Tag Archives: customer journey

Customer Engagement Strategy Using Live Chat

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Today customer’s expectations from a brand have risen from mere marketing of freebies and discounts to a brand’s ability to relate with the “human element”. To earn loyalty, customers want the brands to interact with them and prove their worth in this cutting-edge consumer market.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement in simple words is the relationship between a customer and a business. To ensure customer engagement, companies work towards creating a relationship with their customers to improve brand awareness and brand loyalty.

Customer engagement is crucial to a brand’s interaction with its customers. A highly engaged customer will be more aware of the brand’s vision and mission, and will likely become part of the loyal customer base.

What is a Customer Engagement Strategy?

Customer engagement strategy is defined as the tools businesses use to build strong and engaging relationships with customers. It also involves anticipating customer’s needs, solving their problems and helping them achieve their goals.

An effective customer engagement strategy builds long lasting impressions in the minds of consumers. It also increases awareness of the brand and improves customer engagement. 

The key to a strong customer engagement strategy is to introduce technologies that favor user interaction, user retention on the page, sales, and user participation with the content.

Some of the famous brands like Coca Cola, Starbucks, Rogers Media, Super Bowl, and Apple are renowned around the world for their inspiring and effective customer engagement strategies. Let us take a look at a few of them.

1. Coca Cola

When it comes to marketing, Coca Cola is usually ahead of the game. In 2012, Coca Cola launched a marketing campaign called “ShareACoke” where the company’s logo was replaced by some of the most common names of people in the US. Adding a name to the bottle spoke to the consumers on a personal level and thus became a powerful marketing strategy. 

Within the first year, people shared more than 500,000 photos via the #ShareaCoke hashtag. The campaign became consumer driven where highly active users on social media channels began sharing their pictures with friends and family. 

Thus consumers were acting as creative directors for the brand itself which led to a high engagement on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

2. Starbucks

Starbucks sets a great example of establishing strong customer engagement strategies every year. “My Starbucks Rewards” program was launched in 2009 which allowed Mobile Order & Pay feature where customers would order ahead of time and pick up their orders in the store. This allowed them to cut lines and order through convenience of their phone.

In addition, the rewards program also allowed consumers to check their balance, make use of their star points and earn free coffee refills or food items.

Starbucks doesn’t just limit its marketing projects to social media but also to a wider digital audience. In one of the campaigns called Starbucks’ Love Project, the company collaborated with several artists such as Dave Matthews, John Legend and U2 to create “All You Need Is Love CD.” 

In participating Starbucks locations, customers would get a free CD with a purchase of $15 or more. They were then invited to upload their video to become part of a massive sing-along. Thousands came on board!

3. Superbowl

We are all familiar with Superbowl — the iconic game that generates one of the biggest days for advertising in the US! Companies can learn amazing lessons from the way Superbowl advertisers harness the power of customer engagement in their campaigns. Many organizations even utilize the pre-gaming screen time to start advertising their products and services ahead of the game. 

For example Uber’s pre-gaming marketing featured #UberPuppyBowl; hashtag and promoted the chance for select Uber offices to enjoy a 15 minute cuddle huddle with puppies in select Uber’s offices.

Today with the rise of social media, organizations are leveraging the power of both the mainstream as well as social media platforms to advertise their products. During last year’s Superbowl, Avocados From Mexico’s advertisement featuring Molly Ringwald didn’t receive as much traction as they were expecting.

However, the brand took to Twitter’s live-tweeting responses for the rest of their ads and the halftime show, garnering more attention than their original ad!

Creating a Compelling Customer Engagement Strategy Using Live Chat

User interaction, retention and participation are key elements in creating a compelling customer engagement strategy. This helps improve sales and builds long lasting impressions. 

One of the tools that can help you create a compelling engagement strategy is the live chat feature. Companies are now utilizing live chats during webinars, online conferences, live events and for free ecommerces. 

A live chat feature improves customer experience, builds stronger branding, and helps you gain a competitive edge over your competition. 

Whether you work with small or large businesses, in 2021, you absolutely need a Live Chat tool as part of your marketing strategy. Although live chat feature has been around for a while, companies are now proactively using it on their websites and social media platforms.

Here are some of the strategies you can use to improve your customer engagement through live chat features.

Create Positive Brand Perception

Brands all around the world strive to create a positive perception for their products and services. Live chat can be a useful tool to help you achieve that perception through real-time user engagement. During your brand’s live event broadcasts such as webinars, fashion shows, conferences, concerts, or stand up comedies, you can use the live chat feature for your viewers to engage not just with the content but also with one another in real-time.

Live chat provides you more opportunities to make meaningful connections, which will further promote your brand perception and awareness. There is a power in the ripple effect that a good word of mouth can cause!

Improve KPIs

When working with live chat tools, companies need to understand how to improve their KPIs to ensure positive results. Technologies such as live chat tools can be forefront in creating real-time engagement for your brand. 

When customers interact with an event on your website, they might pose questions about a product launch or may generally be interested in knowing more about your brand. Ensuring the interaction doesn’t stay one-sided, you can take that time to answer the questions for the viewers.  

In addition, you can improve your KPIs in other productive ways too. For example if many customers are asking the same questions over and over again, it is a better idea to include an FAQ page on your website.  

Create an Online Community

Live Chat feature is not only about consumer and business interaction, it is also about consumer to consumer interaction. During live webinars and online events, you can set up a live chat where the viewers can interact with each other. A great example of live chat interaction can be seen on YouTube live videos where viewers communicate with one another by every second.

Other companies like Daily Telegraph, City Gates, CA, Bridgend College, Fox Sports have been using the live chat feature creatively on their social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Provide a Personalized User Experience

When interacting with a brand, customers look for a personalized experience that can address their demands. A personalized real-time experience increases customer satisfaction and improves the perceived value of your brand.

Rather than treating your customer as a transaction or another name on your email list, approach them as human beings who have goals, interests, and preferences. Through a carefully tailored experience, you can help them achieve those goals.

Increase Your Revenue

According to an eMarketer survey on the attitude towards US online buyers who used live chat showed that 63% users were more likely to visit a site again. And 62% of the respondents who engaged through a live chat feature said that they were more likely to purchase from the site again.

Having a live chat feature on your website can have a significant impact on your sales. Using a chat tool during a purchase can influence your customer’s decision to continue with the purchase.

