

The reason why people are conditioned to go to their social media whenever they want to engage is that most websites don’t offer spaces for conversation. Interactivity and timing are the keys to customer retention. 

When you Live Blog, you open a space for discussions and ideas exchange. A Live Blog is sort of a live text that can be integrated into websites, providing real-time coverage of an event. “Liveblogging allows you to post regular updates to your blog as an event is taking place, rather than writing about it just afterward.” 

Imagine a product launch or a live event with an open chat to interaction. That creates a community sense, reinforcing you and your website as a reference when it comes to a specific topic or niche. 

To get better results with your Live Blog, design a plan to monetize interactions and set some prospection approaches. By that, your brand will be responsible to offer a powerful customer experience during Black Friday 2020, keeping the audience spending more time –– and, maybe, more money as well –– on you.

6. How to Enrich Data Using Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Black Friday is also a time to convert leads more rapidly without that obligatory need to walk them through every stage of the funnel. It is also a time to be discovered by customers who have never heard about your brand before. The way to succeed in both situations is knowing your customers better than they know themselves.

Building a customer profile during the interaction to understand their tastes and preferences is great. But what if you could know exactly what they want before the first contact is settled? How impressed do you think your customer will be when you anticipate their desires and needs?

Through Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can automatically gather information about your audience and transform them into a precise profile, just like a photograph. CDP is a single place that collects data from all your touchpoints, organizing them by similarity and relevance, providing you a complete background history about your most ideal audience.

During a shopping season like Black Friday, you can’t have small distractions or time-consuming demands. All eyes must be on your customer! CDP not only collects, analyzes, and executes data but also optimizes your work, increasing the chances of making higher profits.  

CDP spares you from manually gathering and decoding customer data to get insightful ideas. The answers you need will now be readily available on the Customer Data Platform. All you have to do is decide how to turn that into the best sale approach.

7. Paying close attention to different types of audiences

Customer experience is a 100% induced process. There must be no random decisions or actions. Everything should be data-based and built focused on your real audience. For Black Friday, you must know who are the ones more likely to look up for your products or services?

Each segmentation has particular characteristics that must be, more than ever, applied to the strategy. For example, early 20s to mid 30s prefer going mobile for their shopping experiences. By knowing that, you can open Live Chat rooms to translate the convenience, speed, and high-quality customer service they need.

8. Proactive approaches

But you should keep your current customers in mind as well. Do you know it is 5x easier to retain a customer than acquire a new one? That’s because they already know you and how good what you have to offer is. So, how about trying an upsell approach? Maybe a great deal for a lifetime subscription? Use their preferences to increase the value of the experience. 

9. Selling experiences, not products

The pandemic has repurposed the meaning of buying. It still has all those well-known reasons from before. Although, the strongest one, this time, is emotion.

Customers are now purchasing things looking for ways to improve their lives and take back some of the value that was lost during the 2020 issues. Products and services are craved to create a parallel reality to distract people from everything that’s going on in the real world.

And how can your brand touch that point? How to sell feelings and emotions combined with what you have to offer? You must deeply understand your audience and become the personification of what they need.

Excel that, and you may get lifetime customers who will carry gratitude for how you were responsible for bringing back meaning to their lives.

10. Best Free Tools To Create A Powerful Customer Experience

Now that you’ve got all the strategic panorama of creating a powerful Black Friday customer experience, it is time to supply your marketing and sales teams with the right tools!

  1. Live Chat: Within 3 simple steps, you can have as many Live Chat rooms as you want on your website. First, create and personalize your Live Chat; second, paste a single line code on your website; third, start chatting with your audience. 

Click here to get Arena’s Live Chat For Free.

  1. Social Stream: You can now monitor the social web and find the best user-generated content on social media. Engage with the right audience!

Click here to get Arena’s Social Stream for free.

  1. Live Blog: Empower your team to publish news as they happen, in real-time! It works on any website and you won’t need coding. 

Click here to get Arena’s Live Blog for free. 

  1. Customer Data Platform (CDP): Apply your efforts to convert new customers instead of wasting time analyzing a messy and disconnected data pile.

Click here to get Arena’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) for free.The solutions are not over yet! Arena has a complete platform to provide what you need to make 2020’s Black Friday the one to remember. Click here and learn more!

How Amazon boosted user engagement at Prime Day

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Amazon Prime Day is arguably the most profitable day of the year for eCommerce. In 2020, analysts believe sales rocket by 49 percent, hitting $10.6 billion and over 200 million products sold.

As Amazon keeps expanding its global reach – only this year, Prime Day happened simultaneously in 19 countries – some markets presented significant opportunities for affiliates that generate revenue from promoting Amazon’s products.

According to Amazon, Brazil is the country with the fastest growth in Prime subscriptions. Currently, the benefits plan already has active users in 95% of the country’s municipalities.

Tecmundo and Amazon Prime Day

Tecmundo, one of Brazil’s most popular websites for technology news, with over 20 million unique visitors, leveraged the Amazon Prime Day to boost its revenue and bring massive traffic to their website.

As I wrote before, Globo – the world’s second-largest TV Network – used the Arena Live Blog and Live Chat to cover the NBA finals and increase user engagement and revenue. 

Tecmundo went one step ahead and combined Arena’s products, Amazon Prime Day, and its own digital domains to create a unique environment – comparable to a real store on a Black Friday, with many customers interactions, conversations, and of course, sales.

To explore Amazon Prime Day as much as possible, Tecmundo created a hot site to cover all of Amazon’s best deals in real-time with continuous updates and ongoing discussions about the offers, products, and genuine customer reviews. The hot site basically consisted of Arena’s Live Blog and Live Chat.

Why Live Blog?

A live blog is, put simply, a curated news feed that can be integrated into websites, providing rolling coverage of any event in real-time. It combines content that is usually fragmented across the web, complementing articles and written stories with images, videos, tweets, polls, live group chats, and other digital assets that can be embedded in the feed.

Live blogs are widely used for breaking news coverage as they consolidate reported information to content pieces from outside the news organization, like user-generated content and inputs from social media. 

It’s a transparent format in which journalists can update and attach multiple formats in an easy-to-digest layout. 

What is a Live Chat?

A Live Chat is a communication platform that enables users to engage in relevant conversations with each other. Live Chats are commonly used to cover live events to provide an instant communication channel to users of a specific website, for instance. 

A Live Chat is the ideal option for companies that want to provide real-time interactions for customers who are browsing their website, learning about their products, and analyzing the brand’s reliability, for example.

Getting creative with Live Chat and Live Blog

On its hot site created exclusively for Amazon Prime Day, Tecmundo utilized a remodeled Arena Live Blog and Live Chat.

The Live Blog that usually displays conventional news updates in real-time, was configured only to show product offerings and hot deals from Prime Day. The Live Blog was automatically curating these deals from Amazon’s domains. 

The Arena Live Chat was also integrated into the same page. Potential buyers could talk between themselves, question the products’ quality, share personal experiences, reviews, and ask Tecmundo’s dedicated support team questions about the merchandise.

How Arena CDP can refine your sales strategy 

Today, marketing leaders need robust tools to optimize and personalize every interaction while engaging users to build significant and lasting relationships.

Arena offers the full solution to engage, understand, and turn your users into paying customers.

The Arena Data Platform enables publishers like Tecmundo to regain control of their user’s data. 

Our solution offers a unified 360-degree view of users, gathering data from different points of contact (multiple platforms) and enabling companies to find out who their potential customers are, how they behave, when they are ready to buy, and why.

The Arena Customer Data Platform consolidates all the customer data on a comprehensive dashboard to build an authentic unified profile.

Publishers can then analyze customer behavior in real-time to build unique customer experiences to increase engagement and sales on their platforms. 

You can also create experiences like Rogers Media, Fox Sports, Globo and many more. Start a free trial now and see for yourself.

GDPR: How using a CDP solves cookies problems

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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was created to give internet users more control over their personal information. Is your company working according to the law?

While you’re probably aware of the existence of this regulation, you may still not know all you need to about it. For example, did you know this law has existed since 1995? Yeah, and only in 2012 has it started being reviewed.

That happened because of the huge amount of data being generated nowadays. As a matter of fact, the foresight for the year 2020 was that 35 trillion gigabytes were going to be created. It makes sense that a project for data protection would start.

Approved in 2016, the GDPR is a project made in the European Union. However, it affects each and every country that has a connection with EU countries. That means anyone who buys or sells products or services with a country that is a part of the region needs to follow the data protection rules.

In order to make that job easier, many brands are appealing to the Customer Data Platform. This is a solution that works with Customer Data without breaking the law. To thoroughly understand how the CDP can help here, how the GDPR works, and more, keep reading this post.

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What is the GDPR?

With the growth of data usage came the need for some kind of regulation for brands to use information without becoming invasive to users online. Because of that, GDPR came into force.

As you can probably imagine, the main reason behind it is to protect the user and their privacy. Mainly because, with the amount of technologies nowadays, it’s so easy to gather data and use them to personalize ads and content. 

However, that only works if the user allows you to do it. If you send personalized offers for someone who has never even been to your website, it will feel like a privacy invasion.

With GDPR, the user or client has a guarantee of control over data collected. This means that the company needs to ask for permission to gather and store information about them. But, even more than that, the brand needs to make clear what kind of information is being collected, what it will be used for, how long it will be kept in storage, and who it will be shared with.

