How to Reduce Martech Friction for Immediate ROI

It all starts (and ends) with customer data, it’s the lifeblood that keeps healthy, successful marketing programs running. If your business is running on martech that either can’t understand or can’t ingest all of your customer data, a lot of hard work has been undermined.

Think about how your data reaches your various storage centers (whether it’s a CRM, CDP, or other sources). Let’s say first-party cookie data makes its way into an in-house data lake and manual form fills from customer registration and orders find their way into your CRM. Great! Collecting data is half the battle and a worthy one as well, as the importance of doing so has become more apparent in the last 10 years.

Here’s where the cracks in the foundation of your tech stack might start to appear. Can your two or more data sources be understood against each other in real-time? If not, you’re only getting a partial and inaccurate view of your customers — which can cause marketing actions taken against to be ineffective.

Or maybe, your marketing isn’t even in control of the data they need to get their jobs done. If you’re constantly in a back and forth with engineering, pulling lists, correcting segments, and asking to run tests, you’re wasting valuable time that could be put towards more creative efforts. (which is what all marketers would rather be doing, right?)

Rather than wasting time, money, and resources on a game of data hacky sack, invest in technology that will streamline and simplify this process. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have emerged as a leader at the intersection of marketing and data science. In an effort to codify an exact definition for this new technology, the Customer Data Platform Institute promotes these 3 basic principles a real CDP will meet:

• One, it’s a piece of packaged software, rather than a custom-built solution. It also requires much less technical support than an in-house project.
• Two, it creates a single customer view, of every customer, that is updated constantly with new information.
• Three, it needs to be accessible by all your other systems and technology.

Not only do CDPs provide a hyper-accurate view of customers, of which decisions can be made, but also it may present opportunities to shed extraneous systems. First-party data collected from the web can often be directly routed to CDPs, eliminating the need for other data storage and organization platforms.

CDP’s won’t magically build autonomous, personalized customer journeys — they’re simply a stepping stone to get there. But, platforms like Blueshift’s Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) have taken the CDP model one step further to streamline operations and make 1:1 marketing more attainable and efficient than ever.

The key difference between many CDPs and marketing automation tools on the market and Blueshift is our activation component. Essentially, data activation is having customer experiences be informed by the entirety of your data. This means every customer interaction across every channel is guided by a holistic, real-time understanding of customers. In practice, this means our CDAP wears many technology “hats” and becomes an integral part of our customers’ martech stacks.

The CDAP unifies data, AI-powered intelligence analyzes this data and designs complex customer journeys based on what is most likely to get customers to convert, engage, and more. Rather than hopping from platform to platform and spending valuable time on understanding data, this streamlined process truly puts the power of customer data into the hands of marketers.

Using AI to understand, and ultimately make decisions for marketing is one of the most powerful things about the CDAP. Our patented AI can turn lean teams into powerhouses, “AI marketing helps Skillshare’s marketing team appear larger than it is. We are a lean team and having Blueshift helps us present ourselves and speak to our customers in a more sophisticated way like companies 10X our size,” says Brooke Young of Skillshare. Our benchmark study, ROI of AI also found that across 3.8 billion marketing interactions, AI-powered marketing campaigns increase customer engagement by 7X and revenue 3X.

In addition to adding value to your business, the CDAP has helped previously overwhelmed marketers do more with the time they have and execute upon ideas quicker than ever before, “We use Blueshift every day. It’s just really nice software to use because you have an idea, you can go in there, you can create your segments, and send your campaign out the door. You don’t need any 3rd party support and everything is in one environment,” says Mark Neary of Vouchercloud.