Conclusion

Companies all around the world use multiple tools to improve their online visibility, user experience and sales. Many argue that a positive customer experience is pivotal to success of a business and we couldn’t agree more.

According to a study by AMA Access on how B2B marketers are leveraging live chat to increase their sales, the research found that throughout the customer journey, companies can use live chat to improve: 

  • Marketing awareness by 29%
  • Conversion to create sales suspects by 39%
  • Post-sales customer support and engagement by 39%

Try our freemium Live Chat tool Arena to stay on the top of your marketing game, implement effective customer engagement strategies and produce happy customers!

How Can Live Chat improve the User Experience?

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Do you need to boost the user experience on your website? Live Chat might be the solution you’ve been looking for.

Make your customer service more personal and become a reference in your field. Read on to find out unique ways Live Chat can increase your website’s experience.

What is Live Chat?

For its power of handling the immediacy of customer services and fulfilling quality buying opportunities, Live Chat became one of the best –– and most wanted –– tools for marketing and sales.

Live Chat is an opportunity generator. The chance of building real connections with the customers can transform a cold purchase moment into a memorable experience. As we know, customer service can be a tremendous competitive advantage for your business.

But to reach an exceptional level, you must know what your audience wants, why they want it, and how they want to get it. Having a Live Chat will help you tailor the most effective approaches and deliver them at the right time.

Added by pasting a simple line code on your website, the Arena Live Chat allows two types of communications:

  1. Passive, when the customer reaches out to the company;
  2. and Active, when the company itself strategically steps in to increase the value of a visited page, of a product, a decisive moment, or even during the purchase.

But Live Chat is not only about interventions or communications. It can also be used to collect important data about the customer’s preferences and behaviors.

As simple as it might look, having proper knowledge on how to correctly use Live Chat can give you guidance –– or even maybe precise answers –– to your audience’s needs before they even realize them.

Thus, your marketing and sales teams can provide a one of a kind service. As a result, you’ll make bigger and better sales. Let’s dive into some of the possibilities to increase user experience on your website through Live Chat.

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The real magnitude of Live Chat

Before we start listing how you can increase user experience on your website using Live Chat, you must understand its real potential for the success of your company. One of the top benefits of Live Chat is its versatility.

This tool has a whole spectrum of possibilities, fitting different needs, segments, platforms, events, and more. All you should keep in mind is how can you better use this new, simple, and clear path of communication with your visitor.

Shape everything you’re about to read to the reality of your own business!

Everything customers need in a single place

Customer service always had a crucial role in all kinds of buying processes, whether in a physical or digital store. To provide great service you must understand what your audience truly wants!

Most websites are overstuffed with things irrelevant to users’ experience, forcing them to leave and search for what they need in the competition without looking back.

No need to shuffle between the website and social media

A simple, yet very frequent, example is when a visitor needs more information about something on your website, doesn’t find any, and goes to social media to look for it.

Regardless of whether this visitor is browsing on your company’s social media page, they are already out of your website. One simple pop up notification and you’re forgotten!

Having Live Chat on your website cuts off visitor’s urge to shift pages searching for further details about something or engagement they need.

Also because your prospect may find not only the answer they need, but other stores, pages, and services as well. Do you realize how damaging this is for your business?

Providing better offers

Customers hate being treated as just another person in line. They’d rather close your tab and look for someone else. Through Live Chat, every touchpoint of your company has the possibility to establish personal conversations on a level that customers realize they are a priority for your brand.

There are countless missed opportunities on automatic responses, lack of personalization, or standardized approaches. But when it comes to Live Chat, the customer service team knows precisely who they are talking to and how to better serve that person.

Designing infallible strategy plans

Now your customers don’t need to leave your website to solve their doubts, you can understand the new length and stages of their individual buyer’s journey. Those two types of approaches mentioned earlier, passive and active, create one of a kind opportunities to aim precisely at your customer’s pain point.

During a Live Chat talk, your teams can gather rich information about the audience to produce meaningful and stronger interactions during their browsing time. Besides creating a much more relevant experience on your website, you also increase the chances of conversion.

Adding more value to live events

Digital events have never been as on popular as today. The importance of creating engagement spaces for the audience through live events promotes not only a moment about generating relevant connections, but also opportunities to increase the value of your website, brand your company as an authority, and close more deals.

All you need to do is set the goals to reach what you want.

Boosting interactions

Regardless of your business segment, using Live Chat on a well-planned event can stimulate the audience to spend more time browsing through the pages of your website.

To create a sort of customer journey, think about the best ways to trigger your visitor to follow your trail of contents, allow them to fortify their perception about you and your product or service.

Whether in a single user room or a Live Group Chat, your strategy team can build up the ideal experience.

Opening group discussion rooms

Speaking of Live Group Chat, the event hosted by you can put together multiple visitors in a single room to discuss, share experiences and opinions about the main subject. Creating a sense of community on your website establishes your place as a point of reference for the audience.

Setting users’ experience this high may permanently increase traffic, bringing more visibility to your brand, as well as producing great referrals out there.

The power of always being available

Business hours are something really incoherent to the digital market. When a customer wants to make a purchase, there is no such thing as a 9-5 period. Services must not be a one size fits all. You have to build your own way to be there for your client whenever they want you.

So, to generate a continuous service through day and night, you can create schedules on-demand or sales calls.

For example, during business hours when the website traffic might be more intense, you can have 4 to 5 attendants. Each one of these customer service agents can engage around 6 or 7 simultaneous chat rooms. At night shift, when traffic might not be high, you can work with 2 attendants.

Knocking down buying objections

It is very common during decision making to pop up a situation that interferes in the buying process. A doubt, a request, a need, or even something more simple: if there is no one to assist or help, do you really think the visitor will stay until they fix the problem by themselves?

Making yourself present while the audience browses through your website reduces the chances of missing opportunities, whether because the visitor needed you or because you spotted a possibility of approaching.

Help the audience get everything they need from your page. Keep in mind that if the answer is not on you, then they will look up somewhere else. And using Live Chat, you have the chance not only to solve situations, but to tailor the response to that specific visitor.

For example, having a Frequent Questions section is great. But does that information really touch the point to make your maybe-customer give you their money? Probably not. But in a Live Chat room, you can literally embrace the opportunity to create the perfect momentum.

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Forms are dying and Live Chat is taking over

If you can give full personalization, why would you step back and deliver only half of it? That’s the feeling about using forms these days. Is it inefficient? No. But it’s not enough anymore. The worst part is that forms are always the same everywhere. Same fields, same information, same shape, same everything.