What about customers’ rights? To sum up what GDPR says about the subject, the client must have:

  • access to collected data
  • control to correct wrong data
  • possibility of data exclusion
  • access to review and deny automated processes using their data
  • visibility of data transfer to thirds

It does sound like a lot to keep track of, but it comes with a bigger reward: a trustful relationship between brand and customer.

What does that mean? Instead of looking like a privacy-invasor brand, it only communicated with the client according to what they alone decided to share with the company. Therefore, building their success through a highly tailored and excellent customer experience.

How do GDPR and CDP work together?

In order for the company to work according to GDPR rules, it needs strict control over the data they collect. They need to know where the data came from, where it is stored, how it is being used, who it is being shared with, and so on. Every single detail needs to be known.

So, this is where CDP comes into the picture:

The Customer Data Platform, CDP, is a system that does this thorough job with customer data. It collects, processes, and stores data that is relevant, useful, and clean.

Overall, the CDP is built to provide the company flexibility. In other words, even though it’s mainly used for marketing purposes, it can allow other software to have access to its information. 

Thus, the Customer Data platform does exactly what companies need, now that GDPR is out there. Since they need to know everything about the data, CDP is there for it.

What are some specific requirements of GDPR that the CDP is helping brands with? Here’s a few of them:

  • identify where data comes from
  • connect with other data sources
  • gather all customer data into a singular profile
  • correct data
  • document customer authorizations
  • manage and store data usage
  • privacy by design

Moreover, the Customer Data Platform is pivotal for first-party data collection. Something essential seeing that third-party data is becoming less popular by the day — which happens due to the lack of reliability in this type of information, that also breaks (most of the time) GDPR laws of data protection.

The use of first-party data is the goal from now on. With this, you can ask for permission of the user in the direct relationship of the brand website visitor.

In short, to work according to GDPR, companies have the option of not collecting data (kind of unfeasible in this day and age), collect less data than they used to, or use systems that work through those rules, like the CDP.

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What is there to know about the CDP?

As previously mentioned, the Customer Data Platform is the best alternative for brands that want to work with Customer Data while sticking to the GDPR.

It is a system developed to assist marketing teams, but it has grown into much more than that. That is, helping several sectors inside a company, like sales, customer support, and customer attendance.

For that reason, it has also become an essential tool to stand out from the competition while offering the best customer experience.

Through clear and reliable data collection, processing, and storage, a brand can custom content, offers, and ads according to both individual profiles and segmentation groups. Which, by the way, the CDP itself creates.

Additionally, all types of data are read by the software. Though it collects and gives preference for first-party data, it can also work with second and third-party data. What it does is select and separate what data is actually valuable for the company, putting it in storage, and what’s not. 

Here’s a detail to remember: it does this selection considering the regulation (GDPR).

Is there anything else you need to know about the CDP?

Of course there is. The CDP is a huge program that does a lot more than help you with GDPR. Inside its system, there is a client history. Thus, more than an individual profile per customer, it’s also possible to understand how each of them behave online — what kind of purchase they make, which products they’re interested in, etc.

What we really want to say here is that the Customer Data Platform meets your GDPR needs. Plus, it keeps you worry-free in relation to unreliable or illegal data usage.

So, even though we still would have a lot more to talk about with the CDP, let’s just highlight this: with this software, you only use information to personalize content provided by the client, him or herself!

And what does that lead to? A double benefit for the company: improve CX and brand credibility.

How to get a CDP?

You probably have no more questions left regarding the need of a CDP for accomplishing GDPR regulation. But you might still be wondering how to acquire a CDP solution.

The first step is simple: do your research.

Once you know what is in the market, you can easily pick a platform that will meet all your needs. 

You don’t need much more than that. Once you acquire the CDP, set it up and start using it. Simple as that!

Here at Arena, our platform is a guaranteed solution for working with Customer Data. With over a thousand clients, we know how to deliver what you’re looking for. Besides, we also have some other solutions to make your customer experience strategy go up the charts such as Live Chat, Live Blog, and Content Wall.

Now, back to our main topic, let’s see what’s next:

What are the CDP benefits for data usage in the GDPR era?

Along with some benefits already mentioned, like the complete work with Customer Data, there are other advantages that make the CDP complete software that any company should get.

For example, the possibility of all company employees to have access to the data — with due permission. Whether it’s a sales rep, customer support, or product developers.

Especially in the Customer-centric period we’re currently in, allowing every sector to have access to this customer data just makes the job easier and the strategy maintained with efficiency.

Now, there are three other reasons to have a CDP that are directly related to the GDPR project:

Low cost

In spite of not being the cheapest data control tool in the market, it does stand out as the most complete and provides the best price-performance ratio. One of the reasons that makes this possible is that the platform is already built and programmed without the need of an IT support team.

That is to say, you simply acquire the Customer Data Platform, make some basic configurations, and start benefiting from it. No need to hire a platform support team or anything like that.

Another thing: this tool is faster than others that work with data, such as the CRM. In addition, your goals will be reached easier and, likewise, faster with it.

Individual and unified profile

What happened before CDP came to the market was data duplication.

Let’s explain this better:

A system like CRM, for example, doesn’t have the capability of recognizing different actions made by the same client. So, if someone interacts with the brand through the website and then by email, the software thinks it’s two different people.

With the CDP, that problem doesn’t exist. It is built to identify and unify these actions into a singular customer profile. Thus, avoiding data duplication.

No matter how many interactions or where they take place, the platform will be able to understand it is the same person and gather the information in the same place.

Easy external access

Okay, so, we’re talking about how CDP is superior to other data collection systems. This doesn’t mean you need to get this platform and get rid of everything you currently use. Not at all. 

The Customer Data Platform has the ability to connect with other systems, so you can take advantage of all the data you already have by connecting your platforms and centralizing all data into one place.

Even more, if there is incorrect, duplicated, or data going against GDPR, the CDP can correct and/or delete this information.

This way, before you waste your current database, make sure if it’s worth it or not to practice this integration between platforms.

Moreover, other software that is not directly related to data collection could perform better with the help of a CDP database. Don’t hold back doing your research.

So far, you’ve learned some of the main tasks of a Customer Data Platform, but there is still a lot more to know about it. How about reading our ebook on the subject? The download is free and the knowledge is uncanny!

Ecommerce Customer Experience: how to optimize it

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A good eCommerce customer experience offers much more than just speed and ease: it fits customers’ preferences to increase their lifetime value and keep your churn rate low.

It’s no secret that people are shopping online more and more. With social distancing, the average customer profile has evolved and adapted to navigate and make eCommerce purchases.

Ecommerce has been a key channel in retail, marketing, and sales operations, to the point it globally represents three-quarters of the overall retail growth. According to Statista, eCommerce sales are supposed to reach almost $604 billion in 2021.

Whether eCommerce sales are made overseas or regionally, one thing is true: The customer is at its center, and offering an at-least-good customer experience is a basic requirement.

Still, that is not what we usually see these days. Regrettably, it is very common to find bad eCommerce customer experiences, such as buggy checkout processes.

Well, that’s no laughing matter. Losing a customer in the checkout process means you’re saying goodbye to the most concrete revenue you might be able to get.

Why is eCommerce customer experience so important?

Owning an inventory and simply selling it isn’t enough, especially in the competitive market we witness today. Products and services aren’t differentiators anymore—but good eCommerce customer experience is.

An eCommerce experience refers to the quality of the interactions customers have in digital stores.

To achieve acceptable levels of quality, the user interaction should match customers’ expectations and provide them with fantastic eCommerce customer experience—there is where its importance lies.

Customer experience decides if you’re selling or not—literally—when it comes to eCommerce. 

The following statistics, provided by CX Central, make it clear:

  • After going through a poor experience, 89% of customers say they have stopped buying from a brand
  • Customer experience is overtaking price and products as a key brand differentiator
  • Eighty-six percent (86%) of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience
  • In general, 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer an excellent mobile experience
  • Around 25% of online shoppers leave the website without paying if they find the website navigation too complicated

As you can see, offering a bad eCommerce customer experience is the way to chaos. Simultaneously, a good eCommerce customer experience is the way to customer engagement.

But how can you avoid being in the bad eCommerce statistics?

Keep in mind that every and each eCommerce operation should be built considering how the customer feels throughout the buying journey. 

If customers feel bad about your brand while on your eCommerce, they won’t hesitate to open a new tab and search for your competitor quickly. Competition is a few clicks away.

This means you have to offer a seamless, intuitive, eCommerce customer experience.

What makes a good eCommerce customer experience?

A good eCommerce customer experience should allow your customers to move through your online shop with speed and ease while matching their personal preferences.

This might differ from customer to customer – that’s why it is important to know them deeply.

In case you’re in doubt whether you’re offering a great eCommerce customer experience or not, there are a few KPIs that can help you get your answers.

We know a large portion of customers abandon the cart because that’s how they browse eCommerce. 

Still, according to Baymard, the main reasons for cart abandonment during checkouts are too high extra costs (50%), eCommerce demanding customers to create an account (28%), and too long checkout processes (21%). 

Another interesting statistic is that customer retention in eCommerce is 5X cheaper than acquisition. 

This suggests that keeping your customers and increasing their Lifetime Value (LTV) is a great way to keep ROI coming back to you. If your customer LTV is good, you might want to keep it high to benefit from consumers’ engagement.

With this in mind, we’ll move forward to some eCommerce customer experience trends that are extremely promising for the upcoming months.

