Next step towards unlocking the power of first-party data
As the world continues to come to terms with the implications of the Global Pandemic; industries are faced with the prospect of reinventing themselves in order to cope with the changing consumer landscape, as we see a huge shift to online platforms.
To add to this, Google has announced its plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years. Let’s look at the next step towards unlocking the power of 1st party data with the use of CDP (Customer Data Platform).
What is a customer data platform and how it works?
A CDP is a tool used by Advertisers to collect data interactions from multiple sources, viz: their company website, Facebook page, Twitter page, Linkedin page, and offline data. CDP collects PII Data like name, Email, customer number, or personal IDs. CDP works on both known and unknown data (cookies). These interactions are matched to a single customer profile and that profile is made usable to other systems that need it — like Email messaging, Facebook Ads, Programmatic platforms, etc.
Difference between CRM, DMP, and CDP:
CRM platforms focus on business relationships with customers. They help record transactions, historical sales data and keep records of customer communication and feedback.
DMP platforms depend on anonymous data (Cookies/Ad ids/IDFA etc). They are used for targeting Advertising campaigns and the data lasts for 90 days.
CDP platforms can link all types and sources of customer data, whether internal or external, structured or unstructured, known or unknown data. CDP helps with deep analysis of customer online and offline behavior, which allows users to take a more comprehensive view and better understand and respond to their customers in real-time.
Advantages of CDP:
Analyze Customer Behaviour: Marketers can analyze customer behavior across various channels that enables them to experiment and test various strategies to gain better results.
High ROI: CDP has the ability to segment audiences in a more accurate and targeted manner. The return-on-investment for online advertising can be significantly increased by leveraging CDPs.
Real-Time Website Recommendations: CDP allows you to create a personalized customer experience directly on your website by analyzing customer behavior. But this can only be done when you have the capacity to receive real-time information about the visitors, which can be implemented with a CDP.
Cross-channel attribution: CDP will have a more comprehensive view of the outcomes of Marketing activities and attribution across various channels.
Some of the CDP vendors: are Treasure Data, ActionIQ, Blueshift, Tealium, Lytics and Segment.
Some use cases from Top CDP vendors
- If an insurance company wants to run a Display or Video or Social Media promotion campaign with a 20% discount for the most valuable premium customers from the past year – this can be done only through CDP as a permanent data storage.
- Non-Reachable Users – Ad Targeting: Some users are neither reachable on telesales nor are they engaging with any of the native channels. The insurance provider can export the data of such non reachable users and target them through Facebook and Google Ads on their last product intent.
- Customer-Name-Based Personalization: An existing customer visits her insurance brand’s website. As the site loads up, she receives messages personalized with her first name.
- A user searches for a product online which is out of stock. The user visits the store and receives an app push mobile notification regarding the availability of the product in-store.
- A new user visits a hotel’s website, checks the room availability for a particular date and finds that the hotel is packed for those dates. A browser push notification or sms showing the available dates at a slightly lesser price can enable him to complete the booking.
- A user is booking air tickets between New York & Seattle but later drops off the site. When a price drop occurs on the route, the user can be intimated via a browser push notification, email or sms.
And lastly, CDP has a trusted customer profile along with demographic, behavioral, transaction, interaction, and intent data from internal, external, and third-party sources—in a single database.
CDPs are evolving for small, medium, and large businesses. With CDPs, you can deep dive into your combined customer information and use the results to predict the next best action for any customer for marketing campaigns to customer service. That means an expanded relationship, and ultimately more sales and business opportunities.
About the author:
Uday Kumar Haliga, Director Of Operations, Oplifi