Collecting data through Live Chat gives you endless opportunities to pick up details like pieces of a puzzle. You build a bigger picture of the person you are talking to. What product or service are they interested in, what are their preferences, what problem are they trying to solve, what are their expectations…

Those are just a few examples of the level of information you can get using Live Chat. There is no way you reach that by only asking for the name, email, and phone number in a form box.

The mighty power of real-time data analysis

What if you could read your client’s minds? Predict their moves and understand what they want before they realize it for themselves. What kind of experience would you deliver?

Reading such things might sound bananas, but it is not! Having real-time data analysis takes you to a level of assertiveness that only big players in the business have.

The visitor’s browsing time can be monitored step by step. What pages are they navigating? What items are they most interested in? Are they recurrent visitors to that same spot? How much time are they spending on you? At what buying stage are they bouncing off?

Answers like those can give insight to marketing and sales teams precisely, like a script. When you track those kinds of moves, you can clearly understand what is really going on in that sale opportunity.  

Combining that with Live Chat, you’ll have the power to take your visitor’s hand and lead them through your funnel all the way to the end. That walk will be constructed according to all data you already have, making it possible to shorten the process to a faster and better sell.

Customer Data Platform and Live Chat

There is no way to mention real-time data analysis without talking about the Customer Data Platform (CDP): a single place to gather information from multiple sources and touchpoints, organizes them into similar matches and creates clusters of customers as precise as a photograph.

The only way to truly know your audience is through data. Everything else is just speculation. Customer Data Platform helps you with the right segmentation, personalizing communication, humanizing your brand’s services and, as a result, increasing revenue. This is the right way to serve the best user experience on your website!

You can use the information provided by CDP to guide the conversation on Live Chat, define the best approach and strategy to use, or you can integrate your CDP to automatically collect data from the Live Chat.

Through both ways, you elevate the chances of conversion by getting to know your audience like no one else in the market has done so far.

Live Chat and Chatbot are not the same thing

If at any point of this reading the idea that Live Chat is the same thing as those automatic stiffed messages you get on most of the websites around, you’re wrong!

Those are called chatbots: responses previously set to “help” customers in need. There is a long list of reasons why we could say Live Chat is a million times better than bots, but we’ll give you just one: chatbot doesn’t have a real person behind the service. Live Chat does!

Nothing can replace the greatness of human interaction. No customer service can reach a level of perfection using the same shape formulas for everybody.

The type of communication your brand must aim for should be based on emotions, empathy, respect, and affection. It is not only about sharing cold dry information, but about understanding what’s between the lines.

Get Arena Live Chat for free

Now you have some of the answers you’ve been looking for to increase your website’s user experience. It is time to take action! We want to see you thriving, making better impressions, expanding the possibilities, and, of course, making more money.

That’s why we are giving you free access to our Live Chat service. You can have as many Live Chat rooms as you want on your website in a matter of seconds.

All you have to do is signing up, embedding a single line of code on the page you want, and start chatting!

Don’t waste more time! Click here and get the Arena Live Chat for free.

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!

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!

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.

30 reasons to use Customer Data Platform for eCommerce

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Information is king, and businesses are constantly on the lookout for tools that can provide a richer understanding of their customers and the journey they embark upon. Customer Data Platforms (CDP) have emerged as crucial tools, particularly for the burgeoning realm of eCommerce.

30 Reasons To Use A CDP

Here’s a deep dive into why CDPs should be at the heart of your digital strategy:

1. Seamless Automation

Trust in a CDP to transform complex data streams into easily digestible and actionable insights, automating processes that would otherwise drain resources.

2. Eliminating Operational Silos

Facilitate efficient information-sharing across departments with a CDP, creating a unified vision for your business.

3. Enriching the Customer Journey

Harness CDPs to unlock a comprehensive understanding of your customer’s interactions, ensuring you’re always delivering value.

4. Intelligent Marketing Segmentation

Harness the power of AI to sift through varied data, empowering you to create precisely targeted marketing campaigns.

5. Tailored Communication

Today’s consumer demands personalization. With a CDP, ensure every touchpoint resonates and builds loyalty.

6. Crafting Memorable Experiences

Use data-driven insights to craft seamless experiences, both online and offline, enhancing customer satisfaction.

7. Metrics that Matter

Deploy CDPs to get an eagle’s eye view on the efficacy of your eCommerce strategies, refining them as you grow.

8. Real-time Relevance

In an ever-changing market landscape, CDPs ensure you’re always a step ahead, thanks to real-time data updates.

9. 360-Degree Customer View

Break down the barriers between online and offline data to truly understand your customer’s journey.

10. Unified Customer Profiles

Leverage a CDP to get an in-depth understanding of your audience personas, refining your marketing strategies.

11. Stand Out from the Crowd

Responsive data-driven strategies ensure you’re always ahead of the curve, a must in today’s competitive marketplace.

12. Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value

Invest in understanding your current customers’ needs and behaviors, ensuring they remain loyal advocates.

13. Merging Digital and Physical

Achieve true omnichannel success by merging online and offline data streams.

14. Refining Offerings

Listen to your customers. Let their feedback guide improvements in your products and services.

15. Attracting Ready Buyers

Precision-target your messaging to capture those on the cusp of purchase.

16. Deep Customer Engagement

Leverage CDP insights to truly engage customers across every touchpoint, building loyalty and trust.

17. Enhancing Marketing Tools

Amplify the efficiency of your current marketing tools by integrating them with a powerful CDP.

18. Spotting and Addressing Anomalies

Ensure your strategy is always on track by identifying and rectifying any anomalies.

19. Anticipating Customer Behavior

Predict future customer actions and behaviors, refining your strategies for maximum impact.

20. Optimized Operational Efficiency

Drive efficiency by streamlining data processes, freeing up resources for strategic action.

21. Strategic Pricing

Ensure your pricing remains competitive and appealing by gauging customer sentiment and market trends.

22. Effective Supplier Negotiations

Utilize historical data to drive better deals and collaborations with suppliers.

23. Never Miss Feedback

Continuous monitoring ensures you’re always in the loop, adjusting strategies based on real-time feedback.

24. Minimize Cart Abandonment

Dive deep into the reasons behind cart abandonment, ensuring your checkout process is as smooth as possible.