1 – Personalization

You wants your customers to feel like you care about them, right? 

The best way to ensure them you do is to offer them interactions that match their context.

By basing its campaigns on factual data, eCommerce can deliver highly personalized and relevant offers to customers throughout their lifecycle and buying journey.

This means more accurate product suggestions, tailored loyalty points, smart follow-up emails, and more, to guide your customers more easily in the journey.

Please pay attention to the fact 71% of consumers express some level of frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal. On the other hand, 80% of them are more likely to buy from brands that offer customized experiences.

Tailoring a specific eCommerce customer experience based on customer data is no longer a futuristic idea. It is here, and people are demanding it.

2 – Flexibility

Customers expect to buy from anywhere at any time. This means providing them with:

  • A wide variety of paying methods on the checkout page
  • Search bars so customers can quickly find products they’re looking for
  • A small number of input fields in the checkout process
  • Fair price policies that don’t scare buyers away

Are these all? In fair honesty, they aren’t. Granting your customers with flexibility goes much further, and it starts with understanding what their preferences and hopes are.

The omnichannel market, for example, is growing at an impressive speed due to customers’ need to create deeper connections with brands as fast as they need to.

Whether customers want to shop online or to go in-store and have their package sent to their houses, omnichannel embraces countless opportunities across digital platforms and physical operations to deliver customized customer experiences.

This creates a competitive advantage and levels your eCommerce customer experience up.

3 – Human connection

The average Americans see from 4,000 to 10,000 ads daily. This massive advertising has contributed to making customers feel overwhelmed and make them harder to reach effectively.

When getting involved with brands, customers need to understand root-causes to allow an emotional connection. 

This isn’t something that paid ads can tell them, so eCommerce needs to take a step back and focus on organic storytelling techniques.

By focusing their attention on unique, personal brand experiences, businesses can upgrade their marketing campaigns and shopping journeys to build an outstanding eCommerce customer experience.

How does that affect your eCommerce directly? Well, this is a fantastic opportunity to use videos and live content to tell your story in an appealing way to attract and retain customers.

This is also a sign you should focus on more effective human support. 

For example, as much as people don’t mind being served by chatbots, 73% of customers still love being supported by friendly representatives who provide excellent service.

4 – Convenience

Convenience is the key to a good eCommerce customer experience, so fast and free shipping is about to become a brand differentiator.

Hitches and slowness aren’t allowed anymore and might push the demanding, time-sensitive customer away.

Let’s say your marketing team has invested time and money in delivering a campaign to attract customers to a unique sales promotion.

However, as soon as the customers engaged with your campaign get to your eCommerce, they catch themselves face to face with slow loading times, confusing pages, and unclear product descriptions.

Let’s also imagine that, as soon as customers put the products in the cart, the price previously exposed to your eCommerce suddenly increases.

Bad news: You have just wasted all the money your company invested in an effective acquisition campaign.

Studies say 14% of customers percent will begin shopping at another site when waiting for a page to load. Imagine how negatively this can affect your churn and conversion rates.

By neglecting convenience, there is a high chance your metrics towards digital initiatives might not perform the way you’re expecting them to and indicate opportunities you’re losing in the business.

Ways to improve eCommerce customer experience

There are many ways to improve your eCommerce customer experience once you decide to invest in meaningful customer-centric experiences.

One thing is universal for picking and implementing the right technologies to optimize your eCommerce customer experience: your improvements must be data-based.

This means every page and feature on your eCommerce should rely on vital customer information, such as what type of interaction your consumers prefer depending on the journey stage they’re at.

For example, have you ever considered developing a solution that allows your customers to buy from you while driving? Or delivering your products to consumers’ vehicles and other appliances?

Perhaps one of the above might make huge sense and generate even more value to your customers. But you’ll only know for certain if you rely on trustworthy customer data.

This is such a trend that customers will agree to sell their information to brands they choose. 

Whether it is their in-store movements, their location, or online browsing, customers are aware data access is essential to create personal experiences—and they’re counting on you to use it wisely to reward them with the best eCommerce experience ever.

Many eCommerce leaders and professionals worldwide have been doing that and benefiting from Customer Data Platform outcomes to personalize and elevate their eCommerce customer experience.

Improving your eCommerce customer experience with a real-time engagement platform

In the process of improving your eCommerce customer experience, you should strongly consider a few tools to help you build the best user experience.

Arena’s real-time engagement platform is the choice for you. It is equipped with Live Blog and Live Chat that can easily be embedded into your eCommerce to generate leads, increase engagement, and boost your revenue.

Keep reading to find out how both tools can optimize your eCommerce customer experience. We highly recommend checking out how Shoply leverages Arena for their Live Shopping experience.

Live Blog for eCommerce

A Live Blog is a new way to blog that embraces live content to a real-time audience.

When you live Blog, you combine different post formats and sources to create a refreshing coverage feed with the latest news towards an important event in your field. 

Live Blogs are huge in many sectors, such as sports, elections, protests, and conferences. However, these powerful engagement platforms can do much more, especially when we bring your eCommerce to the scenery.

Could you Live Blog a product launch? Sure! Could you live Blog a new promotional sale? Yes! Could you live Blog a special gathering for your loyal top-level clients? Absolutely.

Live Blogs transcend the way blogs have been building content over the years and should be adopted by eCommerce’s that care about the content they’re providing customers with.

Live Group Chat for eCommerce

Have you ever considered working on your eCommerce to embed tools that promote customer real-time interactions 24/7?

Live Chat Groups are an amazing option to achieve that!

As the name suggests, Live Chat Groups are chats that can easily be implemented on eCommerce to allow real-time conversations between your customers and representatives and your customers alone.

By implementing one on your eCommerce, you allow new types of interaction that add on more credibility to your pages and don’t make your customers wait for a response when customers reach out for you.

Live Chats have been used by support and sales teams for years, but now marketers have opened their eyes to its potential to engage and offer excellent customer experiences.

The advantages of Live Chat Groups are:

  • Availability: Consumers want businesses to be available 24/7, and Live Chat Groups are always there to prevent your customers from waiting for a response
  • Support: Sales representatives use Live Chat Groups to give customers great support, whether they’re in the checkout process or in doubt about a specific product
  • Real-time engagement: Replying quickly to customers should spare you the chance to leave them without an answer and lose them to other eCommerce on your field
  • Lead generation: Want a fast, simple tool that collects customer data and lets you smoothly guide shoppers through the customer journey? Live Chat is the answer!

As you read, consumers are expecting your next eCommerce customer experience move

We know how fast you need to implement changes that will give you quick and remarkable results. 

That is why we have decided to let you download our engagement platform for free and get started as soon as you want!

Start now and add Live Chat and Live Blog to boost your eCommerce customer experience!

Reasons you should work with a CDP (Customer Data Platform)

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Why should you invest in a Customer Data Platform? They are revolutionizing the business market, and there’s a reason for it. This system gathers all customer data into a singular font and creates a supreme tool to gain a competitive edge by providing unique and excellent CX.

The future of marketing is working primarily with customer data. This is already happening and has been occurring for a few years now. Data can talk about identity, contact, and even demographic information. But most importantly, online behavioral data is the factor that really makes a difference in understanding how to converse with the audience.

On top of that, data also generates knowledge about the market. So, more than getting to know the consumer, you understand better how to position the brand to attract the public’s attention. Working around the consumer requires a means to control all the information received. As consequence, the Customer Data Platform software was developed.

The CDP system gathers data from all available sources and organizes it in a database. Then, marketing and sales professionals can easily access that information and work on content creation. Besides, it provides insights for campaigns and new products (or modernization of existing products).

Read on to learn more about the importance of having a Customer Data Platform and how it helps businesses grow.

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Why is the Customer Data Platform so important?

A Customer Data Platform is a software designed to collect online and offline data. It deals with three main objectives: collect, analyze, and execute data. Though it was specially developed for marketing teams, it can still be used for other sectors inside a company.

With the organization of all available data, a marketing team’s work will be a lot simpler. By the way, the information contained inside a CDP comes from various sources: website, in-apps, social media, etc. One of the reasons the Customer Data Platform was created was to have all of the data generated from multiple sources gathered into one singular system.

The aim of putting together all information available about customers is to understand them better. The importance of knowing your consumer is undeniable, and the CDP can create an ideal consumer profile from the data collected. 

This means marketing teams have a goldmine in their hands. From the information found within this software, these professionals will know exactly who to talk to, how to speak, and even the best time.

Also, Customer Data Platforms work with real-time data collection. In other words, it gathers data from the first interaction of a user with the brand — whether that’s a visit on the website or an engagement on social media. And it’s not only about the information they share with the brand, like names and emails. So, even if that user doesn’t share anything at the start, their online behavior is already being stored.

It’s worth mentioning that everything is automated in the CDP, from the collection to analysis and database storage. Therefore, marketing professionals have to access the system and start creating content and campaigns.

Why work with customer data?

The reason to acquire a Customer Data Platform for your company is to work with customer data. In this scenario, you can pretty much ask yourself, “why to work with data collection at all?”. The answer to that question could not be more clear: to provide a better customer experience.

Have you heard about the customer-centric strategy? That’s a method of putting the customer in the center of every decision which most companies use nowadays. The reason for that is simple: customers are more demanding than ever before. 

Because the internet has so much information available, it’s harder to create a product or service that will make a person become a customer. Or, even more, make a customer loyal to the brand.

