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What is Data Activation?

Blueshift

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"What is Data Activation?" graphic

We all know data is the key to better customer engagement; the question is how to best cultivate it?

For marketers who have been challenged with delivering increasingly real-time, customized, elaborate customer experiences, data and having a deep customer understanding is essential. But data can only deepen customer insight and enable more precise marketing when it’s harnessed effectively. However, the ever-increasing speed, volume, and variety in which data is generated creates a real challenge: data perpetually changes, which means insights have a brief shelf-life.

How do marketers make sense of all their data and use it drive growth?

This is where Data Activation comes in. 

Data Activation Defined

Data Activation is the next natural step for data. After all the data collection, data warehouses, and data management, it’s time to stop working for your data and put your data to work.

In simple terms, Data Activation is having customer experiences be informed by the fullness of customer data. This means every customer interaction across every channel is guided by a holistic, up-to-the-moment understanding of customers—including all prior transactions, on-site and offline behaviors, campaign engagement, product interactions, real-time actions, and other customer attributes gathered across channels and devices.

Blueshift data activation flywheel

With Data Activation, marketers’ data is continuously used to shape customer interactions, across all channels, as soon as it’s collected instead of idly sitting around in marketers’ systems losing value. This happens through an automated process that doesn’t require marketers to manage every step.

Orchestrating the customer experience

Most importantly, Data Activation orchestrates cross-channel experiences around the customer, not the other way around. This means no matter how many customers or touch points you have, you can be sure that each interaction is based on real-time customer insights, consists of the right content, and is happening at the exact right moment in the channel it’s most likely to drive action. It’s a switch from channel-centric to customer-centric.

For marketers, this means budgets finally don’t have to be wasted on batch-and-blast campaigns. Instead, they can optimize communication on an individual level to drive revenue. In a study commissioned by Forrester, it was found that marketers can experience a 20% increase in revenue from this level of cross-channel consistency, in Blueshift’s platform specifically.

Want to kickstart your data activation journey? Get started with our Data Activation Guide.