A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is used to collate consumer data from diverse first, second, and third-party sources into a single central location. It records and distills your consumer interactions into unified identities, and provides insights that help you drive marketing content and offers that resonate with the individual customer.

Let’s dive deeper to understand how this works.

Recognizing who your customers are and understanding their affinities, needs, and motivations is critical in marketing. The faster you do so, the more relevant and individualized your services and communications become. Identity resolution is key to achieving this objective.

Identity Resolution, or ID Resolution, involves the combining of user information to create a unified profile based on the data obtained from diverse online and offline sources, stitching together known logins with anonymized user sessions.

This means that irrespective of whether a user is logged in to their account on an eCommerce website or not, through recognizable data such as IP address or device, a CDP solution can identify the user or the household and update and enrich the existing customer profile.

Further data enrichment (using third-party data) turns every unified customer profile into a comprehensive Golden Customer Record, which then serves as the single source of truth. This ensures that, at any given juncture, organizations have an always-evolving 360-degree customer view for better engagement and targeting at an individual and household level.

The process of profile-building initially involves the standardization of data from different touchpoints. These touchpoints include online and offline sources, such as web search, mobile app browses, communication between customers and CRM executives at physical stores, POS data, and social media engagement.

Data taken from such disparate sources are generally in different formats and sizes. A CDP converts them all into a common format – a process known as data standardization.

Before getting into the various ways in which a CDP can build individual profiles, one must know the unique types of data that a CDP collects. The most vital of these is first-party data, which is the information your customers give you voluntarily. For example, the phone number, email address, and location a user provides while using a newly-installed mobile app. Other examples include data from loyalty programs and purchase history.

Another important first-party user data is identity-based, which is how a user wants to be identified by people and companies. This includes their name and gender.

Behavioral data comes from tracking users’ online behavior, such as social media engagements and customer journeys on eCommerce websites (think search, page views, click-throughs). All this data is collected dynamically from different user sessions on your site or app, after which the CDP starts the identity resolution process.

Using a common identifier such as IP address, clusters of duplicate records are created and one surviving record overrides the rest. This process is called deduplication.

Some of the characteristics of ID resolution are:

• Persistency of ID — the assigning of an identifier to a given individual and maintaining it even when some of their details, like their phone number and postal address, change.
• Deterministic matching, which involves associating multiple identifiers belonging to a given person to a given shared ID during profile building.
• Probabilistic matching, which involves associating different identifiers across different devices or accounts that appear to relate to a given person even when no deterministic match is there between them. Probability-based data collection and identification may involve machine learning and AI algorithms.

Profile building is an essential aspect of customer data management through CDP. Building evolving profiles enables businesses to adopt a dynamic and omnichannel customer engagement model in marketing.

Omnichannel customer engagement is one of the several benefits of employing a CDP for marketing in an age wherein the boundaries between multiple channels of communication are getting increasingly blurred.

Omnichannel engagement requires businesses to blend multiple channels for seamless transitions, a task that is made possible by CDPs. By arming you with 360-degree customer views and deep customer insights, a CDP helps you deploy the right offers and product recommendations to the right user at the right time—whether the user is on your app or website, or at the physical store.

Say a customer is looking for Mother’s Day gifts on a beauty website via desktop. A few hours later, they download the app on their phone and continue searching for a gift.

Instead of a fragmented experience where the user has to start all over again on the app, with a CDP-resolved unified customer profile, the app experience can be personalized to directly show the user products similar to what they were searching on the website or the most popular Mother’s Day gifts of the season, and even offer them an incentive to complete the purchase.

Such a personalized experience will ensure conversion and seamless customer engagement across channels.

In conclusion, the ability to resolve customer identities and create ever-evolving Golden Customer Records is key to enabling hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences. ADA Global’s Real-time CDP addresses this need. The platform is built for retail with online and offline data management capabilities. Further, it uses AI-ML algorithms to create micro-segments and uncover marketing opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle.