The only way to get to know the consumer and succeed in giving them the best experience is customer data. That is, all the information a company receives from the interaction with a client. Since these are known facts, working with them avoids speculations that could be way off the real deal.

Additionally, some benefits of managing customer data include better segmentation, personalized communication, broader audience understanding, an increase in revenue, and humanization of the brand. 

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That last item is related to what a customer expects from brands. They want the brand to connect and engage with them — just as much as the company wants their audience to interact and communicate too. Customers value their overall experience. It’s much more than only the purchase of a product.

To have a more appropriate data organization, companies invest in platforms that assist in analysis and make their daily work easier. These can include CDMs, CRMs, and CDPs.

What are the types of data?

Of course, to comprehend the best solution for your purpose, you might need a little more information on the types of data that can be collected. Because of that, here’s an explanation about what cookies are and also first-, second-, and third-party data.

Cookies

Cookies are probably the most famous type of data. It’s actually a package of data the computer receives when you first access an online page. After the cookie is on the PC, it will continuously send information to the company every time you access their pages.

More than tracking activities inside their website, cookies also have the function to store information that makes navigation more practical. For example, login and passwords — also called authentication cookies. 

Session cookies and tracking cookies are also varieties of cookies that gather when visitors are active, and the number of visits made to the same page, respectively. In addition, they have an important role in saving information for eCommerce. To clarify, if there were no cookies, shopping carts would be reset every time someone left the page to look for more items.

Even though they are so useful, their minute in the spotlight is coming to an end. Mainly because of privacy issues, cookies have become a concern for the audience. For that reason, browsers have decided to end the support of using cookies. Since cookies’ future is basically non-existing, companies are already looking for new ways to gather and access customer data.

First-party

This is the data collected straight from the relationship between customer and brand. Every piece of information gathered by the company itself can be classified as first-party data. It can be generated from monitoring the website, marketing campaigns, social media, etc. But also from website analytics platforms, CRM systems, and business analytics tools. 

This is the best type of data to work with. It’s the most trustworthy and reliable data. More than that, it’s also confidential data — since you are collecting it directly from your consumer, no other company will have that same information.

Of course, if there is no customer-brand interaction, no data about that person will be collected. That’s not exactly a downside, but it’s important to mention. That way, if your goal is to expand your audience, first-party data isn’t so recommended.

Second-party

Despite not being so talked about, second-party data is real. It’s essentially first-party data from another company. The idea is that you create a communication with a brand that has the same niche, but different products. Seeing that you’re not competitors, you can share each other’s first-party data and expand the brand’s audience.

This agreement between two companies can be an excellent means to improve your audience targeting as well. Further to this, you might create a bond with a powerful ally in the market.

Third-party

Third-party data can be used for the same purpose as second-party; however, it comes from a different source. That is: the information is bought from an external data provider.

Usually, companies that work with an incredible amount of data can decide to sell this information for other companies. Like most things in life, there are ups and downs. The positive point about buying customer data is that you’ll have a lot to work with, grow your audience, and practice better targeting. Moreover, purchased information is wide-ranging and can be used for several purposes.

On the other hand, this information is not exclusive. There are high chances of your competitor ending up with the same data package as you. This data isn’t so reliable since you don’t know where it came from and from who it is — the information is anonymous. Lastly, there’s also the chance of violating data privacy regulation.

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How to use data-driven marketing with a Customer Data Platform?

The primary intention of using customer data is to manage marketing strategies. This has become so huge these days. We even have a new expression in the business world: data-driven marketing. This is about creating a better experience and communication for the customer through data collected. Sound familiar?

A Customer Data Platform brings some benefits to the company that wants to practice data-driven marketing. For starters, the capacity of originating their own database. This gives the brand more control of sources and customer privacy. Easy access to information and anticipation of customers’ needs also get on the list.

The software will also have processes automated, meaning it’s easier to understand what data is essential and what can be left aside for the moment. As previously mentioned, each type of data is good for a specific strategy. Do you want more audience engagement? Get some first-party data. Do you want to expand your audience? Then work with third-party data.

Nonetheless, if you want to stand out in the market, use a combination of both types of data. That’s the most powerful tool you’ll have in your hands. And you know how it’s called? It’s the Customer Data Platform.

Why should you work with a Customer Data Platform?

There’s a whole list of reasons any company praises growth and customer satisfaction should acquire a Customer Data Platform. Some of those include:

  • knowing the consumer
  • improving relationship and engagement
  • creating tailor-made content
  • avoiding data silos
  • improving ROI
  • boosting predictive marketing

Coming from a wide variety of sources, the compilation of first-, second-, and third-party data into a singular system allows the Customer Data Platform to create the ideal customer profile and also unified customer profiles. Both of which will assist in a brand’s communication strategy.

More than that, the CDP works with real-time updates and connects online and offline data. Can you think of a complete database than this? Acquiring this solution will guarantee you better results in marketing campaigns.

Of course, a Customer Data Platform can be used as more than a marketing tool. It can help sales teams, product development, customer support, and pretty much all company sectors. Arena offers a CDP solution so you can work towards all your goals.

That being said, we want you to thoroughly understand what we do and how to use a CDP to your advantage. Because of that, we’ve created an ebook to explain more about it! 

Download it for free now: Customer Data Platform 2020: the future of marketing and sales.

How to Improve eCommerce Customer Experience

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Satisfaction is the word of order. To reach it, the customer experience (CX) for your eCommerce must be on point! Read on and discover how you can improve yours!

All eyes are on the customer now. Whoever dedicates strictly to price is faded to be eaten up by companies serving one moment.

Consumers are more demanding than ever before. Online shopping has become an ever-growing search for the most positive and memorable experience.

On the other side, eCommerce needs to understand its own customers to offer what they really want to get.

So, the faster you assimilate what your brand must do, the bigger will be your returns. Follow up and start right now!

Why is Customer Experience so crucial to eCommerce?

The relationship established between the industry and customers is not supply and demand anymore. It goes far beyond selling. This is a Customer-Centric era! Besides offering an excellent service or product, you must serve a memorable experience, adding value not only to your merchandise but to your whole brand legacy.

Since your company is directly competing with other names offering the same item, with the same level of quality, and the same price, providing an excellent experience to the customer has become the way to stand out, especially in eCommerce.

It is necessary to understand the needs and explore them, making sure satisfaction is present throughout every step of the buyer’s journey.

Dive in your customers’ minds, know their personality, treat them as individuals, be empathic. No one likes to be ignored or mistreated. After all, satisfied customers tend to buy more, put great referrals out there, and positively qualify your company.

How can your eCommerce improve Customer Experience?

The customer experience begins long before the purchase and ends, well… that depends on how deep is their connection with you. Also, aspects including the longevity of the product or service and, most importantly, the degree of emotional involvement to your brand are determinants.

The process of customer experience can start with a personal dream, desire, or status someone seeks for. Whatever is the trigger, customers will join a journey craving for more information to make a dream come true.

With all the accessibility and variety of information provided out here, you must be fully ready to catch their attention at the first click on your eCommerce. They will find out everything about your product or service before addressing any salesman.  

They will build expectations, imagining themselves owning your product/service, feeling the sensation, the joy, the happiness. That is why the entire process has to be flawless. Your customer is preparing their life for that purchase moment.

Although, if they go through any bumps along that ride, anything that negatively influences them, their minds can change in a second, and your eCommerce will lose a sale.

What are the best practices?

Since the idea is to generate a level of satisfaction that your customer will come back to you for any time they need something, here are some best practices you’d better know.

Listen to your customer

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is responsible for gathering, in one place, the entire database of your company. For eCommerce, this functionality is particularly useful, as it helps to increase lifetime value (LTV) and decrease customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Integrating multiple touchpoints is essential to boost consumer loyalty, increasing the relationship between the brand and the customer. A CDP can integrate all customer data sources through a clean and unified registration system.

By that, marketing and sales can create campaigns with even more personality for your client. With a unique approach aiming for customer experience, it is possible to increase conversion chances, maximizing the average ticket without having to acquire new clients.

When crossing complementary information, it gets easier to identify different customer clusters. For example, you can build a segmentation for those who add products to the cart but leave before buying and those who purchase and may be open to new experiences on your eCommerce.

Holding those types of information, strategy becomes more curated, and ad campaigns get more effective. Then, investments can be directed to where it matters instead of giving blind tries and wasting money.

Put empathy first

We can immediately say that being empathic to your customer makes your eCommerce service a personalized, opening space for the exclusive.

We have mentioned a few times here in our blog that the customer knows exactly when someone is pushing them to buy something ––, and you do not want to be that person!

Letting the audience know your products or services are designed by excellence also includes how you connect with them. By serving empathy in your day-to-day, you make the buying process more flexible.

As a result, your customer will understand you are solving their particular needs, and not just making another regular deal.

Create relevant engagement

Customer experience for eCommerce is a 100% induced process. Your strategy team is in charge of building the most extraordinary journey. A golden tool to accomplish that is Live Chat.

A professional Live Chat solution allows you to monitor, in real-time, how many visitors are on your eCommerce and what pages they are browsing and products they are looking for. It is also possible to know if they are evading the buying process to make a proper intervention to reverse the situation.

Those proactive Live Chat invitations break the barriers of reactive positioning –– when your brand waits for the customer to call you. Approaching visitors in real-time completely changes the dynamic and the relationship between sales and customers.

