In the first part of our SmartHub CDP series, we introduced you to the SmartHub CDP, and how it’s changing the martech landscape for the better by becoming marketers’ one-stop-shop for data unification, intelligent marketing automation, and omnichannel customer experience orchestration. We’ve also covered how the SmartHub CDP is filling out the “hollow” tech stack and how it goes beyond a traditional CDP. Now, let’s examine the Hub component — and why it’s unique ability to embrace any tech ecosystem, connect all channels, and provide a central place to orchestrate and trigger messages while leveraging shared, unified data from across all systems, make it truly revolutionary for marketers.
How the next-gen CDP + Hub power the tech stack
As we discussed in part 3 of this series, the CDP component to the SmartHub CDP is essential. That foundation of unified customer data is what powers a healthy, well-oiled tech stack. So, it helps to think of customer data and the Single Customer View as the “gasoline”, whereas the Hub is the “engine” of your stack — it routes data, triggers experiences, and connects all the moving parts to ensure everything functions correctly within the customer experience.
The Hub empowers marketers and gives them a single platform from where they can create and activate seamless, adaptive omnichannel journeys that integrate every brand touchpoint and channel.
The Hub truly enables marketers to be omnichannel in their marketing approach. Marketers can easily bring in all channels essential to the customer experience, from email, mobile, and digital to customer support, in-product, sales, and more This allows marketers to see a holistic view of how customers interact with your brand and trigger messages or tasks across these channels.
Previously, marketers were primarily focused on driving customers to a brand’s store, website, or app where the customer experience would take place. But today, marketers are being asked to bridge the customer experience divide, with marketing becoming ever more closely entwined in the customer experience. In fact, nearly twice the number of marketers (79%) say they lead customer experience initiatives across the organization compared to two years ago. Because of this shift in marketing’s responsibilities, it pays to ensure communications that fall outside of marketing’s typical jurisdiction are still personalized, relevant, and on-brand.
Let’s break down exactly how the Hub functions and what that means for your tech stack and achieving your marketing goals.
Breaking down the Hub
The Hub component of the SmartHub CDP has four key capabilities:
Omnichannel orchestration:
Coordinating delightful, seamless omnichannel experiences requires a central Hub. The Hub enables marketers to autonomously craft experiences that dynamically adapt the content, channel, timing, and sequence of messages in response to customers’ behaviors with your brand. The Hub’s intuitive journey builder allows marketers to design and refine campaigns on the fly — while still being robust enough to incorporate multiple channels, stages, conditions, template variants, and built-in testing. The end result is a cohesive experience across all channels (marketing or other) within a single customer journey builder for marketers to access, adjust, and optimize as needed.
Triggered workflows:
Always meet customers at the perfect time and channel for conversion through triggered, timely messaging. Send time and channel are determined by a customers’ real-time interactions with your brand, as well as historic engagement and other marketer-determined customer attributes. This ensures marketers are meeting their customers at crucial parts within their journey to drive engagement, conversion, and increased LTV/ brand loyalty. Ultimately, this puts marketers in a better position to influence their customers’ decision-making throughout the buying process.
Connected apps:
Connect your entire tech ecosystem with one easy to access platform that allows you to easily leverage every channel, tool, or touchpoint that matters to your customer experience. The Hub creates a noticeable difference within your brand experience, as customers will receive a more cohesive, seamless experience across every channel. Switch on pre-built connectors to the channels and systems that matter to your team to better streamline your customer journey building process. The SmartHub CDP easily fits seamlessly into your tech stack, regardless of your current tools, because it is an open, tech-agnostic platform and is purpose-built to make those connections through a series of easily arranged APIs. This enables marketers to future-proof their tech stack as new channels come and go, technology advances, and their business needs change.
Intuitive UI:
This robust, yet flexible platform is made even better with its easy to use, marketer-friendly user interface. Easily create customer journeys with a simplified approach to workflow creation that puts marketers in control, rather than constantly having to work around legacy technology, data science involvement, and other barriers.
Why the modern marketer needs a Hub
The benefit of bringing a SmartHub CDP into your tech stack cannot be overstated — but let’s dive deeper into the specific ways in which the Hub impacts marketing positively.
- Capture more customer opportunities with a platform that allows marketers to remain responsive and agile to customer behaviors in real-time with triggered messages that both delight customers and lead them further along their journey.
- Get campaigns up and running quicker than ever before by tying customer actions and stages to self-driving journeys that automatically add in new customers as desired actions are completed.
- Intelligently scale with automation by delivering 1:1, self-driving customer journeys that are shaped by the fullness of your customer data.
- Take the stress out of campaign management by streamlining and simplifying workflows and eliminating unnecessary processes through automation.
The Hub is here to make the creation and management of the many moving parts marketers own easier so they can drive better results for organizations. As martech continues to grow more crowded and complicated there needs to be a central piece of technology that brings order to the chaos and that places the customer at the core of everything you do — and the Smarthub CDP achieves this through its one-of-a-kind Hub.
That being said, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. The Hub is essential in orchestrating and streamlining your customer experience, but marketers need intelligence to help guide next-best-actions in real-time — think of this as the steering wheel of your martech. In the following part of our SmartHub CDP series, we’ll break down what makes this platform “smart”, to better understand how it works and how it can help marketers reach their goals and delight customers in the process. If you’d like to learn more about how the SmartHub CDP is redefining the way marketers use their data, check out part 1 of our SmartHub series, or reach out to our team to see it in action.
