When marketing teams are first starting out, most everything they do can be described as a bootstrap effort — marketers are called upon to be scrappy and pull off great campaigns with very little. For most teams, this works well until they hit a certain point. As businesses scale up, working off disparate data sources and marketing tools becomes an impediment to CRM and improving your marketing efforts. As your marketing team shifts into a new stage of growth, data unification will be instrumental to your success and ability to reach your customers effectively.
What is data unification?
If you’re completely unfamiliar with the concept of data unification, or maybe not well versed in it, you’re not alone. 51% of marketers report that their business isn’t pooling data into one unified source. This is often caused by the lack of proper technology to do so, or simply isn’t a priority for marketing leaders.
With the rise of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), the importance of having user data stored in one unified location has come to the forefront of marketing buzz. And while a ton of this discourse may be just buzz, there is incredible value in CDPs, or CDP-esque platforms for businesses looking to scale up and upgrade their comms.
The main aim of a CDP is to collect and unify your customer data to build comprehensive, single customer views of every known and anonymous user. From a marketing perspective, data unification is the process of routing all your first-party data from different sources such as CRM, real-time events, product catalog, offline events, and more into one central location that can then be used to build and deliver highly-personalized, multi-channel marketing campaigns.
Why data-driven marketing wins
Besides just building a holistic, real-time view of your customers, leveraging your unified data against the power of AI can make scaling up your marketing easier than ever before. Platforms like Blueshift’s Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) combine the power of a CDP with patented AI to build self-driving, 1:1 customer experiences that boost conversion and LTV. Using the entirety of your customer data, Blueshift’s AI can produce predictive recommendations, segments, and build customer-centric journeys, where every single marketing output to optimized for the individual.
Blueshift customer Skillshare boosted enrollments to their online learning platform by 89% using AI-powered recommendations to keep students engaged with relevant content throughout their learning journey. Best of all? With Blueshift’s intuitive interface, the Skillshare team is able to build and launch highly targeted campaigns faster than ever before — usually in as little as 10 days.
Ultimately, data unification is the first step in building a team culture that values using customer data to drive your marketing strategies. If you’d like to learn more about how your team can unlock the full potential of your customer data, check out our Marketer’s Guide to Data Activation. If you’d like to see how Blueshift can help your business, get in touch with our team for a one on one demo.