By acting proactively and showing you are there, available at any time, you have better chances to enhance eCommerce’s customer experience.

It turns essential to mention that every step of this type of engagement is strategically designed to be data-based. There is no guessing or trying in the dark. Unexpected behaviors here can instantly ruin the deal.

Prepare your teams

Another great way to provide a better customer experience for eCommerce is by investing in proper training for your support team. Courses, workshops, digital content: there are plenty of ways to educate and create better service.

It is also fundamental to listen to your team’s reality, encouraging them to share their perceptions, give feedback, and improve the process along the way.

Establish a safe and open communication channel between you both. After all, a significant part of your success depends on them.

Simplify the buying process

Having your customer behavior mapped, you can identify –– or even predict through data –– some crucial details, especially when it comes to the buying process itself.

When you anticipate their common desires, you can display items or services to enhance their experience on your eCommerce and offer a smooth process to do business with your company. You improve the chances of higher revenue.

What metrics to measure about CX for eCommerce?

When we talk about customer experience for eCommerce, some important metrics work as a compass to indicate whether you are on the right track to achieve your business goals. They must be closely linked to the macro strategy, so the results operate as a cascade.

It’s worth mentioning that many managers focus excessively on operational activities indicators, such as the number of e-mails or social media posts.

Those are also important since you can measure teams’ productivity. But without the correct data analysis of performance, it is likely you are all wasting time and money.

General conversion rate

This one probably is very familiar to you. Also, a fundamental metric to evaluate how the customer is experiencing your eCommerce. The conversion rate index usually can point out bottlenecks on your website or strategy.

Aspects your team would not figure out quickly, demanding users’ behavior to identify it correctly. Gaps can be extremely dangerous to the entire process, causing exit spots before the purchase happens.

Shopping Cart conversion rate

A must-have indicator for eCommerce, this one measures when some products or service is added to the cart, but the visitor abandons the process before concluding the sale. By analyzing this metric, you can identify which stage they are evading.

That way, your teams can use tools like real-time updates, provided by the Customer Data Platform, to comprehend why it is happening and how to revert it. Also, you can still create a powerful retarget campaign using CDP to bring them back for those lost customers.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

When it comes to measuring customer satisfaction and the possibility of making good referrals, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the best known. A typical example of NPS is the following question: “How likely are you to recommend us on a scale from 0 to 10?”.

This metric can be used as a starting point for products or services standardization entirely based on data and customer experience.

As a business manager, the questions approached by NPS are essential to be solved. After all, you know if the customers aren’t satisfied with what they’ve received, chances are, they’ll get frustrated.

Customer referrals

The buyers’ journey is cyclic. It is not enough to have the right products and serve well anymore. The environment built by you must provide a prime time through every single step of customer experience.

When potential new customers see how your brand has been transforming clients, it kind of creates a shortcut between consideration and decision-making. For example, social proofs reveal the opinion of real individuals about the connection established with you and your service.

It could be a testimonial, a demonstration, photos, or even a five-star evaluation. The more referrals your customers put out there, the more authority your brand gets. And even though it may be not easy getting people to spend their time writing something positive about you, it is ok to offer some motivation in return, like a coupon or a gift.

What are the positive results of CX in the checkout process?

To earn customers trust and make them feel safe to close a deal, the checkout page has a massive role in it. From the beginning until the end, your customer experience for eCommerce must be consistent and cohesive, exuding security throughout the journey.

Withdrawals mostly happen at the checkout stage, whether it’s because the page is complex, or demands too much information, or because there are patterns the customer may not feel comfortable filling.

Picture yourself going through your checkout page:

  1. How simple and objective is it?
  2. Are the main points of the information displayed clearly?
  3. Is your checkout browsing intuitive?
  4. Can customers quickly understand that it won’t be too long?

Questions like those enlighten how your checkout page should be constructed, focussing on customer experience.

Here, a bonus tip is to always pay attention to the type of devices being used to access your pages. If you neglect the sources, you will be shutting down several entry doors. You can get that information using the Customer Data Platform.

How can CX generate more revenue?

Nothing can push customers away more than a bad experience. Therefore, to ensure technological innovations lead you towards better results, more profits, and brand loyalty, eCommerce’s customer experience must count on the right tools. Arena’s customers in the eCommerce segment, like Shoply, are already reaping the profits from offering an enhanced Customer Experience.

Just as your customer wants to keep it simple, yet meaningful, so should you when it comes to how to do it. That is why Arena gives you the most fantastic alternatives.

The first one is the Customer Data Platform. This is, by far, your ultimate top option. Every piece of data you need to create the best customer experience for eCommerce is on CDP. Click here and understand how it can increase your sales! Also, you can have a Live Chat solution for free on your website in three simple steps! Within minutes, get this powerful tool right now and boost customer experience on your e-commerce.

How to use CDP to improve your conversion rates

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Customer Data Platforms can fuel your marketing efforts, help you improve customer experience, and maximize ROI. This post will teach you how to embrace CDPs on daily marketing activities to potentialize results.

Marketing leaders’ job has become more challenging year after year with the rise of new content channels, connected devices, and sales formats. In a competitive scenario, acquiring and retaining requires more than just a good strategy. We live in the age of tailor-made communication, where there is no room for basic and generic marketing anymore.

No wonder companies from all segments have searched for ways to make their marketing approach more personal and cost-effective at the same time, which requires the right tools and best practices for data management. 

A report from the CMO Council shows that marketers worldwide see the execution of a data-driven strategy as their primary challenge to have a unified view of customer experience (CX) across different touchpoints, according to 38% of marketers consulted for the study. 

According to 30% of respondents, another challenge is to abandon customer data silos, which make data inaccessible across the organization. Even though marketers can count on CRM and DMP platforms to understand some of the customers’ engagement and pain points, the problems above can only be truly solved through robust data management platforms. 

In that sense, digitally mature marketers have specifically reached out to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) in order to understand customers better and offer them a better customer experience.

Ultimately, a CDP can boost brands’ ROI and help them maximize conversion rates. This post will explore the concept of CDP, how it differs from other data platforms, and how marketers can use them to improve their results. 

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What is CDP?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software that centralizes customer data from different data systems and customer-facing platforms. It collects quantitative and qualitative information from diverse touchpoints with customers, offering a friendly interface that allows companies to access customer data from different departments easily. 

Customer Data Platforms combine customers’ demographic data, buying history, hobbies, transactional data, social media preferences, interactions with call centers, navigation data, and more. 

They work mostly with first-party data, crossing information from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Data Management Platforms (DMPs), and customers’ direct interactions with your brand through support channels, payment methods, social media, and different devices. 

The idea is to combine Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and build a unified view of individual customers – also called Unified Customer Profiles. Since the data match is consistent across different platforms, data is even more reliable than other platforms. 

A few examples of data collected by CDPs:

  • Purchases
  • Renewal dates
  • Customer and product value
  • Abandoned baskets
  • Stage in the conversion funnel
  • Products and categories searched and browsed
  • Store and website visits
  • Content and channel preferences
  • Social media interactions
  • Customer support interactions
  • Email opening rates
  • Lifestyle preferences
  • Contact information

These are just a few examples. The possibilities are endless! In reality, your company can choose to plug in any data system to the CDP. All data can then be stitched to the unique customer profile, allowing marketing teams to work on segmentation and personalization.

Typically, CDPs are used with five purposes in mind:

  1. Improving customer identity resolution
  2. Data cleansing and enrichment
  3. Data Centralization and integration
  4. Audience data analytics
  5. Marketing segmentation and optimization

CDP vs. CRM vs. DMP: beware of the difference

The marketing industry has long relied on acronyms to refer to metrics and tools. The data management realm is specifically pervaded by similar acronyms that comprehend entirely different things, such as CDP, DMP, and CRM.

Most marketers will agree that it is essential to manage data through one of these: Data Management Platforms (DMP), Customer Data Platforms (CDP), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). However, not all of them might understand how each of them works.

All three platforms share a list of common assets: they aim to establish a Single Customer View (SCV), use data for audience activation, and offer reporting, analysis, and optimization tools. Such platforms will often work side-by-side, but CDPs, DMPs, and CRM show many differences despite their similarities.

We have already explained how CDPs work, now let’s explore how DMPs and CRM systems compare.

Data Management Platforms

The DMP is mainly used to drive advertising campaigns, relying almost exclusively on anonymous data from cookies, devices, and IP addresses. It captures generic data such as when users visited your website and how long they spent on the page.

Then, such navigation information is used to target ads according to customer behavior to reach customers who match the brand’s target profiles – a process called probabilistic matching. A DMP can monitor campaign strategies, identify conversion points and personalize campaigns according to them. 

Main differences with CDP

  • CDPs work with both anonymous and known individuals, while DMPs work almost exclusively with anonymous entities and unknown customers
  • In CDPs, database updates happen in real-time, while DPMs only allow scheduled database updates
  • CDPs are based on historical integrated customer records, which means you can store customer data for however long. DMPs, however, store data for shorter periods, usually up to 90 days (a cookie’s lifespan) to target ads and build lookalike audiences
  • DMPs are used only for managing digital advertising, while CDPs can be used across an entire organization, including for sales and customer success

Customer Relationship Management

CRM systems are typically used by sales teams, storing personal information from known customers – such as contacts, demographics, transaction data, notes about customers made by sales, CRM, and customer success teams. 

Softwares alike are used to track leads, understand the sales pipeline, and for driving customer engagement. CRMs don’t store anonymous user behavior.

