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The Data Activation Survival Guide

Blueshift

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Data Activation Survival Guide

This past year has been the year of the CDP. The market grew by a whopping 71% in the first half of 2019 alone. 78% of companies have, or are looking into buying Customer Data Platforms. The hype of CDPs has allowed marketers to unify their siloed data — but that’s only a part of the puzzle. While businesses have unified data, it’s not immediately apparent how to execute data activation.

C-suite expectations are also high. 93% of executives expect that using more customer data in their campaigns will greatly impact their ability to be competitive. More customer data than ever before is being collected, but other major issues in data infrastructure are preventing the data from being utilized fully. Over one-fourth of business have no connectivity between channels. This leads to a fragmented customer experience that inhibits growth. For forward thinking marketers willing to invest in tech, this presents a unique opportunity. 

To activate data in order to facilitate these experiences, you need a solution that can capture, model, and manage raw data from any source, and out to any source. What’s activation you ask? Leaders in the CDP space use “activation” as a catch all for describing the process by which customer experiences are informed by the fullness of customer data. This means every customer interaction across every channel is guided by a holistic, real-time view of customers. 31% of marketers still face access to this data as a major roadblock towards the overall goal of a responsive, automated, customer relationship.

It’s time to rethink how you’ve structured your tech stack around the CDP to drive revenue and deliver a seamless, 1:1 data-powered experience. Here are the steps to get started:

STEP 1: INFRASTRUCTURE

A big theme of the building-out-your-martech-stack trend has been “unify by any means necessary”, and infrastructure has been largely neglected. That process must start with a rock-solid solution that can ingest and route customer data from any source effectively. CDIs unify siloed data and pipe it across your marketech stack. They normalize raw data to get it in reliable form before routing that data to different systems. However, while CDIs can connect disparate data from all customer interactions regardless of schema, they don’t provide marketers with a means to actually do anything further with that data.

STEP 2: OPERATIONALIZE

Within larger martech stacks, there’s often a piece missing. Data is primed and we know how we want to use this data for marketing, but we lack the tech to act on the data. The key component to a well-oiled martech stack designed for unique customer experiences is an activation piece. This tech models and analyzes your data at a 1:1 level, extracts intelligence, and uses this knowledge to make customer engagement decisions that guide marketing actions across channels. Without it, raw data with little meaningful insights drive your communications, which leads to a myriad of marketing slip ups.

STEP 3: DELIVER

With data activation operationalized, customer data can be utilized to inform 1:1 messaging across every channel.The intelligence derived during activation will push tailored marketing to the right channel, at the right time in such a way that optimizes for engagement and conversion. APIs work on the backend to seamless deliver these messages, and provide feedback to be used for further decisioning. For marketers, this means budgets don’t have to be wasted on batch and blast campaigns. Instead, this agile tech stack optimizes communication on an individual level to drive revenue. Forrester has attributed a 20% increase in revenue from this level of cross-channel consistency, in Blueshift’s platform specifically.

Want to kickstart your data activation journey? Connect with our team, we’re excited to help.