View All Posts

The Gift of Data: Transforming Customer Engagement with a CDP

Blueshift

|

The Holiday Season often brings to mind the joy of giving and receiving, but not every gift hits the mark. Have you ever unwrapped a present that left you scratching your head, wondering if the sender really knew you at all? It happens more often than we think. Just like receiving a moldy fruitcake, customers often find themselves on the receiving end of experiences that feel disconnected, impersonal, and downright baffling. 

Data is the foundation for creating personalized and memorable customer experiences. It’s the essential ingredient for understanding preferences, behavior, and needs. Picture this – a well-intentioned but misinformed gift giver. They lack the crucial details needed to choose a present tailored just for you. Similarly, marketers face several challenges in curating personalized experiences for their customers. From getting a customer’s name wrong to suggesting a product tailored for a car model they don’t own, a negative customer experience has the power to either enhance or undermine the overall customer journey.

Unwrapping the Gift of Personalization with CDPs

The good news is, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can help marketers navigate these pitfalls by:

  1. Unifying Data
  2. Creating a 360 View
  3. Putting Data into Action

1. Unifying Data

Marketers rely on accurate, relevant, and accessible data to craft compelling narratives and tailor experiences that resonate with their audience. However, the challenge often lies in the scattered nature of this data. Multiple touchpoints, disparate systems, and varied sources lead to a fragmented landscape, making it challenging for marketers to decipher and leverage effectively.

CDPs function as a centralized hub, unifying all sources of customer data, seamlessly integrating diverse touchpoints. They also ensure easy integration with other systems, such as cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, through powerful APIs. 

Let’s look at Carparts.com, a leading online retailer for auto parts and accessories, as a real-life example. With a substantial customer base and an extensive product catalog, having unified and accessible data is key to powering personalized customer experiences. By leveraging data such as the year, make, and model of each user’s vehicle, along with insights into their browsing behavior, Carparts.com effectively delivers hyper-personalized and accurate recommendations.

2. Creating a 360 View

Once all your data is unified in one place, it becomes much easier to gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers. A key function of CDPs is to connect, unify, and resolve identity, attribute, and event data from multiple touchpoints, devices, and channels. By consolidating data from various sources, CDPs create a 360-degree profile for every known and anonymous user with cross-device identity resolution. CDPs also resolve online and offline identities, effortlessly merging profiles in real-time as new data flows into the CDP from any of your source systems. These profiles then update automatically with each customer behavior, providing you access to timely and the most accurate data. With all your data consolidated into one place and updated in real-time to reflect the latest customer behavior, these profiles are ready for activation.

3. Putting Data Into Action

Activating data is the key to unlocking its potential for creating personalized and impactful customer experiences. CDPs are more than just repositories; they transform raw data into actionable insights, allowing for targeted and personalized engagement that extends beyond transactions. With a deeper customer understanding and the necessary data at your fingertips, you can effortlessly build dynamic and precise audience segments, ensuring your campaigns reach the right customers. Then, seamlessly orchestrate compelling cross-channel customer journeys by leveraging your robust data for key use cases such as reducing cart abandonment, nurturing leads, increasing retention, driving engagement, and more. By harnessing the capabilities of CDPs, marketers can not only drive engagement but foster lasting relationships that build brand loyalty.

In a recent webinar, Suncoast Credit Union spoke to the importance of collecting the right data to fuel personalized engagement. Leveraging the rich data gathered from member touchpoints, including attributes like membership source and captured behavior events such web engagement or form submissions, Suncoast Credit Union efficiently delivers 1:1 digital member experiences that seamlessly mirror the level of personalization received in their physical branches.

The Power of Personalization

Imagine the relief and delight of receiving a thoughtful, personalized gift that perfectly aligns with your interests. That’s precisely what real-time, relevant, and accessible data does for marketers. It’s the equivalent of unwrapping a gift that sparks joy, meets expectations, and leaves a lasting positive impression.

For marketers aiming to craft exceptional customer experiences, the lesson is clear: the accessibility of real-time, unified data matters. Having the wrong data or even just outdated data is akin to gifting a fruitcake – it might as well not be sent at all. CDPs empower marketers to leverage data effectively, foster genuine connections and ensure that every interaction feels like a thoughtfully chosen gift – one that delights, resonates, and truly speaks to the recipient.

Ready to activate your customer data in real-time? Sign up for our free CDP Starter Pack. Effortlessly ingest customer data and kickstart personalized cross-channel activation in just 15 minutes!