Mains differences with CDPs

  • CRMs aren’t built to ingest large volumes of data from different sources, like CDPs
  • CRMs only analyze personal data from known customers, such as name, age, and contacts, but not navigation behavior – something tracked by CDPs
  • CRMs do not connect customers’ actions through different channels and devices, and so is not able to follow the customer journey like a CDP

Using CDPs to improve marketing ROI

Successful marketing campaigns don’t embrace just a few channels, but a complex constellation of touchpoints with your audience. Acting over this constellation, however, can sometimes be challenging. A survey from the Harvard Business Review shows that only 3% of marketers believe they are able to act on all of the customer data they collect. Another 21% say they can act on very little of it. 

As we discussed earlier, CDPs can play a significant role in connecting customers’ fragmented journey. But beyond that, they can help you make smarter investment decisions, improve ROI, conversion rates, and Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). 

Also, CDPs can automate and eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks from marketing professionals’ routines, making daily marketing activities more agile.

A few ways a CDP can improve business results:

Accurate personalization

In the age of recommendation algorithms, customers expect personalized experiences everywhere. Marketers should avoid at all costs making wrongful recommendations or serve ads that are not relevant within the user’s journey. 

Because CDPs break data silos and integrate marketing efforts across different channels, they help brands to deliver the right messages, at the right time and in the right channels for customers. For instance, you could exclude users that recently bought your products or those who are not likely to engage with your ad campaigns from your targeting strategy, focusing on users who are likely to engage.

Better budget allocation equals better leads

CDPs allow brands to acknowledge what products customers show interest in, their purchase intent, and how likely they are to churn. They can also find out their favorite interaction channels and stage in the customer journey. From there, it gets easier to allocate ad dollars and improve content strategies on every channel.

As a result, CDPs help attract more qualified leads, optimize marketing budgets, reduce customers’ acquisition costs (CAC), and improve conversion rates.

More qualified data

Marketing leaders are shifting their attention from second and third-party data to first-party data. As privacy and compliance regulations become more consolidated, organizations increasingly seek to work with their own, integrated data – something Customer Data Platforms can help them with.

Driving data-driven sales

Customer Data Platforms can help sales teams upsell or cross-sell products based on customers’ recent purchases or search intent. By having access to enriched, accurate data, salespeople can better design retargeting and churn prevention campaigns through email, mobile, and other channels.

More autonomy and agility to marketing professionals

Depending on other departments for reports and insights can be time-consuming and unproductive for marketing teams, since not everyone is on the same page about marketing needs. CDPs are useful to many areas within a company, but every team can shape their use according to specific goals while having access to all kinds of company data. 

According to CMO Council, 67% of marketers believe speed is one of the primary benefits of data-driven marketing, resulting in quickly executing their campaigns. Through CDPs, teams can scale marketing efforts and get new processes started faster. 

Benefits from CDPs don’t stop there. In this post, you can check 20 ways CDPs can be used in marketing.

Integrations and key assets of CDPs

In a fragmented media and advertising landscape, marketers want tools to give them more control over events in their channels. CDPs allow companies to integrate different systems and deploy data with customers’ profiles to many marketing and customer relationship platforms. 

Most Customer Data Platforms typically offer connector marketplaces where marketers can set up integrations in just a few minutes. However, the depth and amount of possible integrations can vary according to the CDP you choose.

Areas of integration offered by CDPs usually include: 

  • Advertising: Integrations to DSPs, Facebook Ads Manager, Google Marketing Platform, and more
  • Analytics and AB Testing platforms: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Optimizely, MixPannel, etc
  • Email and marketing automation tools: MailChimp, Hubspot, Sendgrid, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, SMS tools, and others

When connected to other systems, CDPs can deploy customers’ profiles to marketing tools (also called delivery platforms), enabling the planning and distribution of campaigns and personalized messages.

The amount of tools companies will connect to their CDPs will depend on the specifics of their business. Large businesses are likely to connect more tools than small companies, for instance.

Before adopting a CDP, be prepared

Yes, a Customer Data Platform can do wonders for your marketing strategy, but you need to feed it for it to work properly. CDPs won’t effectively integrate customer touch points if they can’t truly access data about the whole customer’s journey.

If you want a seamless, functioning CDP, it has to be fueled with multiple data records from clients – not just a few sources. A Customer Data Platform should gather historical data and freshly-collected data about their interactions with your brand. 

That’s how it can create a satisfactory customer profile and identity resolution (when the system matches records from different data sources and connects them to single customers). But why do you need identity resolution?

A customer might interact with your brand through several channels and devices, but sometimes CDPs will interpret different data points as if belonging to other customers.

So, not having enough data or having insufficient data prevents you from having the perfect picture of single customers, resulting in wasted investments, bad customer experience (CX), and poor marketing results.

In a nutshell: the more data sources your CDP can gather, the better. If your company only provides a few data points, your unified customer view might not be so complete, resulting in gaps in customer experience and poor conversion and engagement results. 

Want to learn more about CDPs?

As we have seen, Customer Data Platforms are complex, and so is the process of choosing the best one for your company.

If you want to dig deeper into the benefits of CDPs for marketing, we recommend downloading Arena’s “Customer Data Platform 2022” ebook. In this complete ebook, you will find more valuable information about how CDPs work and how they can be incorporated through every step of marketing.

If you want to learn the specifics about Arena’s CDP, feel free to reach out to one of our consultants.

Customer Data Platform: where audience data and sales strategy meet

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Are you having trouble improving conversion rates and connecting customer insights from different touchpoints? A Customer Data Platform helps you understand your audience in a granular way and enables you to craft better campaigns and product offers.

Understanding customers always required brands to look at their audience through different lenses – whether through other marketing channels, relationship platforms, or customer segments. On the verge of Big Data culture, however, just having a fragmented view of your audience is not enough anymore. 

What drives sales is the ability brands have to deliver a cohesive customer experience (CX) across different channels, which is only possible by fully understanding channel correlations and cause and effect connectors along the audience’s touchpoints. 

These days, people interact with brands more often than ever before, and so making sense of different interactions is a lot more complicated than it once was.

Recent research by Ascend2 and Research Partners consulted more than a thousand marketers and found that 43% see data integration across different platforms as one of their main goals. In contrast, 37% wish to enrich data quality and completeness.

No wonder executives are investing more and more in their technology stacks: one-third of industry professionals believe it’s essential to have the right technologies for data collection and analysis, according to a study by Digital Doughnut. Currently, 44% of marketers say they already have data management platforms.

But amongst all data platforms available, the Customer Data Platform is undoubtedly the best you can have if your goal is to understand your audience better and drive more sales. We’ll show you why!

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What is CDP? And how does it work?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software that unifies customer data from different data systems and customer-facing platforms. It combines customer’s demographic data, buying history, social media and content preferences, call centers, and customer navigation data. 

Once implemented, the CDP acts as a 360º data solution: it collects, filters integrates, and analyzes customers’ data in real-time. 

CDPs can ingest structured and unstructured data from Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM), Data Management Platform (DMPs), customer support channels, eCommerce websites and apps, payment systems, social media, etc. They also track behavior across different devices.

By acting as a hub for many data sources, the Customer Data Platform allows marketers to build a holistic view of single customers and their pain points. 

But how exactly do they organize so much data? Well, CDPs rely mostly on first-party data so they can determine the so-called Unified Customer Profiles, which are profiles based on information from real customers and prospects.

That makes the data match consistent across different platforms, and hence the audience insights end up being much more reliable for marketers.

Check out some practical examples of data collected by customer data platforms:

  • Transactional data: order details, customer and product value, renewal dates, abandoned baskets, stage in the conversion funnel
  • Behavioral data from web and mobile: Products and categories browsed, clicks, store visits, interaction data, number of pages visited, etc
  • Profile data: Contact and opt-in data, psychographic data, details about channel and content preferences, lifestyle, etc
  • Brand Relationship Data: Email interactions with customer support, social listening insights, social media comments, etc

The end-to-end role of a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

In today’s competitive landscape, marketing executives are expected to keep track of all customer interactions and connect marketing efforts to other departments, such as sales and customer success, to provide customers with a satisfactory customer experience (CX).

The rush for data management optimization is seen clearly by the CDP industry’s growth in recent years. According to the Customer Data Platform Institute, the number of CDPs available in the market doubled from 2017 to 2018. Now, there are more than 50 CDPs in the industry worldwide.

The truth is that CDP can be an asset for every department within a company, working as an end-to-end solution to enrich customer experience. We’ll soon explore how brands can use CDPs to drive sales, but first, let’s explore CDPs’ overall benefits for companies. 

Breaking Data Silos

CDPs integrate data from multiple departments, which encourages different teams to collaborate and speeds operational routines. With a CDP, marketing, sales, customer experience, and support teams can be on the same page regarding customers’ needs.

Automating marketing workflow

Because they automate a lot of the data integration and analysis, CDPs make the lives of marketing professionals a lot easier, freeing them from repetitive work and allowing them to spend more time in strategic planning. 

Speeding up decision-making

As data processing happens in real-time in the CDP, it also makes it possible for companies to easily spot changes in customer behavior and act upon them while quickly sharing relevant insights with different teams.

The power of CDPs in driving sales

As we pointed out, CDPs are an excellent liaison point for different departments and can be at the heart of customer experience management. But to what extent can CDPs contribute to final sales? 