25. Addressing Checkout Drop-offs

Investigate and rectify factors causing customers to abandon checkouts, maximizing conversions.

26. Tackling Churn Rates

Unearth the reasons behind dwindling customer loyalty and rectify them, building a lasting relationship.

27. Boosting Conversion Rates

Harness data insights to optimize your site’s usability and messaging, driving higher conversions.

28. Driving Organic Traffic

Strategically leverage live content and social media to naturally increase site visitors.

29. Elevating Social Media Engagement

Deepen customer relationships by engaging them on social platforms, turning followers into loyal customers.

30. Embrace the Future

Data is the future of marketing and sales. Integrate a CDP into your strategy and ensure your brand remains at the forefront.

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For a comprehensive understanding of the transformative power of CDPs, delve into Arena’s ebook Diving Into The Customer Journey In Live Ecommerce. The insights within can be the key to unlocking the full potential of your eCommerce strategy.

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What is and how to do Customer Data Management CDM

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This guide will teach you how to use data frameworks to offer differentiated customer experiences and optimize marketing ROI.

It has been a few years since the buzz around “Big Data” started. Working with marketing in the media space, you probably hear your peers bragging about their data-driven strategies a lot. Do you consider yourself a data-driven marketer too?

Beyond marketing, modern CMOs have had to assimilate abilities in information technology and customer data management.  In 2020, you should expect most marketing teams to effectively use customer data to drive growth and customer satisfaction.

Getting there can be quite a journey, though. Research from the Dentsu Aegis Network from 2018, made with 1,000 CMOs, shows that to two-thirds agree that while there is increasingly more consumer data available, it’s harder to extract insight from it. 

Another report from Harvard Business Review shows that less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions, while less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. 

Historically, companies have relied on excel sheets and on manually storing and analyzing customer data through different software, with little to no integration. No offense to excel and isolated systems, but things have changed.

The amount of customer data flowing to companies’ databases continues to rise through new channels and platforms, and that’s where customer data management comes to play. More than ever, organizations need a complete set of practices and automation tools to help them manage customer information.

In this article, we will talk about the importance of having customer data management on top of the marketing agenda. We’ll also explore the types of data, best practices for data management, and the role of different data software in data management.

What is customer data management?

Customer Data Management, shortly known as CDM, is the framework in which companies collect, track, organize, analyze and share customer data throughout the organization. 

The term “Customer Data Management” was coined in the 1990s, initially as a way to describe software that replaced disc-based or paper-based data storage. Such software was often used independently by departments within companies.

The concept of CDM evolved along with the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry and nowadays embraces a wide array of cloud computing applications that centralize access to customer data. It also embraces a set of methodologies that help marketers to locate, cross-analyze, and act on customer data.

Why marketers should invest in customer data management?

In a scenario where customers interact with brands through dozens of channels, there is almost no room for guessing and gut-feeling in marketing. Having a good hunch about what will engage audiences is not enough, and so the role of customer data management is to provide companies with accurate and actionable insights.

It reduces your chances of making mistakes, since mismanaging your customer data can lead to actions that will ultimately reduce engagement and profitability. Additionally, using customers’ data in a biased, inaccurate way can lead to poor customer experience (CX) and harm your brand. 

Good customer data management is key to building a data-driven culture and bolstering customer-centricity in marketing. Isn’t it everything you wish for? 

Data Management strategies can bring marketers a holistic view of customers’ journeys, connecting the dots between different channels, and offering cues to enhance their experience.

Customer Data Management is important for: 

  • Customer acquisition
  • Increasing retention and engagement rates
  • Knowing customers in detail and in real-time, from individuals to clusters
  • Increasing data quality by breaking data silos
  • Simplifying customer relationship management (CRM) 
  • Drive higher revenue

How customer data management is connected to customer lifetime value (CLV)

Having well-structured customer data management practices is what allows marketing teams to follow up on important indicators, like the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Amidst a seemingly chaotic user journey – with different channels, devices, and purposes – customer data management can help marketers understand customers and guide them through the conversion funnel. 

Collecting and organizing relevant customer data will allow you to better segment your audience, find out behavior and buying trends, and drive personalized campaigns. As a result, marketers can ultimately attract more qualified leads and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) – improving overall marketing ROI.

But customer data management is useful only for marketing. It can help sales, IT, and customer success manages customer touchpoints. The great news is that every department can have access to the same data and deliver a consistent, unfragmented user experience.

Four Types of Data to pay attention to

Before trying to set up a data management framework, your team should have a roadmap of data types and specific information that can enrich your strategy, according to your business goals. 

We will now explore four data types and a few examples for each.

1) Identity Data

Identity data is collected through micro-transactions and interactions in the company’s channels – when a customer signs up for a newsletter or enters their payment information on the checkout page.

By collecting customers’ identity data, marketers have the minimum amount of information to start a conversation (and hopefully a long relationship) with the customer. Such information is also helpful to help companies build brand personas. 

Examples of identity data: Name; Personal data (date of birth, region, gender, etc); Address; Contacts; Social media profiles; Account data.

2) Quantitative Data

Quantitative data is mostly related to the customer’s decision making process as they interact with your brand. Such data covers different channels throughout the customer lifecycle, from emails and customer support channels to purchase transactions and social media. 

The idea is to understand the specifics of how customers are interacting with your brand through important operational data. You could use quantitative data to find out details about channel interactions and steps that led customers to convert.

Examples of quantitative data: Transactional data, such as the number of purchases, time of purchase and subscription value; Order dates; Cart abandonment and Bounce info; Click-through-Rates; Website visits; Product views; Number of Interactions.

3) Descriptive Data 

Descriptive data comprehend additional lifestyle information that complements customer personas. Collecting this type of data typically requires doing deeper research and interviews with customers in order to dive into individual buying behavior. Such data is pretty helpful if you want to use predictive analytics in your marketing strategy.

Examples of descriptive data: Family Data such as marital status and number of children; Lifestyle data, like hobbies and interests; Education and career data.

4) Qualitative Data 

Qualitative data should describe the motivations behind the customer’s actions. Gathering such insights might be more time-consuming and expensive than simply collecting quantitative data, but it is worth it. After all, tackling into customers’ deepest motivations is how you’ll captivate them.

This type of data is better collected on a one-to-one basis, mainly through the marketing teams’ interpretations of customers’ opinions throughout their journey – through analyzing CRM notes or reviews in websites, social listening tools, feedback questions, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) systems. 

