Newsworthy

The SmartHub CDP Explained

Blueshift

| August 5, 2020

For companies large and small, it’s no longer solely about attracting customers to your brand. Marketers are becoming responsible for a greater share of the customer experience, which is also shifting. Today’s customers are savvier than ever and have grown accustomed to relevant, connected, real-time experiences across every interaction with the brand. With the sheer amount of options consumers have today, marketers have smaller windows of opportunity to wow message-overloaded consumers that have sky-high expectations. Customers today expect customer-centricity and it’s essential to brands’ success.

Luckily, there are more technologies and tools than ever before to help marketers achieve that standard. That’s thanks in part to the customer experience becoming increasingly digital, traditionally offline channels becoming digitally addressable, and to more customer data at marketers’ disposal. And yet, marketers still struggle to achieve their goals and remain stuck sending generic, low-performing messages that are disparate across channels.

Often, marketers find themselves held back by inverted tech stacks and disconnected teams built around disjointed channels, instead of around the customer — and as a result are left with a siloed, partial view of the customer. It doesn’t matter how many fantastic martech platforms you have in your stack if they’re not communicating with each other and are each operating off their own siloed understanding of the customer. Without a reliable single customer view at the center around which to unite marketing decision-making, the possibility of cohesive customer experiences is impossible. The key to making all your existing platforms work harmoniously to deliver deeply personalized, customer-centric experiences starts with connecting your data into a central view of the customer to power everything else.

There is hope, though! To surmount these pervasive problems your martech stack needs a boost. It’s time for marketers to unlock the full potential of their stack and start delivering experiences your customers actually want with a Smart Hub that truly understands the customer and orchestrates experiences around them. It’s time for marketers to be smarter about how they engage customers by putting the customer first. It’s time for the SmartHub CDP.

The CDP’s role in the martech stack

While the push to unify data to create a cohesive view of the customer is more important than ever, it isn’t a totally new concept. Many different platforms, such as CRMs and DMPs, have risen to popularity in an attempt to solve this issue. Now over the past 5 years the latest solution, Customer Data Platforms, or CDPs, have grown in popularity and adoption faster than any marketing technology.

A CDP is a packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems, as defined by the CDP Institute. That’s an incredibly broad definition, so it’s no wonder the CDP market has become disparate, with vendors ranging from marketing data integrators to marketing clouds offering an add-on CDP module, and more. What’s more, CDPs are only one part of the puzzle, rather than a full circle solution. They’ve granted marketers access to unified data, but the process stops there. Marketers are left to determine how to take that data, derive meaning from it, and use it to craft 1:1 customer experiences. And, that’s where a specific type of CDP, the SmartHub CDP, can truly unify your tech stack around the customer.

Elevating customer experiences with the SmartHub CDP

The SmartHub CDP connects applications around a deep customer understanding and uses it to direct interactions in real-time, enabling brands to deliver relevant, connected experiences throughout the omnichannel journey.

The SmartHub CDP is designed from the ground-up to deliver on what marketers have previously been struggling to do — unlock a unified customer understanding and use it to craft personalized, cohesive experiences across all touchpoints.

Unlike traditional CDPs and marketing automation platforms, the SmartHub CDP completes the full cycle of data unification, intelligence, orchestration, and feedback. As a result, your tech is continuously being informed and learning more about your customers, and being made “smarter” by the SmartHub CDP.

The SmartHub CDP is made to fit in perfectly with your existing tech ecosystem and unite the stack around a single, complete customer view. It then uses that customer understanding to direct marketing actions across all customer touchpoints as they happen by making sense of fast-changing customer behaviors. The SmartHub CDP can also be extended to applications beyond marketing (support, sales, product, merchandising, and the rest of the customer experience) to create truly connected, intuitive experiences across the full customer journey.

Breaking down the SmartHub CDP

CDP: Unify Data & Segment

A SmartHub CDP foundation is made up of a rock-solid CDP. It creates rich, always up-to-date profiles of every anonymous and known customer by pooling together all your customer data — historic interactions, real-time behaviors, and predicted future actions — from all channels, devices, and systems in real-time.

These profiles capture each and every interaction customers have had with your brand, whether that’s recording an opened email, viewed product, or a transaction — from across all touchpoints. New data is constantly streamed to ensure your marketing is being guided by complete, accurate, up-to-date insight. These actionable, ready to use profiles connect the stack around a unified, holistic customer understanding. Marketers also have the ability to create advanced, granular segments that are ready to be activated across their ecosystem.

Hub: Orchestrate & Activate

The SmartHub CDP acts as a central hub for your company’s martech. It connects all channels and applications and guides interactions throughout the omnichannel customer journey by being responsive to customer behaviors.

It becomes a single platform for marketers to craft and activate experiences across all their channels. Marketers can easily orchestrate omnichannel journeys and bring in the channels and apps connected to the SmartHub CDP into a connected customer experience. The hub also automatically triggers timely interactions in response to real-time customer behaviors. And the UI is as seamless as the customer experiences it creates.

Smart: Predict & Decide

Finally, the secret sauce behind the SmartHub CDP are the “Smart” capabilities. AI and intelligent decisioning enable real-time experiences driven by a true, in-the-moment understanding of your customers, taking into account their complete history with the brand, current context, and predicted behaviors. AI continuously optimizes who is being targeted, with what content, on which channel, and at what time based on customer interactions. And a built-in 1:1 personalization engine surfaces the products, content, and offers that are messaged to what will resonate in the moment.

This combination of data unification, orchestration, and intelligent decisioning makes it easier than ever to scale up 1:1 personalized experiences. AI-powered decisioning also gives marketers an assist by automating away time-consuming processes needed to make it work.

Smarter marketing starts with the SmartHub CDP

Delivering relevant, timely, and meaningful experiences across the right channels for engagement will always be a challenge and opportunity for marketers. The SmartHub CDP offers a smarter, accessible, scalable approach. By having a deep, shared understanding of your customers at the center guiding everything you do, balancing all of the moving parts to great customer experience becomes a breeze.

It’s time to align your stack, team, and customer experience. It’s time to embrace smarter marketing and simplified workflows. It’s time for the SmartHub CDP.