There are many ways CDPs can directly or indirectly improve conversion rates, drive customer loyalty, and decrease churn and bounce rates. In fact, a report from Forbes Insights highlighted that 44% of organization leaders believe the Customer Data Platform is helping them drive customer loyalty and increase ROI.

We have made a list of 11 ways CDPs can help you drive sales while also better understanding your customer base. 

1) Know your customers across multiple devices or channels

The mandatory philosophy among marketers is that they should reach their customers on the right channel, at the right moment, and with the right messages and products. To do that, they need to let go of assumptions and understand exactly how users interact with them across different channels and devices.

With all such information concentrated in the CDP, marketers can tailor better experiences and advertising segmentation across devices, increasing campaign success chances

2) Accurately track shopping events

A CDP is a great tool for retailers and eCommerce as it tracks customers’ buying behaviors and relevant transactional data in significant volume. CDPs allow them to keep a consistent record of the products customers added to the cart, the duration of checkout and order completion, abandoned carts, and other information that is crucial for online operations.

3) Improve pricing 

Collecting data from many sources – from your eCommerce website, app, or even physical stores – CDPs help you clarify how much customers are spending and how much they are willing to pay for your products according to their stage in the customer journey, search, and navigation patterns. 

CDPs can also be connected to your supply chain systems to help you adjust costs and manage the relationship with suppliers, which are aspects that often impact pricing. With such information updated in real-time, you can be more assertive in your pricing strategy.

4) Offer personalized discounts and product recommendations

Having a holistic customer profile at hand also allows brands to offer clients personalized discounts and product recommendations that ultimately can turn them into loyal customers.

A study by Salesforce shows that 57% of customers are willing to share their data to exchange personalized offers or discounts. In comparison, 52% will share their data in exchange for product recommendations that meet their needs.

While knowing customers in detail, companies’ teams can offer precisely what users need to advance in the sales funnel – whether it is a discount, a free trial, reviews from peers, or a personal approach from the support team.

5) Connect physical and digital shopping experiences

For retailers that also operate offline, a CDP can connect insights from online and offline systems, which is often a challenge for companies looking forward to addressing omnichannel experiences. A survey from the CMO Council found only 7% of respondents said they are always able to deliver real-time, data-driven experiences across physical and digital touchpoints.

With a CDP, brands can offer better customer experience from the website to the physical store – and vice-versa – increasing sales opportunities.

6) Be quick to react to customers interactions

Being quick to answer customer’s signals is also crucial for both customer acquisition and retention strategies. Still, many marketers struggle with the amount of real-time insights they can access and act upon. 

Research published by MediaPost, commissioned by technology consultancy Vanson Bourne, shows that only a minority of marketers feel they can immediately react to online customer interactions. According to the study, only 43% act quickly over customer behavior in the pre-purchase stage, 38% during purchase, and just 35% in the post-purchase phase.

By providing CRM, sales, and marketing teams with a continuous data stream, CDPs can make customer data more actionable. Isn’t that the point of having so much customer data? 

7) Prevent churn and cart abandonment 

Retail managers and online marketers are often investigating why customers abandon carts or churn after a few purchases. A CDP can give you deep insights into what stands in the way between your customers and the checkout.  

It helps you spot gaps throughout the entire customer journey (and not just in specific channels) that might be leading customers to give up purchases. Are there problems with website usability? Is your customer support too slow? 

By figuring out what is wrong, your team can work on fixing these gaps and segmenting churn prevention campaigns to attract customers back. 

8) Optimize Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Conversion Rates

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable. 

With the Customer Data Platform’s assertiveness, companies can better streamline marketing segmentation and customer success efforts, thus optimizing results related to Conversion Rates (CR), Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), and Customer Lifetime Value.

9) Qualify your leads

One of the best aspects of CDP for sales is that it allows you to qualify your leads better and nurture the relationship with customers across their entire lifecycle. Not only it supports marketers in optimizing strategies to attract qualified customers; it also gives you the necessary information to engage with customers who are ready to buy. 

A study by Forbes shows, for instance, that 53% of marketing executives are using CDPs to engage with existing customers’ needs, increasing the likelihood that they will become recurring clients and the chances of upselling them. 

10) Enhance predictive marketing

Predicting customer behavior and preferences are what helps giant retailers like Amazon to drive sales. This marketing technique, which determines the probability of success of different marketing strategies, is essentially fueled by high volumes of customer data, which only a CDP could support. 

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

11) Improve attribution models

With so many touchpoints with the audience, it is often difficult for companies to determine accurate attribution models and discover which channels drive more sales. According to Google, almost 80% of all transaction value involves at least two marketing channel interactions – a number that can be much higher depending on your business’s complexity.

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.

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Why CDPs are more complete than other data management platforms

So you have learned the many benefits that CDPs can bring to the table. Many leaders still ask themselves if they should ditch their existing data management tools for a CDP. What has to be clear for marketers and sales managers is that different data platforms don’t need to exclude each other. 

A Customer Data Platform can potentialize the outcomes of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and Data Management Platforms (DMPs).

In a survey by The Relevancy Group conducted in 2018 with US executive marketers, about 6 in 10 respondents said they were integrating CRM data into their CDP. 

From a digital advertising perspective, CDPs can make the work of Data Management Platforms a lot more precise as well – with at least 29% of marketers feeding CDPs with digital advertising response data.

Although CDPs, DMPs, and CRM systems share some similarities, they all have different purposes within a company, with CDP serving as a primary data hub to make your teams more confident in responding to customers’ needs. 

Want to become an expert in CDP?

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.

If you feel like it is time to learn more about CDPs, we invite you to download our eBook Customer Data Platform: the future of marketing and sales.

The eBook will give you details about CDPs’ features, how they work, and how they can be incorporated into your marketing and sales strategies. We hope you enjoy it!

The secret to real data collection: why is a CDP key to your business

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Using a CDP is extremely important these days, but just as important is the need to understand why you need it. It’s more than collecting real data, it’s about how you chose to use, such as to improve your business.

Knowing who a brand’s audience is the most significant purpose of a company. It’s the only way to recognize the best way to communicate, find your public, offer them your product or service, and so on. Because of that, from the early years of the internet ascension, customer data collection has been discussed.

Many software and platforms were developed to gather data to help companies better target their audience. However, data collection can be a delicate subject regarding privacy matters.

Indeed, a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to give the public more control of what happens to their online data.

While it was extremely common for companies to gather data and sell to third parties, this is now a bit more complicated — especially when it comes to data originated from cookies. Although collecting customer data is still common and required in the market, brands need to be more careful about how they do it and what kind of data they have in their hands.

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A business needs to have accurate data to provide a better customer experience. This means that working with purchased cookies won’t be the perfect solution since they’re mainly anonymous data. For that reason, solutions like the CDP are becoming more notorious. They’re a way to work with real data, hence accurate information, and find the most suitable marketing and sales strategies.

To better understand the search for real data and how a CDP will help achieve that, here, you will learn more about:

  • what happened to cookies
  • what is the importance of CDP
  • why use real-time data collection
  • how does CDP influence a company’s strategies
  • how does this affect relationships between customers and brands

What happened to cookies?

It has recently come to our knowledge that browsers like Firefox and Google are suspending their support to the usage of cookies. These are the text files that store a user’s activity online. They can be used to save some navigation information and make the process easier. For example, automatically filling a website when you’re reaccessing it, or collecting login information for a page.

However, the primary use is to save data about a user’s browsing history, such as pages visited and browsing time. As we all know, having this type of information is essential for excellent performance in digital marketing strategies.

Because of that, browsers used to support cookies and allow companies to access a user’s information for as long as the cookie was saved on the computer. This means that personal and browsing information would be shared with each company’s website for the same amount of time.

When talking about this subject, we can think of both first-party cookies and third-party cookies. First-party is the information that a company gathers directly from the audience, while third-party is data united from various sources. Other companies mostly buy third-party data.

Though when a company purchases data from another one, information is anonymous. You can’t really know who that person is, and data might not be so reliable. Other brands can also end up with the same information you have since the data provider can sell the same data “package” to anyone.

Because of privacy matters and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), cookies’ popularity has been going down. People started using ad blockers so they wouldn’t be bothered with ads after clicking a product.

Even more, when Google decided to suspend third-party data sharing through its browser, the cookies’ future became quite unappealing. Now, brands that want to work with customer data need to find new ways to gather data — and work primarily with first-party data.

Hence, the CDP comes to the rescue. A Customer Data Platform is a software developed for marketing teams to create more useful content and campaigns. 

What is the importance of CDP?

Since it is essentially a marketing tool, the main reason to use a CDP is to know the consumer better. Analyzing and understanding customer data and behavior is crucial to create accurate content. In general, the Customer Data Platform gathers information from a wide variety of sources putting the pieces together to create the ideal consumer profile.

The entire process of data collection and organization is automatized. So the software does all work to give professional marketing information ready to use. However, several teams can have access to this data. All sectors in a company might need some context from the consumers before dealing with their tasks, especially sales and customer support. Still, the products and engineer teams can easily use the CDP information too.

Having data centralized into a single platform is a peculiarity of the CDP. That’s because there were other tools before it that worked with data collection, like the CRM, but none of them were as complete as the CDP.

Further to this, in the era of data-driven marketing, the process of decision making inside a company must be made based on real, accurate information. Since purchased cookies were anonymous, data could be compromised. On the other hand, with a Customer Data Platform, real data is at easy reach.