Best practices in customer data management

An effective customer data management framework requires marketers to make human and tech investments, have well-defined processes and priorities. We have picked a few key practices involved CDM:

Data collection 

A lot of the data within enterprises go unused, and so data collection is the first step in building an integrated customer data management strategy. There are millions of data streams coming into companies’ systems from many touchpoints, and so marketers need to make sure relevant data doesn’t go to waste. 

It’s important to understand what data needs to be ingested. Ask yourself: What goals do I want to achieve with my marketing strategy? Which data points are directly or indirectly related to my Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? From there, you can start filtering your sources of data and the indicators you will track.

Data Integration

Centralizing all company’s data into a central system is also vital for customer data management. That enables the “ETL Process”, which stands for “Extracting, Transforming and Loading” data. This stage is where you will check your data integrity, filter it, and validate it. 

A good data system will ingest relevant data, convert it in necessary formats and load it into different tools such as a data warehouse, a customer data platform (CDP), a data management platform (DMP), a customer relationship management (CRM) or any other system. The result? You will have a single hub for all the data you need.

Data management

This is where you connect the dots between data points to build robust, unified profiles of individual customers or segments. This could mean using statistic models to create identity graphs, applying data governance to make sure you integrate consent to customer data, or anonymizing data to be used through a data management platform (DMP).

Data analysis and activation

Data management tools: the difference between CRM, DMP, and CDP

Although customer Data Management can be described as a framework, it requires companies to have the right technologies. 

Your data software stack could be more or less complex depending on the size of your business and the number of touchpoints with the customer, but, essentially, your CDM strategy will require a combination these platforms: a Customer Relationship Platform (CRM), Data management Platform (DMP) and Customer Data Platform (CDP). 

Each one of them plays a role in your strategy. But what is the difference between them? 

The basis of data management starts with customer relationship management systems (CRM), which are built to engage with customers by tracking their relationship with your company. They only store data if the customer has interacted with the brand in some way, and they are based on historical and general information such as contact, demographics, and notes made by CRM teams.

Data management platforms (DMPs), on the other hand, have been widely used by marketers to serve ads and lead digital campaigns. These platforms focus on third-party anonymized data collected through cookies (that typically expire after 90 days), device IDs, and IP addresses.

In a different model, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software capable of unifying customer data from various sources, internal or external, gathering quantitative and qualitative information from multiple touchpoints between a company and its customer base. It allows you to build a holistic view of customers and their pain points in a granular way. 

Why CDPs are the ultimate trend in customer data management

Although CRM systems, DMPs and CDPs share similarities, they are different when it comes to managing data. Customer data platforms, specifically, have increasingly been used as an integration hub for data systems because they are built to ingest large volumes of data from multiple sources – unlike CRM systems and DMPs.

There were days when marketing segmentation based on DMP persona segments and CRM was enough, but today, brands are expected to personalize every step in the customer journey – which is only possible through CDPs.

A study by Forbes shows that 53% of marketing executives are using CDPs to engage with existing customer’s needs, increasing the likelihood that they will become recurring clients.

The focus of CMOs is also shifting from third-party data and anonymous data to first-party, single customer data, which also underlines CDPs’ importance. As data privacy and compliance regulations arise, organizations also seek to work with their own, integrated data.

CDPs are capable of providing marketers with a historical record of identified customers that can be used not only for advertising but for other purposes as well.  By centralizing information in a single platform, companies can optimize resources and avoid having to rework their data over and over through different systems. 

Bonus tips for successful data management

Make data widely available to different teams: The Harvard Business Review study we mentioned before reveals that 80% of a data analyst’s time is spent on just discovering and preparing data. Customer data can be an important asset across departments, so it’s important to centralize access to it instead of storing it in separate departments and warehouses. Let the data flow!

Always keep data governance in mind: Understand the privacy policies of your data tools and ensure consent is integrated into all of your data collection, while also respected in marketing campaigns. 

Don’t over-collect data: Understand exactly why you’re collecting the data your collecting, and which questions your company is trying to answer with them. Resist the impulse to gather too much data “just in case” you need it, without a proper purpose.

Create rules for data categorization: Set up file formats you’ll be using, standards for tags, file-naming, and timestamps. Such standards will make it easier for your team to navigate through the data.

Beware of new data sources: Pay attention to emerging data types, such as those from voice activation devices, geo-localization in smart devices, Internet of Things, Augmented and virtual reality platforms, etc. New data points will eventually require new processing and marketing frameworks.

Still want help defining your customer data management strategy?

Now that you have learned a bit more about customer data management, maybe your next step will be to study data management solutions.

If that is the case, we recommend you check out Arena’s customer data platform blog section to dive deeper into the subject. You can also get in touch with one of Arena’s consultants and learn the specifics about our CDP.

Customer Data Platforms vs. Data Management Platforms: Definitive Guide

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Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Data Management Platforms (DMPs) might look similar, but each plays a different role in marketing. In this post, you will learn their main differences and applications. 

Connecting the dots between your customers and the dozens of touchpoints with your brand is not an easy assignment. There are multiple roads that lead customers to your channels, and, in the best scenario, to buying your products.

If you were to map the physical and digital interactions that guide your customer through the conversion funnel, you would probably find ad pieces, search queries, social media and proprietary content channels, interactions with customer support, and so on.

With so many channels in mind, your team has to make sure your brand’s message is unified across all of them.  You want the path to your content and your products to be as seamless as it can be, right? In order to do that, you need good tools for customer data management.

A report from research company Forrester found that data-driven businesses grow on average 30% more yearly than those ones that don’t systematically harness data within the organization. Data-driven companies are also expected to drive $1.8 trillion by 2021.

Historically, companies have relied on Data Management Platforms (DMPs) and Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) to gather insights, and shape marketing campaigns, and content strategies.

But what if you could complement these tools and engage your customers with even more compelling and personalized messages? That is possible with the emergence of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), a prominent type of data management system.

In this guide, we will explain exactly how Data Management Platforms and Customer Data Platforms work, their differences, and similarities, and how you can use each of them to leverage data-driven marketing in your organization.

Integrating Customer Data Platforms and Data Management Platforms is crucial for your marketing strategy

Customer Data Platforms (CDP): Definition and Examples

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software capable of unifying customer data from different data systems and customer-facing platforms. It gathers quantitative and qualitative information from several touchpoints with customers, regardless of whether they are recurring customers, new customers, or prospects.

