Introduction

It goes without saying that data is the new oil. In today’s competitive world, brands need to go the extra mile to ensure they stand out from their competition. And to do this, more and more experts are pointing towards using customer data to truly understand the buyer’s journey. A deep understanding of a customer or prospect’s journey can help brands cater to them in the right way.

With D2C businesses choosing to go increasingly omni-channel, it is all the more important for them to provide an exceptional experience for their customers at every step. That is where Customer Data Platforms or CDPs can help. This blog discusses everything you need to know about customer data platforms and tells you how you can choose the best platform for your D2C business.

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Why is CDP Impactful For D2C Brands?

The online world is filled with amazing e-commerce brands taking the customer experience to a higher level. To compete with these giants, D2C brands have to bend over backward and provide a stellar experience throughout their journey. Today, creating a unified experience has become a necessity, and CDPs help you do exactly that.

Customer data platforms can come in handy in the process of customer segmentation. Read on to understand how you can simplify and automate the workflows for each customer seamlessly with a CDP.

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What's The Data That Makes Up CDP?

CDPs avoid data siloes. No matter where your customer is, or what they do online, a CDP can help you track their activities and boost your efforts to reach them. When we say data, it is not just about who your customer is; it is also about what they like, what they dislike, how they behave online, and more.

There are various types of data that make up CDP to provide a 360-degree viewpoint

• Behavioural Data: Information generated by a user during a visit to a website, in an app, or on a mobile browser. These will include their searches, clicks, metadata, browsers, etc.
• Identity Data: Demographical and customer attributes such as names, gender, age, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, and other information.
• Transactional Data: Purchases, returns, and other information from e-commerce or POS system. Although it paints a smart picture of client preferences, it frequently fails to take into account changes in lifestyle.
• Marketing Data: Marketing or campaign metrics such as engagement, reach, impressions, and other metrics. This will also include social media engagements.
• Psychographic Data: Information on customers’ personalities, preferences, attitudes, goals, and opinions. Understanding your customer is mostly dependent on this type of information, which is frequently more challenging to obtain.
• Qualitative Data: This data includes Customer service information from CRM systems on live chat, the quantity, and length of interactions, frequency, NPS ratings, feedback, and reviews.

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Customer Segmentation Using CDP - How It Simplifies And Automates?

To truly cater to your target audience, segmentation is key. Why? It goes hand in hand with personalization. Segmentation helps identify buying trends and target relevant content to high-value segments, which in turn would lead to higher customer satisfaction and retention. Though many organizations today have comprehensive segmentation strategies, most of them do not have the right tech and tools to efficiently “section” their customers and deliver effective top-notch experiences.

However, do you know how to efficiently segment your target audience? Using a CDP can help you create multi-channel segments in no time. You can choose to segment based on multiple attributes, which gives you an extremely specific audience to target.

Let us take an example to understand this better. Imagine you are an online D2C business owner. One of the biggest concerns you have is the cart abandonment issue. While this is something major e-commerce brands are also facing, it costs dearly to D2C businesses. With a customer data platform, these brands can identify these “would-be” customer segments and target them specifically with personalized messaging and other marketing efforts. What more? Dynamic profiling can help you change your strategies with time, and improve the targeting.

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For Client Segmentation And Personalization, Some Use Cases Of CDP Include:

High-value segments

Identify and contact potential new customers with customized incentives based on key traits shared by your customers to increase their already strong probability of purchase.

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Individual push messaging

Customize various omni-channel message triggers depending on previous, one-of-a-kind consumer experiences.

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Preferred channels

Determine the channel that your clients have historically preferred to use to interact with your business. Then, adjust your marketing properly to prevent spamming.

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How Does CDP Work?

Here’s the thing: Many organizations, in an attempt to not miss out on the trends, end up using multiple tools to perform each activity separately. What does this result in? A data silo that is extremely inefficient and useless.

That is where CDP brings together all these aspects of customer analytics and provides organizations with a unified platform that they can leverage seamlessly.

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The Basic Components Of Customer Analytics Are:

Data Collection

One of the many marketing instruments your team employs is data collection. For instance, Google Analytics gathers information on visitor/user activity on your website.

There are too many tools that can be used. Apart from analytics, there are also HubSpot, MailChimp, Optimizely etc. Certain insights about your clients may be provided by a number of these data collection tools, but they are typically insufficient. And that is where the next 3 categories come into focus.

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Data Sorting

The next step is to find a means to organize your data and send it to the proper location for analysis. Your CDP functions as the data's traffic director. Your data will be instructed on what to do and where to go. CDPs are intended to link many tools collectively and guarantee that the data those tools are gathering is uniform throughout your business.

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Data Storage

A location where your CDP can transfer data for storage is the third component you'll require. Data warehouses are crucial to customer analytics because they were created for this purpose.

Websites, apps, emails, and other cloud-based tools are some of the sources of data that data warehouses collect and store.

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Data Protection & Privacy

CDPs also collect in-depth data that include motivational information, opinions, customer service information and so much more.

However, one common concern that people have when it involves conversations around data is: What about data privacy? Well, customer data platforms help you protect your customer’s data privacy by limiting and gatekeeping the data you collect. That is, the data use and governance strategy that you use along with your CDP can be vital in ensuring you collect only the data that would be helpful in your marketing efforts.

You can mark sensitive data with a CDP that has data tagging, protection, and permissions, and only provide visibility to the people throughout the business who need to see or use it at a given time.

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How To Choose The Best CDP Platform For Your Business?

Create a Working Group

Who are your stakeholders at this point is the question you need to ask yourself. Engage the teams already responsible for collecting consumer data because a CDP will absorb data from all areas of the company.

Each stakeholder does not have to assess the chosen CDP vendors on their own. However, it is crucial to ascertain their needs and explain the goals of a new CDP.

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Define your KPIs

Although it's simple to seek a new CDP to combine all of your data into a single, centralised database, what do you actually need from this useful technology? To avoid feeling overwhelmed, it's typically a good idea to model against a small number of clear use cases.

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Gather your tools

To help ensure you can meet your main use cases right from the beginning without requiring major adjustments, you must specify what tools are required to fulfill the particular use cases. These could be business information tools, communications platforms, online tools, or CRM tools.

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Prioritize your demands

Start with your use cases to define your goals, then make a list of the functional requirements they have. You can then categorize them by relevance and make sure that the selected CDP has these functions available to it.

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Take control of customer data and make it work

Although it is a demanding procedure to follow, keep in mind that a CDP is not simply another mar-tech platform but rather an enterprise tool that may greatly enhance business operations and assist businesses in achieving enhanced actionable insights, and hyper-personalized customer engagement to boost revenue.

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Conclusion

Overall, the right customer data platform would allow you to efficiently get all data pertaining to your customers in a centralized location. It would help predict your customers’ behavior over time (with machine learning and natural language processing) seamlessly. With the aforementioned criteria in mind, a thoughtful investment in a CDP can help your company function at the capability of the customer and quickly accomplish or surpass its goals.

If you would like to know more about customer data platforms and how they can help your D2C business grow, talk to our Fornax team today.