Globally, customer-centricity has become one of the cornerstones of the retail industry transformation. One would think, it’s the Walmarts of the world that are setting high customer expectations in retail experiences. Not at all. It’s actually the tech giants that have shifted the paradigm and redefined buying experiences.

Leading the way are Google (Omniscient, Omnipresent!), Netflix (Disruptive Content Viewing recommendations!), and Amazon. And what about the introduction of the familiarly deep voice of Amitabh Bachchan on Alexa? Innovative to say the least and an absolute bestseller marketing strategy!

With such stratospheric expectations, it is only natural that retailers worldwide are investing in AI-powered solutions. These are built on robust customer data that promises a stellar end customer experience.

Of course, challenges in this spectrum aren’t new. Cloud computing becoming de rigueur and ubiquitous. Digital transformations was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in changed consumer behaviour. Harnessing the best of customer data to take ‘intelligent’ decisions is the need of the hour. But the real issue is about the competing claims and varying tech offerings that promise the moon, but fail to achieve (flatter to deceive) when it comes to results.

Customer Data Platform (CDP), are the new kids on the block and in the rather over-crowded MarTech space they have definitely caught the fancy of all. Despite a purported market size of USD 1.6 Billion, there is still confusion and hesitation on part of the buyers, when it comes to the actual advantages of investing in such a platform/solution.

Based on multiple successful case-studies and applications from across global retailers, let’s look at three ways in which the CDP has generated massive positive payoffs not just for the marketers but for the entire enterprise.

A CDP can help identify your ‘best’ customers to engage with. Here are three fundamental aspects of how it enables this for a marketer.

1. Create a Single View of the Customer
   A retail customer data platform unifies data from every single customer touchpoint across the enterprise to create what is known as the ‘Golden Customer Record’. This enables building up an in-depth profile of every individual customer to start identifying the right behaviours/opportunities for growth, retention, loyalty, and lifetime value.
2. Act on Real-time Customer Behavioural Trends
   CDP helps the marketers capitalize on those ‘Moments of Truth’ during a customer journey and ensures improved engagement, leading to faster conversion.Use cases can range from the more common cart-abandonment interventions and, on a shopping app using personalized in-app banners or push notifications leading to more complex journeys that could string together his search experiences, search terms and personalized recommendations. Based on this, marketers are orchestrating a triggered email marketing that is also dynamic and depending on the time he/she opens their email.
3. Ensure Campaign Success Based on Optimal Audience Lists
   CDP drives analytics-based decisioning for multiple use cases. Say, for example, a retailer plans to introduce a new product and launch a promotional campaign for the same. CDP helps identify the most appropriate campaign audience for the same, with the help of lookalike profiling and finally give an appropriate audience that has a higher propensity to buy the new product/category or brand that one is promoting.

CDP literally becomes the ‘brains’ behind all marketing operations leading to precise targeting through better knowledge of customer needs. This has an impact both on the top-line revenue through improved metrics like frequency and on the average order value that can be influenced by such optimal marketing influences. What a CDP also focuses on, is improvement in the bottom-line margins through multiple cost-saving efficiencies. Here are a few examples:

1. Better Managed Data – By unifying relevant data from multiple silos into a single purpose-built ‘lake-house’ for the marketing team’s end-usage.
2. Cost Savings Through Improved Marketing Performance
   • Decreased cost of managing creatives by using template libraries for creatives.
   • Optimizing your paid media campaigns by the use of Custom Audiences with the right set of real time customer segmentation for all re-targeting campaigns on GA/FB/etc. This leads to decreased CPA on all your performance marketing initiatives.
   • Marketing Automation leads to faster Turn-Around Time for your campaign go-live – and this can be achieved across multiple types of customer journeys (E.g. On-demand CRM, trigger base, lifecycle based, drip journeys, etc.)
   • Improved App performance through native dynamic content personalization on the mobile app and lesser development efforts for any campaign requirements from external development resources/project management, etc. for the technology teams.

With a CDP at the center of your MarTech, retailers can focus on building out a best-of-breed stack to understand what combinations can bring in the best results; all this without any disruption to customer experience. They can use the CDP as a central point of defining all customer experiences, including say, a new personalization engine that powers experiences on their app or change the underlying platform that powers their ecommerce personalization platform, etc.

Gartner defines a ‘Smart-Hub CDP’ as one of the most progressive types of CDPs.

The potential benefits of such a customer-centric master mind solution is not just for the marketers but also for the entire organization focused on deriving values by improving top-line growth (incremental sales) and staving off costs (bottom-line optimization) to bring in the best bang-for-the-buck from investments.

As we move into a world with fewer cookies and other identifiers, maintaining accurate measurement will depend heavily on the intelligent use of first-party data, privacy-safe techniques like data aggregation, and machine learning models.

A CDP gives marketers all of these, in an easy-to-use interface. The marketers who thrive and succeed, will be those who act on it and adopt it today. Are you one of them?

This article was first published on Times Internet.

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.