Customer Data Platforms collect all sorts of data in a granular way, combining customer’s demographic data, buying history, social media preferences, call centers, and navigation data.

Basically, CDPs cross data from CRM systems, DMPs, customer support channels, payment methods, social media interactions, and different devices, allowing marketers to build a holistic view of customers and their pain points.

They also gather behavioral information, such as customer’s lifestyles and hobbies, transactional data from the company’s web site, mobile apps, advertising channels, social listening, and email marketing tools.

Here are specific examples of data collected by customer data platforms:

  • Transactional and order data: Exact purchases, renewal dates, customer and product value, abandoned baskets, and stage in the conversion funnel.
  • Behavioral data from web and mobile: Products and categories browsed, clicks, store visits, interaction data, and number of pages visited.
  • Profile data: Contacts and opt-in data and psychographic data points, like details about lifestyle, context, content, and channel preferences.

As marketing executives are expected to keep track of all customer interactions, another great news is those customer data platforms makes its unified customer database accessible to other systems – and even other departments. Wouldn’t it be great to connect marketing, sales, and customer success data, for example?

Unified customer profiles

You might still be wondering how exactly CDPs can capture so much data. That happens because the software facilitates customer data integration, filtering the data through algorithms to determine unified customer profiles.

These profiles are based on navigation patterns from your real customers and prospects, because they are mostly based on first-party data – Personal Identified Information (PII) that comes from customers navigating your own channels.

Such accurate profiles make it a lot easier for marketers to build personas and segment campaigns. Since the data match is consistent across different platforms, CDP is known for offering deterministic matching.

As the processing of data happens in real-time, CDPs also make it possible for you to quickly spot changes in customer behavior.

Data Management Platforms (DMP): Definitions and Use Cases

While leading marketing at a large organization, the least you should have is a data management platform to orchestrate your digital marketing efforts. The Data Management Platform (DMP) market size is expected to drive $3 billion a year by 2023, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15% between 2017 and 2023.

If you are still not familiar with Data Management Platforms, it’s time to get acquainted with them. DMPs are intelligent data warehouses that are majorly used to drive customer segmentation and retargeting campaigns. 

Their main objective is to increase audience engagement and make your ad targeting more effective. A DMP will monitor campaign strategies, identify conversion points and personalize campaigns according to them.

Segmentation on the Data Management Platform (DMP) can be done according to different data types, sources, end-users, and geolocalization.

These platforms focus on third-party, anonymized data collected through navigation cookies; device IDs, and IP addresses. Since the information captured is anonymous, DMPs automatically select data for marketing campaigns based on a process called probabilistic matching or lookalike modeling  – when the system finds customers that are more likely to match your target audience by having similar qualities and behavior.

Here are a few specific examples of data collected by Data Management Platforms:

  • Web and app data: General information about customers who visit your website and app, like age, gender, location, browsing, and purchasing history.
  • Data from second and third-party sources: Anonymous data from partner sites and apps and databases bought from other providers.
  • Data from first-party systems: Sometimes, DMPs can include valuable, but highly sensitive information like customer’s name, address, email address.
  • Data from advertising campaigns: Visualization and navigation data related to search-engine-optimization (SEO) marketing and display advertising campaigns.

The methods for data collection through DMPs also may vary by vendor and industry, but generally, the system gathers information via JavaScript tags, server-to-server integration, and an application programming interface (API).

If a major publisher wants to send its website data to its DMP, for instance, it can use tags. An e-commerce platform, on the other hand, might choose to send data from marketing automation tools.

CDPs vs. DMPs: Key Differences Explained

If you are just starting to dive into marketing data solutions, it is almost inevitable to mistake DMPs for CDPs. Although they share some similarities, they show far more differences when it comes to managing data. The CDP Institute, a platform-agnostic organization in the realm of data platforms, uses a simple quote to explain the distinction between CDPs vs. DMPs. They describe:

“CDPs work with both anonymous and known individuals, storing personally identifiable information’ (PII) such as names, postal addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers, while DMPs work almost exclusively with anonymous entities such as cookies, devices, and IP addresses”.

Yes, the main distinction between DMPs and CDPs is about the type of data they rely on. However, other important data platform differences impact how they are used. Let’s explore them in detail.

Types of Data

As the CDP Institute describes, the greatest difference between CDPs and DMPs lies in their use of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) – or data related to customers’ identity. In marketing terms, a PII is a combination of data used to identify a specific customer.

The logic behind CDPs is that you’ll be targeting individuals: the more data you collect about a single customer, the better will be the experience your brand will provide to him, specifically.  It can help you analyze if the user can be converted to a customer or understand content affinity based on the customer’s inclination to visit articles, for instance.

DMPs, on the other hand, rely on anonymous data – from cookies, devices, and IP addresses –  in hopes to reach customers who match their target profiles. DMPs are useful in capturing generic data, such as noting when a particular user visited a website and how long they spent on the page.

Data Retention

Another major difference between customer data platforms and data management platforms has to do with how long they store data.  CDPs are based on historical records, which means you can store customer data for how long you think it will be useful. You could choose to maintain customers’ records for a long period to build in-depth, accurate customer profiles and nurture relationships. Or, you could set a time limit for it, but having a long record about customers make it easier for you to analyze their lifetime value, for instance.

DMPs, however, store data for shorter periods of time, usually up to 90 days (a cookie’s lifespan)  to target ads and build lookalike audiences.  That’s not always good because it prevents marketers from having the bigger picture of the customer data over time.

Use Cases

Customer Data Platforms are used to gather customer data in their organic form and deploy insights to other marketing platforms. Marketers can use CDPs to coordinate different marketing strategies across different devices and channels. Beyond advertising, CDPs can be used to leverage the integration of marketing teams with other areas, from sales to customer experience (CX). In this post, you can check 20 ways CDPs can be used in marketing.

DMPs, on the other hand, are often constrained to digital advertising activities. They help marketers coordinate campaign optimization, audience modeling, cross-channel segmentation, and retargeting.

Data updates

In CDPs, database updates happen in real-time, while DPMs only allow scheduled database updates. It doesn’t mean that one model is better than the other, once the way you access and activate data will depend on your strategy.

Marketers can lean on CDPs for ongoing marketing efforts with single customers while relying on DMPs to potentialize specific campaigns and track their performance periodically.

What DMPs and CDPs Have in Common?