Accordingly, the service generates better results through the personalization of communication. Businesses that are continually looking for ways to improve ROI can find their needs fulfilled with the CDP. Being a data-driven company and working with real data makes you one step ahead of competitors.

 

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Why use real-time data collection?

It’s not only about data collection, but mostly about real-time data collection. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, working with anything in real-time is an advantage. In this case, it means that the data collection software, such as a CDP solution, will start gathering information from a person’s first visit to your page.

For the company, it is a strategy for improving the promptness of a response and communication system. Therefore, improving every customer-related service in the company. It’s no secret brands use CDP to have better customer relationships, audience engagement, and audience targeting.

Moreover, it is possible to classify visitors into customers and qualified leads as soon as they access your website. Equally, having a database with real-time data makes it easier to take actions that are on the spot, allowing you to see where the current strategy is failing and what needs to be improved.

Overall, working with a CDP makes the company look active and worry about treating customers the way they deserve.

How does CDP data influence a company’s strategies?

Whatever product or service you provide, there’s no doubt you have competition. Because of that, brands need to offer the best solution and customer service at every moment. Nowadays, it’s hard to catch someone’s attention, but extremely easy to lose it.

So, even though a company should work to create a good reputation in the market, no matter what, aiming to be ahead of the competitor is necessary. After all, having a customer turn into a brand advocate is not easy, but highly relevant to a company’s strategy.

Consequently, it’s required to offer the best customer experience out there. For that, you must know who your consumer is, ergo, the use of CDP.

A Customer Data Platform can gather data from multiple sources, from social media and in-apps to sales engagement and product use. This is what makes the software such a unique solution, since the more information you have, the more accurate the ideal customer profile will be. From then, not only marketing strategies will be perfected, but also sales and customer support.

As professional marketing, you know it’s no proper working with guesses in any business. Thus, making decisions founded on real data will lead to several benefits — including the increase in audience engagement.

How does this affect relationships between customers and brands?

When we talk about acquiring a CDP solution, the main reason is to connect with the customer. Thus, it’s logical that it’ll have an impact on the relationship between customer and brand. Since it’s possible to understand and know the consumer thoroughly, it thereby becomes possible to make them more satisfied by providing truly personalized service.

When customers are more satisfied, they are more likely to recommend your mark to other people. With the right after purchase strategy and content, they may even become brand advocates. And why is this so important? For a company, it means a better return on investment and lowers costs with customer acquisition.

After all, it’s less expensive to retain clients than to acquire new ones. That’s why many companies started working with a customer-centric strategy as well. If there are no customers, a business can’t survive in the market. 

Arena is a CDP platform that will revolutionize your company. With our real-time data collection system, all marketing and sales strategies will be refined and boosted.

To better understand how that’ll happen, download our ebook Customer Data Platform 2020: the future of marketing and sales. It has everything you need to know about acquiring and using a CDP to make your brand a reference.

Connecting Marketing Campaigns with Customer Data Platform

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Customer Data Platform has become the game-changer tool to reach business success. Find out how a CDP can integrate your marketing campaigns to increase revenue now!

Throughout the years, marketing and sales can gather large volumes of data from their actions. But the million-dollar question is how to manage that amount of information effectively and coherently apply them, connecting your marketing and sales campaigns.

But since we are experts on this issue, we made this content for walking you through and show how the Customer Data Platform can sew up your strategies to generate more profits, reduce customer acquisition costs, and increase the investment.

Keep up and find out!

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software capable of gathering and organizing customer information from multiple sources. 

It puts together data from social media, CRM, e-mails, purchase records, ads, browsers, devices, and more. It also allows real-time updates, reading customer behavior to provide fresh and relevant material.

This compiled information obtained by CDP allows communication with hyper-segmented audiences. More positive engagement is given since marketing and sales know precisely whom they are supposed to talk to and what they really want.

Customer Data Platform uses every single action taken from the audience and turns it into a data profile. So, even though a first-time visitor didn’t share their e-mail with your website, you can still use browsing behavior, pages, and items checked to build up a remarketing campaign on Google or Facebook Ads.

Build more assertive marketing with CDP

One of the essential aspects of CDP is the possibility of creating integration, not just about data but also about teams. Customer services, marketing, sales, customer experience, and support: from Customer Data Platform on, they will speak the same strategy language.

When there is communication harmony indoors, all pieces combined can show this bigger and coherent picture. As a result:

  • Customer services can give the appropriate approach, knowing exactly who they are talking to and what the audience truly wants. No more wasting time here.
  • Marketing can design unique plans of action, understanding by analyzing customer behavior, the best elements to improve conversion in that segment.
  • Sales can offer precisely what the audience needs to purchase, whether it be a discount, a trial, testimonials, or a personal approach to explaining some details.
  • Customer success can promote simple usability based on the interests listed on CDP, enhancing user experience, and improving the chances of making an upsell.
  • Support can grant a more humanized and empathic service, offering high-quality solutions to increase customer satisfaction, generating good referrals.

Those steps combined to ensure a buyer’s journey without bumps or unfortunate surprises along the way. Hence, the entire process gets smoother, causing the best impressions your brand could ever have.

Improve marketing metrics with Customer Data Platform

Through the Customer Data Platform, you can have a 360-degree view of your audience. Having that density of information turns easier to get tighter metrics, eligible to translate ad campaign performances, and provide relevant insights for the teams.

Data is gold, only when you use the right ones. The lack of planning and proper understanding over it may cause inaccurate results and misperceptions about the strategy. The same rule applies to metrics.

CDP does not over give you information. It hands you organized and coherent material to measure all the steps on the way. Therefore, marketing and sales can count on extra support to plan, execute, and manage their best actions.

Increase success of ad campaigns using real-time data

This is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools currently available in the business. Real-time user data refers to new information from data sources being injected into your Customer Data Platform profiles. 

An applicable example of this feature is when a sales team gets to see an online buyers’ shopping cart to induce a cross-sell. This type of data can also be used to re-target campaigns after the visitor triggers an event.

The ability to walk around the customer to scan them from multiple POVs given by real-time data grants you access to analyze aspects of your strategy. Take a look at some more possibilities you can have with real-time data on CDP:

  • Recognize bottlenecks on your website
  • Improve marketing, and sales campaigns live
  • Create an exclusive and personalized customer experience
  • Offer individualized and relevant post-sale service

All those pieces of interactions –and those many more not mentioned –create a singular environment experience for your brand, leading to customer satisfaction, positive referrals, and more revenue.

Reduce customer acquisition costs and upgrade ROI

To talk about the return over the investment (ROI) made with the Customer Data Platform. First, it is fundamental to understand where CDP is going to fit in your strategy. To get that, there are some key questions that you can answer: 

  1. Does your company work with multiple communication channels? 
  2. Do your teams need to improve their strategies to be more assertive? 
  3. Does having updated data about your customer continuously bring you more insights?
  4. Would it help have more in-depth information about your audience to increase sales?

If you got at least three definite answers, you definitely should consider talking to a consultant to see in a more practical way how CDP can benefit your company.

With doing that, there are some aspects to measure how CDP will optimize ROI. Time, risk, and cost are the trio to show you how efficient marketing, sales, support, UX, and other teams can get with the Customer Data Platform. 

To each department, you should know how much more you can get using the same budget as before. Also, it is important to list some possible cost savings due to group efficiency.

What is the value-added to the process that will lead to risk reduction? You should be aware of the strategy value as well, understanding how much cleaner the entry points will get. 

Last but not least, knowing the total cost of the CDP initiative. Analyzing your new numbers, you may see the bigger picture with all stages connected and the newfound paths it leads to.

Once your teams have this level of customer knowledge, they can aim the efforts directly into actions more likely of conversions. Personalization and localization are two key features to leverage niche data and provide exclusive and relevant customer experience through CDP.

That behavior can lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), improve productivity, increase profits, and customer retention. Analyzing smart data through CDP facilitates a plan of action based on individual customer preferences instead of a massive standardized campaign.

Ease decision-making

Companies need to learn how to make profitable operational decisions fast. It is going to be an ever-increasing data-driven scenario, and we already know that more data is only relevant when it is useful data.

The only way to capitalize on significant amounts of information is by organizing them into relevant segments. By that, your team will be able to tailored offers and strategies to fill their real needs.

Enhance CRM with Customer Data Platform

Every business currently in the game is using customer relationship management (CRM) –– or, at least, they should be. CRM is a software to store customer data and help marketers and sales to develop better practices.

Their functions might sound similar, but they are not. The digital buying journey demands uniqueness to succeed. To understand what customers are doing is not enough anymore. Seeing beyond time and space to predict what customers may do is now crucial.

Also, the need is not only about capturing new customers but also keeping old ones satisfied, making more purchases, and putting great referrals out there. Each customer is now a cycle, not a straight line with a beginning and an ending point.

So, CDP has the power to add unique features to CRM information. It gives you access to a more robust and enriched database made by an organized combination of other data sources. Thus, the customer journey and experiences will become more polished and exclusive.

Customer Data Platform: the future of marketing and sales

We want to take you further and show you: 

  • How to enhance a CDP with first-party data
  • What it does to CRM data –– and other data sources 
  • A panorama about the quality of the information generated 
  • What are the other benefits it can add to your strategies 
  • Why getting a CDP solution can make you stand out amongst competitors

Check out Arena Personas, a great way to boost your CDP with first-party data generated by your own brand.