Building a Campaign with a Customer Data Platform

Understanding your customers all comes down to your data and a tool, customer data platform, that helps you to understand it. If you’ve pulled in all the information you have about your customers, with the help of a CDP you should start to get an idea of what they like.

Not many businesses realise it, but the information you get out of your customer data platform is gold. It is the powerhouse behind any successful digital marketing campaign.

Companies still struggle to create engaging content, powerful messages, or relevant campaigns altogether. This can most likely be attributed to not just the state of their customer data, but the organisation’s attitude towards data in general.

Bad or incomplete data will inevitably make for poor performing campaigns.

Your customers won’t respond to campaigns that don’t interest them. Less if they receive communications that aren’t relevant to them.

The way to avoid this happening is to let the information from your CDP guide your campaign.

How Customer Data Platforms help to form Successful Campaigns

It can be challenging to develop effective engagement campaigns. Before you can start to create, there is a lot of preparation that’s involved.

A customer data platform allows you to understand your customers and put together data driven campaigns. These will be more personalised, more relevant, and overall more successful.

Knowing how to engage with your customers properly is what brings success. If you’re doubting whether you’re doing enough to engage your customers, then you probably aren’t.

The groundwork involved in the lead up to campaigns is what will decipher how well or poorly they perform. If you’re unsure of what to do beforehand, take a look at the following examples.

Data Unification

Combining and storing data in one place allows you to better understand and analyse your customer information. 

The more data you include in your data platform, the richer your campaigns will be. Including transactional, behavioural, or preferential data means you’ll develop a deeper understanding of your customers, their wants, and their needs.

The more data your CPD can ingest, the more your customers will feel understood as a result.

Once you develop that understanding of your customer you can start to identify campaigns that would be suited for them. 

Making decisions for your business based on data ensures that your decisions are better informed. You can be pretty confident that when you communicate with a customer you understand you will get some good returns from it.

Segmentation

64% of your clients expect customised interactions, so generic, scattergun communications will fall flat. While you may get lucky with some of your products or offers, you’ve alienated the majority of your audience. When you segment your campaigns you can tailor offers based on buyer behaviour. So you can not only anticipate an uptake in engagement, but a significant increase in revenue as well. 

Through segmentation, you can pinpoint a specific group to reach with a specific message or offer. Depending on the level of segmentation you apply, no two customers will receive the same email or notification.

To offer, on paper, two similar customers completely different product offerings and promotions is immensely powerful. 

Personalisation

Personalising your messaging gets you results. Even though getting there might require some effort, the benefits are well worth it.

Customer data platforms enhance your ability to create outstanding campaigns by incorporating various types of data to guide your messaging and personalisation. These actions benefit both your business and your customers’ experience.

Personalisation isn’t always as obvious as using someone’s name in your messaging. Rather, showing the customer what they have shown interest in in the past. Some of your users may browse your website for shoes. Use that information to include in your messages to them and make them more engaging.

Things like knowing where a customer left their basket and sending a message that immediately redirects them is extremely helpful. Every year, abandoned carts result in significant revenue loss, so it’s important you recover it using this strategy.

You’ll find that when you use your data to go beyond a first name basis your customer relationship will deepen.

Prediction 

In the long run, retaining your current customers is more valuable than trying to acquire new ones. You must understand how to interact with them and what to show them if you want them to keep coming back.

It is pointless and annoying to present them with something they have never expressed interest in. The only sales funnel that’ll steer them towards is your competitor’s.

Every single interaction you have with a customer should be used to get to know them better. The more data you gather and understand, the more it will filter into your predictive analytics efforts. Using a customer data platform to predict what customers would be interested in based on previous purchases or interactions will work.

You can start putting relevant messages and products in front of your customers once you can start to predict accurately. Customers will be much more likely to stick with you once they realise that what you’re sending suits their preferences.

Use Cases

On a practical day-to-day level, a customer data platform helps your business achieve its goals. Below are some examples of how our clients use it to deliver tangible ROI.

Primarily, each of them involves in-depth, real-time audience segmentation based on the comprehensive data stored within each unified profile.

Setting the right combination of attributes, you can speak to a specific audience, delivering personalised messages at any stage of the customer’s lifecycle.

Identifying Churning Customers 

Businesses that use a recurring subscription model are not the only ones that need to keep an eye on their rate of churn. Any company that depends on repeat business can use a customer data platform to spot customers who might never come back.

Once you identify these customers, you need to act on it or else you will lose them. Offering discounts or other offers can help to win back these customers.

Encouraging Customer Loyalty

Happy customers are loyal customers. The customers you continuously impress with your personalised campaigns are much more likely to keep doing business with you. 

Continuing to provide regular, meaningful and relevant experiences will strengthen your relationship with your customers and bring them from loyal customers to brand advocates.

Cross-channel Marketing Automation

Having data silos within each engagement tool is a disadvantage because it limits your ability to develop campaigns for different channels. As a result, your email campaigns are unaware of, say, messages sent via SMS or push notifications. It is not a good idea to hound your customers, but you also risk not learning which channels each one prefers.

A customer data platform can provide you with that level of knowledge and more. It serves as the intelligence engine that determines which engagement channel to use and when.

Wrapping Up

The needs and wants of your customers are quite varied. You can give them the personalised experience they desire by utilising the first party data you already have.

You can encourage your clients to take actions that will lead to results. The Single Customer View gets more detailed the more your customers engage with your brand. This makes it possible for you to market to your clients far more successfully. 

Learn more about the benefits of a customer data platform by booking a demo with us today.