CDPs and DMPs do not necessarily replace one another. CDPs, specifically, can act as a complementary asset for DMPs. That means that the data gathered by CDPs can be enriched for better segmentation in DMPs, creating better lookalike audience segments. Therefore, you could choose either one or both of these platforms according to your marketing needs.

Generally, DMPs and CDPs will work side by side with customer relationship management systems (CRMs), which store data based on historical and general information such as contact, demographics, and notes about customers made by CRM teams.

Now, to set a common ground between DMPs and CDPs, we made a list of the assets they have in common.

  • Both CDPs and DMPs aim to establish a Single Customer View (SCV) or a 360-degree view to help businesses understand their customers.
  • Both platforms use data for audience activation and for delivering personalized user experiences.
  • Both platforms offer reporting, analysis, and optimization tools

3 Reasons Why a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is the Best Choice for Marketers

While different management platforms are always welcome, many marketers are turning their attention to Customer Data Platforms. Despite the growth of data and spend on marketing technology, many CMOs still struggle to demonstrate the revenue impact of their marketing activities on the business.

In this scenario, CPD emerges as a promising tool to centralize valuable insights, automate marketing integrations, and track performance precisely. A study by Forbes shows that 53% of marketing executives are using CDPs to engage with customer’s needs.

To finish this guide, we made a list of 3 ways your marketing team could benefit from a CDP:

1. Accurate personalization

In this day and age, not having a CDP can actually result in a poor experience for your customers. You can’t take the risk of making wrongful recommendations or serve ads that are not relevant within the user’s journey. Because it breaks data silos in organizations, CDPs are generally more effective than DMPs in attracting qualified leads, optimizing marketing budget, and reducing customers’ acquisition costs (CAC).

A CDP allows you to acknowledge what products customers show interest in lately,  as well as their purchase intent and how likely they are to churn.  You can also find out their favorite interaction channels and stages in the customer journey. From there, you can come up with predictive models and improve content strategies for every channel.

2. Better data quality

The focus of marketing leaders is also shifting from third-party data and anonymous data to first-party, single-customer data, which also addresses CDPs’ importance. As data privacy and compliance regulations become more consolidated, organizations increasingly seek to work with their own, integrated data.

3. Integration to other software

CDPs can be integrated into different touchpoints called “delivery platforms” or “engagement platforms”. These can be, for instance, your company’s email marketing or marketing automation software, website, or social media management platform.

Delivery systems interact with the platform to send out messages and collect engagement data that will feedback into the system. These integrations enable the planning of campaigns and the set of messages.

Next Steps

We know that there are many data management solutions in the market. But now that you have learned a bit more about DMPs and CDPs applications, maybe it’s worth strengthening your marketing data solutions.

We recommend you check out Arena’s customer data platform blog section to learn more about the potential of CDPs. You can also click here to get in touch with one of Arena’s consultants and learn the specifics of our CDP.

What Omnichannel is and Why it Leads Customer Experience

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Omnichannel puts the customer at its ultimate core. This integrated and all-places strategy personalizes touchpoints in the customer journey to offer the most effective shopping experience anytime and anywhere.

It is fair to say omnichannel is the perfect response to a new customer-centric culture. Here’s everything you should know about it.

Taking care of customers according to their expectations is the greatest of brands’ responsibilities. This concern has made marketing, technology, and sales teams work together for years to increase customer satisfaction in different channels.

From mobile apps to desktop blogs, from e-commerce to social media and physical stores, customers expect the same service excellence in any place, at any time.

To reach that excellency level, companies these days must assemble and harmonize various components, such as data, multimedia marketing, and multiple sale channels, to get to their audiences at the right time and place, and intently offer the best of the best experience.

That’s when omnichannel walks in.

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What is omnichannel?

Omnichannel is a marketing and sales strategy that combines and crosses different channels to provide an outstanding and personalized shopping experience. By blending several elements into an integrated whole, omnichannel removes the boundaries between digital and physical spaces, optimizing brand messages, general communication, and, most importantly, customer experience.

Already a reality in some great retailers, omnichannel brings together e-commerce, shopping apps, blogs, social media, marketplaces, ads, and physical stores to improve the consumer lifecycle and customize its touchpoints, whether they’re digital or offline.

In order to be omnichannel, brands need to mix products, marketing, sales, customer support, supply chain, and more, to make their deepest reasoning clear: Put the customer in its ultimate core and let channels combine (and recombine) to deliver consistent and efficient shopping and communication initiatives.

Some omnichannel examples are:

  • Being able to buy a product that isn’t available in-store, using an app
  • Purchasing on e-commerce and collecting at the store
  • While collecting, being swiftly introduced to new launches that really interest you
  • Abandoning the cart and getting an email with the offer of a new, exclusive customer loyalty program that follows up to the abandoned product
  • Getting a shipping notification via e-mail and SMS

Omnichannel vs Multichannel

We can say every omnichannel retailer contains multiple channels. That makes omnichannel essentially multichannel, but the contrary isn’t true. Therefore, these terms can’t be used interchangeably.

The main difference between these “channel” concepts is that omnichannel integrates its operations while multichannel components act separately.

In a multichannel strategy, there isn’t mutual communication. In fact, it is common for multichannel retailers to face lack of information exchanges and a sense of competition between their channels.

When it comes to branding, multichannel sends out the same message in all channels and to all consumers, regardless of the lifecycle stage they’re at.

This combined with the fact multichannel doesn’t allow personalized experiences contributes to the idea that multichannel focuses on products, not on user experience.

Meanwhile, omnichannel not only integrates channels but collects and transforms customer data into personalized interactions with their consumers base. It means that, unlike lack of communication, an omnichannel brand message quickly adapts through the customer journey and remains relevant.

It doesn’t matter if the customer is online or not: The same unique message will be sent. Most businesses invest in multichannel today, although we should mention that omnichannel consumers spend between 15% to 30% more than multichannel consumers.

It is also important to distinguish omnichannel from cross channel. Cross channel strategies also integrate channels to offer more comfortable and agile shopping experiences. However, omnichannel stands out for being the only method to assess consumers’ behaviors, habits, and preferences to create personalized touchpoints.

Why should brands be omnichannel?

You probably know how exigent the modern consumer is. Technology has put a personal device and free access to information in customers’ hands, and people have grown fond of browsing and comparing. Technological and ever-changing lifestyle also makes customers enjoy shopping experiences that are flexible, trustworthy, and responsive to their needs. Buying when and where they want is a basic requirement for customer experience and care.

