It’s time to place your customer at the core of everything you do. Start creating relevant and engaging customer experiences with the power of your customer data. Learn how the SmartHub CDP can transform and activate your first-party data into more meaningful marketing.
12 Min Read
Making smart use of customer data and intelligence has long been the driver behind winning marketing strategies. So why are only 28% of marketers completely satisfied with their ability to engage customers across channels at scale?1
There’s a clear gap today between the kinds of customer experiences marketers aim to create and what they can deliver. The cause? Marketers struggle to use their data in execution across channels. This ongoing disconnect leads to marketers missing out on significant growth and revenue opportunities.
In this guide, you’ll learn the drivers behind your data-driven marketing challenges, what Data Activation is, why it’s essential to your marketing success, and how to use it to deliver game-changing, repeatable growth.
1Salesforce. (2018). Salesforce State of Marketing: 5th Edition.
Making smart use of customer data and intelligence has long been the driver behind winning marketing strategies. So why are only 28% of marketers completely satisfied with their ability to engage customers across channels at scale?1
There’s a clear gap today between the kinds of customer experiences marketers aim to create and what they can deliver. The cause? Marketers struggle to use their data in execution across channels. This ongoing disconnect leads to marketers missing out on significant growth and revenue opportunities.
In this guide, you’ll learn the drivers behind your data-driven marketing challenges, what Data Activation is, why it’s essential to your marketing success, and how to use it to deliver game-changing, repeatable growth.
1Salesforce. (2018). Salesforce State of Marketing: 5th Edition.
Marketers have never lacked brilliant ideas to better engage customers — they’ve lacked the data, martech, and people infrastructure to bring those ideas to life. You try to deliver 1:1 personalized experiences to your millions of customers only to see your marketing systems slow or break. You set out to bring consistency to cross-channel campaigns only to find you can’t work with the same data across channels. You design customer journeys around customer behaviors only to find your systems can’t act on those behaviors fast enough. Sound familiar?
If you’re like most marketers, it’s as if you’re stuck in an ongoing traffic jam. You know where you want to go and how you want to get there, but traffic prevents you from actually getting there. Most martech stacks—whether using legacy systems or a mix of the latest marketing technologies—create traffic jams for marketers, especially when faced with new use cases. Adding to the congestion, essential data is spread across departments and platforms. Then, you have to navigate past draining cross-department processes and dependencies on data and engineering teams to execute even basic campaigns.
2Kelton. (2019). Marketer vs Martech in 2020.
Unfortunately, the demands of “always-on” customers have evolved beyond what today’s marketing tools can handle.
At the heart of the problem is current martech stacks and processes that center around channels, rather than people. When customer experience decisions for a specific channel use only data from that specific channel, it’s no wonder that interactions across channels are disjointed. But when we flip the order to focus on the customer and use a 360° customer view to create unique cross-channel experiences around them, the experiences become seamless, delightful, and work to intuitively guide customers down the path to purchase.
With over 7,000 marketing technologies on the market, and more than 15 technologies in the average martech stack, how do you get your channels and systems to work together so you can effectively engage your customers? The answer is a shared data language.
In recent years, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have come on the scene promising to remedy marketers’ long-standing data silo challenges by unifying disparate data into a single view of each customer and connecting it across the martech stack. While CDPs have provided marketers with much-needed data consolidation and access, marketers still haven’t seen these data initiatives translate into their desired marketing outcomes.
It’s clear that shifting to customer-centric marketing and creating 1:1 personalized experiences requires more than just having a unified view of customers available. Marketers need to have their customer data drive the right marketing actions across channels.
With over 7,000 marketing technologies on the market, and more than 15 technologies in the average martech stack, how do you get your channels and systems to work together so you can effectively engage your customers? The answer is a shared data language.
In recent years, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have come on the scene promising to remedy marketers’ long-standing data silo challenges by unifying disparate data into a single view of each customer and connecting it across the martech stack. While CDPs have provided marketers with much-needed data consolidation and access, marketers still haven’t seen these data initiatives translate into their desired marketing outcomes.
It’s clear that shifting to customer-centric marketing and creating 1:1 personalized experiences requires more than just having a unified view of customers available. Marketers need to have their customer data drive the right marketing actions across channels.
The next big challenge marketers will face is becoming more apparent: marketers today use less than 50% of their data in their marketing3. Why does this matter? Because the kinds of experiences marketers want to deliver require quick action on insight into real-time customer behaviors, interests, and intentions. But as data continues to grow and change at an exponential rate, today’s marketing systems can’t extract insights and rapidly execute against them while those insights are still meaningful.
So how can marketers effectively connect 24/7 with millions of customers living across time zones and oceans in a way that feels as personal and relevant if they can’t rely on their data to guide the best marketing actions?
Activating Customer Data with the SmartHub CDP
3Techvalidate. (2018). Activating Customer Data for AI-Powered Marketing.
“One of the biggest challenges in one-on-one marketing is the need to activate large volumes of data when you scale to millions of customers across multiple touchpoints. Unlike other platforms that struggle with increasing amounts of data, Blueshift’s SmartHub CDP becomes more powerful the more data you have in it. This has allowed us to scale our personalization efforts and customer journeys across multiple apps on different channels, and the results have been tremendous.”
“One of the biggest challenges in one-on-one marketing is the need to activate large volumes of data when you scale to millions of customers across multiple touchpoints. Unlike other platforms that struggle with increasing amounts of data, Blueshift’s SmartHub CDP becomes more powerful the more data you have in it. This has allowed us to scale our personalization efforts and customer journeys across multiple apps on different channels, and the results have been tremendous.”
Chris Kachel
Sr. Director, Customer Experience, LendingTree
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