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How CDP Marketing Powers Your Brand

How CDP Marketing Powers Your Brand by generating a blue lightning bolt from a metal pole.

Today’s ecommerce market is growing incredibly fast, as we all know. It’s never been easier to create an ecommerce business in every product category.

As a result, the industry has become much more competitive, giving shoppers more options than ever before. It’s just a fact: your competition is always just 1 click away on Amazon, Google, or elsewhere.

So how do you stand out? Brands and retailers like you are able to compete by offering buyers relevance and deep personalization at every touchpoint. With nearly infinite choices at their fingertips, lasting loyalty can only be achieved through a strategic, customer-centric approach that permeates the entire ecommerce operation. 

But how do you create that experience?

Marketers like you need access to customer data to gain deep insights into your buyers and drive real results. This is exactly why marketers need a customer data platform (CDP) that directly powers marketing. Learn why CDP marketing is the future of commerce. 

What is an Activated CDP?

A CDP pulls together information from multiple sources and platforms, such as your ecommerce software, point-of-sale, and marketing automation — unifying this data in a single source of truth. Centralizing this data into one platform creates a powerful, single view of the customer. 

But an Activated CDP takes that data and puts in in the hands of marketers, so they can use data to create more targeted and personalized campaigns to drive revenue and boost loyalty. The best CDPs are purpose-built for retail and ecommerce — able to handle the high volume of customer data in the space and directly drive marketing campaigns.

Why you need CDP marketing

Nobody wants to feel like just another number in a database, but sometimes that’s what can happen when you use software to automate processes. Not so with a CDP. A customer data platform can help you get better acquainted with your customers so you can improve the shopping experience. Here’s why you need a CDP to power your marketing. 

Understand customer interactions and buying habits

Trying to understand your customer when you only have access to email marketing data is almost as hard as running a 10K race with a hangover. With a CDP, you can get a better picture of customer behavior, as instead of one getting access to one slice of the pie (or one data silo), you can view all interactions in one place. 

Being able to see all the channels a customer used during their buying journey (even if they have different IDs within your system), you start to piece together the how and why your audience shops. Some of the extra insight you get includes:

  • The campaign and channel a buyer used to first engage with your brand, and which ones ultimately drove the sale
  • How often a customer viewed your content and products
  • How many–-and which–-campaigns they engaged with as a prospect

Run targeted, multi-channel campaigns

A CDP gives marketers access to purchase data, as well as website behavioral information, ad click data, and more — all of which provides you with a more accurate picture of customer preferences and helps you to personalize content and create deeply specific segments across multiple channels. 

Instead of sending all customers in a segment the same email, you can personalize certain messages based on past behavior. Take product recommendation emails. Instead of sending generic recommendations to every customer, with a CDP you can use recent page views and purchases to power the products you show. 

The same goes for data on which channels a prospect prefers. If a customer never opens your emails but has visited your site, browsed some products, and left again, why not show them a Google ad instead, or send them a push notification or a retargeting ad of a sale on that product?  

Measure marketing performance

A CDP gives you insight into the true performance of your marketing, whether you want to drive sales of specific products, generate brand awareness, or increase your social media following. By bringing all of your customer data together, you can track more than just email clicks and opens, and start to look at revenue-driven ecommerce metrics, such as sales conversion, average order value, and customer lifetime value

This arms you with the data you need to work out which campaigns lead to purchases, which drive loyalty, and which are falling flat and need to be optimized. 

Employ predictive analytics

By unifying customer data, you can extract actionable insight to help you provide more relevant, timely communication, as well as better understand buyer intent. By pulling in data from different acquisition channels, such as display ads, newsletters, and social media; website data, such as product or category views; and past purchase and lifecycle info, you can start to make predictions about future customer behavior. This includes both the likelihood of purchasing and time to next purchase. 

For example, by analyzing your data and trying to spot patterns, you notice that people who come to your website from your social media channels are more likely to make a purchase than people who click on a link in your newsletter. Or you might notice that people who buy shorts have a quicker time to purchase than those who buy jeans, especially when they visit your site in the summer months. 

This can influence your merchandising and website strategy, and many other facets of the business. As you have a better idea of which products are likely to sell well, so you can place them front and center on your website, as well as include them in product recommendation emails.

Center the customer, always

The C in CDP is key. Your customers are everything. But it’s also something that can be easy to forget when you’re poring over data and worrying about meeting goals. If you use a CDP, you can put your customers at the center of all your marketing campaigns so that they like you better and want to spend more time with your brand. And that’s how CDP marketing can power your brand. 

This article was originally published by our friends at Zaius.

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