Request a demo here.

Today’s consumers want highly personalized services and digital experiences. In fact, about 3 out of 4 users get frustrated when they do not get that convenience. Ecommerce personalization is, therefore, crucial in today’s eCommerce-dominated marketing landscape.

The key requirement for personalization is coherent customer data. There are many data management solutions that process and analyze customer data to help you create personalized marketing strategies, targeted ad campaigns, and optimal experiences for your customers.

The most popular of these data management solutions are:

• Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs)
• Data Management Platforms (DMP)
• Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

CDP, CRM, and DMP all have a common modus operandi—analyzing and compiling data collected from multiple sources to create detailed customer profiles. These profiles are used to optimize and personalize products, services, adverts, customer relationships, and other marketing-based functions.

At the same time, these platforms also have some fundamental differences. You need to know these differences to be able to choose the solution that is best for your business. Choosing the ‘wrong’ solution can affect your business operations and ROI, as all three options can be expensive to implement.

Let’s delve deeper into each tool to understand the differences.

A CDP is used to aggregate customer data from a wide array of sources to create a coherent, comprehensive, and evolving profile for each customer. These sources include your website, mobile app, social media pages, Point of Sale (POS) systems, live chats, and email marketing systems, among others.

A CDP gathers first-party data from the channels it is connected to and the systems it is integrated with. The data can be of different types: behavioral, demographic, technographic, transactional, and more.

The platform uses this data to create real-time customer profiles and build a comprehensive customer database. It gives you a 360-degree, unified view of a customer.

More importantly, a CDP centralizes this database, making it accessible to other enterprise systems that handle different functions like demand forecasting, CRM, data analytics, marketing automation, personalization, marketing campaign creation, A/B testing, and dynamic content personalization.

All the while, the system keeps collecting new data to update millions of customer profiles seamlessly and simultaneously.

DMPs are used to collect and organize data from first-, second-, and third-party sources to build individual customer profiles. The aggregated data can then be shared with other business or marketing technology systems.

The data is specifically used to drive targeted advertising and personalization on different digital channels. That doesn’t mean that a DMP independently manages customer data and creates advertising campaigns. It acts as an intermediate entity between data sources and the places where the content will be used.

Now, the key differences between a DMP customer profile and a CDP customer profile are:

1. Both the data and profiles in DMPs are anonymized. These profiles are accessible to marketers not as identifiable individuals but only as customer segments.
2. The data and profiles can be stored for a limited time only.

For instance, say a marketer is looking to create a targeted marketing campaign for a certain demographic of people. They can use the DMP to find data for the segment they want to target, such as the number of women below the age of 30 currently using a Samsung Galaxy phone.

Once the DMP system gathers and runs this data through various analytical tools, marketers can target the customers in that segment. All the individuals in a segment will receive the same marketing messages, emails, and adverts on social media pages or other online touchpoints.

As a result, where a CDP is geared more towards profiling and serving existing customers, the primary use of a DMP is winning prospective customers with data-driven online advertisements.

A CRM uses a series of data collection, management, and analytical tools to manage relationships with customers. This system uses AI and machine learning-based tools for pattern recognition and in-depth data analytics. Chatbots—which are essentially AI-powered customer service executives—are prime examples of CRM tech.

Where a DMP is primarily used for targeted advertising, CRM is associated with sales teams. One of the main uses of CRM is analyzing data in user reviews and feedback to develop better products over time.

Like CDP and DMP, this solution too dynamically gathers customer data, but the purpose is to evolve and improve the quality of services. You can employ CRM systems to simplify customer interactions, resolve post-purchase grievances, and optimize the functionality, reliability, and durability of products and services.

A CRM platform enables you to align your sales and marketing operations through integration with CDP, DMP, and other similar tools. You can achieve this by tracking individual customer journeys by sourcing first- and second-party customer data from feedback forms, surveys, responses to emails, activity on your website, call center communications, cookies, and others.