Another detail you should pay attention to is that people have enough time and information to consider which is the best product or service. And, thanks to content marketing, there is a huge number of tools that tailor customer journey to this new demanding and multi-connected profile. Brands work hard to make the most out of marketing in social networks, blogs, messaging applications, and more.

Still, content isn’t all it takes to engage people: Companies need to focus on customer behavior.

And, if you’re curious about it, you should definitely check these Google; and Salesforce; insights:

  • 68% of shoppers purchase movies, books, and video games both in-store and online
  • 66% of shoppers prefer online shopping to find items, compared to 27% who prefer offline
  • 55% of buyers say that retail experiences are disconnected from channel to channel.
  • 59% of shoppers prefer to shop online to get better prices
  • 83% of U.S. shoppers that visited stores had used online search before going into the store

That being said, brands should be omnichannel because customers are omnichannel. They don’t split a brand’s perception into offline and online. It means that, if their experience is damaged in any channel, frustration will lead buyers to switch to another brand. Recall that 58% of consumers will turn to competitors if they face a single bad customer experience. 

However, omnichannel benefits are not exclusive to shoppers. Companies that integrate sales, logistics, technology, and marketing channels also benefit, as they make consumers happy and likely to buy more – who doesn’t want more revenue, right? 

In addition, satisfied clients talk about their experiences with friends and family and help brands increase their customer base.

Omnichannel strategies also cut costs by rethinking opportunities based on consumer habits. Another advantage is that unifying communication promotes a more consistent brand image and encourages synergy between operations. Often, it is cheaper to adopt omnichannel and optimize strategies than to open more sales channels.

Finally, we should mention that being all-places – as latin Omni suggests – makes your brand capable of solving multiple use cases, whether online or not.

How does omnichannel work in e-commerce?

Omnichannel has a huge impact on e-commerce. Known for its convenience, e-commerces allow customers to buy anywhere, at any time, and provide relevant information about products and services that interest them.

The omnichannel mindset turns e-commerces operations more efficient. Its approach aims to provide online shoppers with seamless and continuous buying experiences.

Digital components that absorb customer data through e-commerce purchases can be easily accessed to create a well-built consumer understanding. The goal here is to identify what methods will bring better results and which channels are more effective to engage and delight the customer.

Another possibility is that e-commerce can lead to many other shopping opportunities. Think about the number of shoppers that buy online and decide to collect their products in-store.

How great would it be to offer specific products once the customer arrives? Or, to look at it from another perspective, think about what will happen to e-commerces that won’t let shoppers choose how and when to get their hands on their purchases. Will they fail to deliver convenient experiences? They surely will.

When correctly implanted, omnichannel e-commerces strategies will quickly identify customer touchpoints that will lead to specific solutions – and, as a consequence, to more engagement and brand loyalty.

The effects of omnichannel in customer experience and culture

Omnichannel is all about customer experience. Its core is to deeply understand buyers’ needs and embrace them, all while respecting their time and delivering meaningful messages.

Whether online or offline, omnichannel interactions should cause a sense of identification and present a brand that gives buyers the chance to access their preferences.

The real impact here is that, by understanding people’s needs, omnichannel is extremely powerful to generate follow-up interactions and engaging buying stages.

All data available must be used to create a context for future touchpoints in multiple shopping environments. And the secret to the omnichannel done right is that this context must be continued, wherever people are.

Customer experience must be continued, otherwise, brands fail to engage and retain. If your consumers don’t identify with the message you’re sending through your channels, then they’ll look for other messages they can connect with.

That’s why you have to step back and focus on the fact that, for your channels to be truly omnipresent, you firstly need to perceive the habits and preferences of your target audience.

If you think omnichannel only personalizes messages and experiences, you better think again. Being able to collect and interpret universal customer data is a fascinating way to go a little further and customize offers and even products.

Let’s move on to some examples of how to do that!

Be inspired: real omnichannel experiences

Sephora: My Beauty Bag

Born with digital DNA, the giant beauty Sephora created a special feature to connect clients to their favorite products. Named “My Beauty Bag“, the feature – which is also an app – is part of the Beauty Insider loyalty program, and allows customers to access products and past purchases whenever and wherever they want. 

While using My Beauty Bag, clients can, whether in-store or not, search for the right shade of lipstick, rebuy old purchases, and recommend products to friends. Sephora’s stores are equipped with tablets that make it possible for consumers to log-in immediately and add new items to their bag or “loves” – previously known as Sephora’s shopping list.

My Beauty Bag enables shoppers to collect favorite products, organize them in one place, create wish lists, keep track of both online and in-store purchases, and track rewards. 

Burberry: Series B

Based on customer data, Burberry created a new series of limited edition products that remain available for only 24 hours on the 17th of every month. The timing here creates hype and a sense of urgency for customers to reach out and buy the exclusive and recently launched products. Purchases can be made on Instagram, WeChat, LINE, and even in the Korean Kakao platforms.

This type of strategy was essential to increase consumer engagement and create anticipation, and it paved the way for the development of new activities across multiple channels that focus on customer experience and interactions.

Amazon: Amazon Prime and Amazon Go

Even if a huge number of companies worldwide won’t have as many resources as Amazon has, there are some key details to pay attention to in their omnichannel strategy that can inspire other businesses, especially when it comes to data unification.

With the mission to be the world’s most customer-centric company, Amazon has been investing in omnichannel for years now. 

When Amazon Prime membership arrived, it called public attention by offering free shipping. It saved time and was convenient. As time went by, other benefits were provided, such as unlimited video and music streaming, discounts, and even a wardrobe, that allows customers to try on items online before purchasing them. 

Omnipresent, Amazon decided to expand to physical dimensions and launched Amazon Go, a convenience store where customers don’t need to wait in line.

Through the Amazon Go app and artificial intelligence features, clients register everything they’re putting into the cart and leave the store as soon as they want. There’s no need to pay in the cashier. Their receipts appear in the app and money is charged from the Amazon account.

This new type of purchase is called “Just Walk Out” and embeds different AI technologies and data to provide the best shopping experience. Omnichannel at its best!

As you might have noticed, omnichannel is intimately related to customer experience and retention – and brands that ignore its potential are most likely to fail in maintaining competitive advantage. 

Want to learn more about engagement and make your customers brand loyal? Access our Customer Experience Guide!