Personalized marketing solutions that CDPs deliver
Orienting your marketing analysis and efforts using customer journeys may be the most powerful way to empathize with the experience your customers have interacting with your brand. And this applies to both on-line and off-line experiences- not just digital marketing optimization. Customers are constantly creating data for brands, now we need customer data platforms (CDPs) to make sense of it.
Making your customer’s buyer engagement world-class requires looking at your customer journey from lead-to-renewal then adding processes and systems that function in real-time while taking in new contextual factors like brand trends to define better more personalized messages. Sounds like a lot? A CDP can make customer journey analytics manageable within your own marketing team.
With CDPs, marketing analysts can control wrangling and secure customer data, but and a deeply empathetic customer expert who understands the attitudes and behavioral nuances of the different segments.
In my last installment, I described how CDPs are used for engagement scoring, which gives you insight into your customer experience's health. Yes, engagement scores could be bucketed within customer journey analytics. But what I like to describe here are the ways analytics give you visibility into the details of what’s going on. These inform personalization tactics.
4. Customer journeys analytics to unlock marketing personalization
Analytics in general has vital importance in reviewing the vast amounts of data created in the digital world. Customer journey analytics can provide a quantitative link between customer experience and hard metrics like revenue growth by channel or profitability by offering. The challenge in getting there is due to the amount of disparate digital data sources, an inherent requirement is that the data be cleaned and processed before being loaded into “self-service” analytical tools like Tableau or PowerBI. In fact, according to Gartner’s 2019 Multichannel Marketing Survey, 58% of marketers said leveraging integrated customer data was a significant or moderate challenge. This is where a CDP fills in the gap to get the data ready for insights and customer journey analytics.
Inherently, CDPs readily connect to data sources like CRMs, POSs, email automation, and programmatic advertising. Further, marketers need everything in time and seasons across all the channels where customers engage. But CDPs are up to the task by handling identity management rules, organizing and prioritizing the different keys and identifiers, and track of individual journeys over time.
What do you want to know?
Once you are set up, the excitement begins. This is where personalization becomes unlocked by the visibility you have from actual customer journeys. With the customer profile data, you have a modular solution to slice and dice for insights. Cutting the jargon out, marketers get answer key questions like:
What is really happening versus what I laid out to happen in my customer journey?
Which campaigns are used to keep our valued customers with us?
When is the best time to ask for a referral?
Which offers are impacting loyalty and referrals?
Can I find a cadence of communication that works without overwhelming?
Which topics seem to need repeating?
What combination of tactics converts leads to customers most effectively?
What combination of tactics keeps customers most cost-effectively?
Are there groups that behave the same way?
What is the minimum number of interactions before purchase?
Which campaign tactics are working? Is it working for just some?
How many attempts does it take to reach a customer before getting a response?
Do reminders work? And by how much?
Am I nurturing my customers in the ways they need?
B2B Use Case Example:
For a healthcare services company, we found quite a number of customers registered for the same webinar repeatedly but never attended it. This behavior signaled interest in the topic but suggsuggestedficulty with the timing. The register data and email open showed engagement was high for, however, the actual conversion signaled an opportunity to improve our connection.
We partnered with Boston-based marketing consultants, Revenue Architects, and dove into a reusable solution with customer journey analytics starting with webinar data, web interaction data and 3rd party firmographics.
Through audience isolation methodology and a CDP at the core to crunch the data, the team targeted specific audiences based on location and title. For example, we looked at engagement from prospects in Legal vs Finance, practitioners vs managers, and policy heavy states like CA and FL. They went on to use the same data to create a new campaign after finding engaging segments by characteristics including organization type, purchasing stakeholder role, and team size. Better targeting which more impactful message improved conversions even when it was to educate a key influencer. Practically and more tactically, the insights informed updates to templates, timing, and frequency of the webinar and white paper offering in a new improved marketing funnel.
In summary
The big barriers to getting customer journey analytics once several applications are being used are getting that information in one place and in a coherent manner. CDPs were invented to solve the data connection problem and the identification problem. When used to segment and look at customer journey analytics, thencan begin to answer a mymany questions that give visibility. When you can see what is happening and what is working, personalization happens.
In the final installment of this series on how CDPs fuel marketing personalization, I'm going to finish with finding ways to evaluate your return on investment (ROI) when it comes to implementing data-driven customer personalization.
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