Due to today’s cutting-edge competition, many products and services have similar quality, capabilities, and functionalities. So, customer opinions and purchase decisions are formed based on their marketing interactions and overall experience with your business. CRM tools help optimize these interactions.

A CDP is a well-rounded customer data management solution for many reasons.

• First, only a CDP helps you unify data collected from diverse sources, including your legacy databases and other digitized records, to relentlessly update real time customer engagement profiles in real time. You can also integrate CRMs and DMPs into a CDP to help augment its first-party customer data.
• Second, the centralization of data lets you break down any existing data silos between different sub-departments within your marketing department. This lets employees and managers across the board participate in marketing-related strategizing, thereby making decision-making more balanced and data-driven.
• Third, the 360-degree customer profile lets your business optimize marketing campaigns and other engagement efforts by enabling hyper-personalization for individual customers. After all, dynamic personalization not only improves customer retention over time, but also revenue by 5-15% and cost efficiency by 10-20%, according to McKinsey.
• More than anything, a CDP helps you make the most of every interaction between you and your customers across every channel and touchpoint. A CDP is more than just a data collection and unification tool–it enables audience activation and campaign orchestration across different communication channels.

The above-mentioned capabilities make ADA Global’s Real-time CDP a trusted and reliable solution among major retailers and brands worldwide. It is built for retail with online and offline data management capabilities, and tracks customer behavior using over 1,200 out-of-the-box measures and dimensions.

Further, it uses AI-ML algorithms to create real time customer segmentation and uncovers marketing opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle.

Request a demo here.

So, you put in the work, try to optimize where you see opportunity, and leverage new techniques. You’re excited about this email. Yet, you don’t see the results you were expecting.

It’s frustrating.

In today’s social-media driven world where everything is quick and easy, it is forgivable to assume that email marketing is past its glory days. Yet, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Marketers still vouch for email to deliver results and here’s why:

 Source: campaignmonitor.com

But the question remains – how do you improve your email marketing campaigns? Where do you start and how do you go about it?

In this blog, we will cover how you can make the most of your email channel and the best practices in deliverability, personalization, and dynamic content personalization.

Let’s dive right in.

When is the last time you saw an email that resonated with you? One that had you hooked right from the get-go. One that covertly but seamlessly navigated you to click on the CTA button. The brilliance of a well-crafted email that leads to conversions is its simplicity in encouraging action.

While there is no definitive formula to craft the perfect email, here are a couple of pointers to help get you started:

• Focus on Your Key Objective For The Email: While it’s tempting to cram in as many ideas and offers in one email, it is important to hone in on one objective. This is the theme of your email around which everything else falls in place. Imagine crafting an email centered on trying a new holiday theme recipe. However, the email also includes content about passes to a concert. Confusing, right? Always begin with a clear objective. Your content and design must speak to this objective.
• Maintain a 60% Text to 40% Image Ratio: It’s important to structure your email in a way that appeals to the reader. No one has the time to read chunks of text in an email. It is off-putting and can result in a dip in your KPIs. Conversely, an email laden with images can come across as too promotional. Maintain a healthy balance of text and image that conveys a message than a sell.
• Keep Your Subject Line Short And to The Point: Your subject line should not exceed 41 characters or 8 words. This is the first interaction your audience will have with your email – if it doesn’t convey the message on the first read, the reader will most likely ignore the email.
• Your Subject line, Content, And Visuals Need to be Aligned: Imagine a subject line that speaks of an exclusive summer offer, but the banner contains winter cues, while the main content holds information about an upcoming launch. It is haphazard. It will not translate. Nor will it meet its objective for the campaign. The messaging right from the subject line to the CTA must all be aligned.
• Include a CTA in Every 3rd Fold of The Email: This draws attention back to your objective and keeps the reader engaged. This also aids in improving the conversion rate of the email.
• Ensure Your Email is Responsive And Within the Recommended File Size: Bear in mind that your audience accesses and views your email on different devices. With over 60% of emails being opened on mobile devices, it is important to ensure that they are responsive and load with ease. The recommended file size is 80-100 kb.
• Use Valid Links With UTM Tags: Ensure that the links used in your emails contain no typos or errors. It is especially important when your CTA links to a different landing page or sign-up sheet. An error in your link may cost you conversions. Remember to add UTM tags in your emails to track its progress across online platforms. Data is key – gather, analyze, and optimize to make the most of your email channel.

