Kane Dane
All-in-one marketing and customer data platforms or CDPs are more popular than ever, and for good reason. These information repositories store customer info, plus include different plug-ins and functionalities to transfer important data to departments or people rapidly. With the right CDP, you can better understand your customers, respond quickly to inquiries, and sell more effectively than ever.
But your CDP is only as good as the data you feed it. Depending on how you use your CDP, you could see better or worse results for your efforts. This page will break down how to enrich your CDP by leveraging it to maximum effect.
Connect Data Sources Together
For starters, you can reach your customer data platform by connecting all of your data sources together to construct a “single customer view”. In a nutshell, a single customer view is a holistic, comprehensive avatar or review of your target customer using all of the data gathered by different marketing channels.
To best leverage your CDP, make sure to connect all of your data sources to that platform. By connecting and integrating all of these data sources, the resulting customer avatar will be more accurate and thorough than otherwise. The better you know your target consumers, the better you can market to them and the more likely they are to form an emotional connection to your brand.
Create “Golden Records” for Customers
So-called “golden records” are combinations of meaningful and reliable data from several sources or systems into a single view. Think of golden records as the overall or master records for customers and leads for your business.
Specifically, your CDP should integrate both transactional and behavioral data into the golden record. All data should be integrated and absorbed in real-time to make sure that engagement, personalization, and analytics processes are up-to-date and relevant to your customers’ needs.
Once you’ve built up golden records for your customers, you’ll always know:
- What your customers want
- How best you can fulfill their needs
- How to predict what your customers may want in the future
In other words, golden records are marketing super tools you can’t afford to ignore.
Leverage Machine Learning Technology
AI and machine learning technology are spreading across multiple industries, including customer data platforms. Your company should also use advanced analytics tools and machine learning tech to:
- Understand individual customer needs and wants
- Segment customer behavior based on those needs and wants to improve your customer engagement and marketing decisions
- Make better predictions about your customers and how you can serve them best
- Optimize your goals more accurately and healthily for long-term business success
Machine learning technology essentially helps to predict what your customers want, need, and will demand from your business in the future. Try to find a CDP that includes machine learning analytics and tools, or integrate data from your CDP into another tool or software app to take advantage of this technological development.
Personalize Customers’ Experiences
Personalization is king when it comes to marketing, and that’s true for your CDP as it is everywhere else. You should try to personalize customer experiences across different marketing channels. Since you should have plenty of information thanks to your customer data platform, this should be fairly easy. You should know your customers’ names, addresses, unique needs, past purchases, and so on.
When you personalize customer experiences, those customers will be more likely to make purchases from your brand. More importantly, personalized marketing experiences make customers more likely to offer even more data, which you can add to your CDP golden records for individual customers.
Personalization can be implemented:
- In social media advertisements
- In email newsletters and email marketing ads – imagine a happy birthday email with a special product offer, for example
- And more
The more personalization you put into your marketing, the better your marketing results will be overall.
Enable Cross-Department Access to Your CDP
Lastly, you should optimize access and use of your CDP across your entire enterprise. Simply put, you have to enable cross-departmental access to the customer data platform. Why?
If everyone in your company can access the CDP, they can access the crucial information contained within. Armed with this data, your marketers, salespeople, and customer service representatives will all be able to perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively whenever they interact with the public or target customers.
Furthermore, enabling cross-departmental access to your CDP means that your data platform will constantly be fed new, accurate customer data in real-time. Over the months, your CDP’s golden records of your customers will become even more accurate and useful.
In the end, using your CDP while keeping these strategies in mind will help you see a much better return on your marketing investments. Use your CDP like it’s meant to be used and master your marketing and customer sales tactics like never before.