While the guidelines above will help you speak your message to your audience, it is also important to speak to your audience.

Here are three key factors to help you clinch gold in your email marketing efforts:

1. Experiment With ai email personalization: Gone are the days when a cookie-cutter mass mailer did the trick. Your audience wants you to speak to them on a personal level. They want to form a bond with your brand. It is this connection that will drive engagement. Here is how you can experiment with personalization:
   • Lifecycle Email Campaigns – Based on the different life stages in your audience’s journey, create and share emails relevant to each segment. For example, share a welcome email as soon as someone subscribes to your newsletter. Or share an email reminding them about their cart. It is important to cultivate your relationship with your audience at each stage. Sharing emails at each nodule engages them and helps to motivate them along their lifecycle.
   • Always-on Campaigns – Share emails to your subscriber list based on their individual loyalty points accrued, offers based on past purchases, as well as festive offers to help keep them engaged with your brand.
2. Drive engagement With dynamic content platform: The more relevant an email is to your audience, the more value you add to your campaign. Dynamic content empowers you to offer your audience a personalized experience at scale. The dynamic content you can leverage to increase the effectiveness of your campaign are::
   • Text – It is the most common and effective type of dynamic content facilitating personalization. You can personalize a line, a sentence, or even a paragraph to different subscribers. For instance, if you are a clothing brand, based on past purchases, you can create a dynamic paragraph on clothing and footwear that can be personalized for each audience segment.
   • Visual – You can change the image, GIFs, and videos based on the segments you target. You can also experiment with various visual elements based on your segment.
   • CTA – You can customize the size, shape, color, and text within your call to action to drive your click-through rate and result in conversions.
   • Offer – Include customer offers in your hyper-personalized email campaigns based on seasonality, gender, interests, available inventory optimization, timing, and other personalization variables. For instance, let’s assume you run an email campaign with an offer for shoes at a discounted price. Say this email resonated with the people from Japan (in the JST time zone) and they made use of the discounted price. Consequently this resulted in you running low on stock. The people in the Pacific Time zone have yet to view this email. This gives you a leeway to switch the offer with a discount on another product. So, when a person from the PST time zone views the email, they will see the new offer.
3. Analyze and Enhance Deliverability: With elements of the email now in place, it’s time to dot your ‘i’s and cross your ‘t’s. Deliverability does have an impact on the performance of your triggered email marketing campaign. Here’s how you can avoid dips in your performance owing to low deliverability:
   • Authenticate – Ensure that your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are in place. This will help internet service providers verify that your mail server is authorized to share mass emails.
   • Monitor – Routinely check if your brand or sender ID figures on any blacklists. Review your brand’s score in senderscore (you want to fall in the 90-100 percentile), and errors in postmasters, to ensure that you are clear of any shortcomings. This will help ensure that your emails go out without a hitch.
   • Act – It is important to monitor and make changes as your campaigns progress. When you notice a spike in the number of unsubscribes, it is wise to reduce the frequency of emails being sent. This helps to sustain your sender reputation until you can adopt a different strategy. Routinely purge the ID with bounces and non-openers that show up after 180 days. This will help you maintain a healthy list and in turn healthy email campaign performance.

In summary, email continues to remain a robust and effective digital marketing tool. When executed the right way, a successful email marketing campaign can lead to a great customer experience and higher sales. The vast opportunities available with email give you the ability to experiment and improve as you go. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your emails (emojis add flair too!). In closing, always remember to adapt, test, and optimize!