How to understand what a person is looking for on the Internet and what secret weapon can be used to make him feel that your product or service is the best among millions of online stores and service providers? LeverUP’s CDP expert Lucija Sopic answers these and other questions.
What are the hottest trends in customer experience and management at the moment?
One of the newer and more critical keywords is a well-functioning and configured customer data platform, also known in the marketing world as CDP. Foreign trade giants are ahead of us in adopting this software today. Still, smaller companies are also becoming more and more interested in how to get to know their customers better and make better-targeted offers to them.
One of our clients characterized CDP as a “data superhighway” that provides marketers with various types of customer data. In other words, the main goal of CDP is to merge different data silos into one, create logical connections between data flows and make them available in real-time and immediately usable.
How does this platform work, and how do you know, for example, that a company has adopted CDP?
Let’s say you want to buy a new phone. The first thing you do is go to Google and do an initial search – what could be a suitable model, how much it costs and where it is sold. Then you visit different websites, look at pictures and videos, and compare prices and delivery times. During these operations, the possibility of which company you end up buying your phone from actually changes many times.
We have all been in a similar situation, regardless of the product or the final purchase desire. And isn’t it that during this process, you can understand that shopping recommendations and social media ads are becoming more and more accurate and seem to be meant for you? As if someone reads your mind and knows what phone you’re looking for. Companies that show correctly targeted ads are most likely to have adopted CDP.
So, the data of the customer who wants to make a purchase is collected and put to work for their marketing goals. Please elaborate on what this means for the company.
Stitching data together is the key. Let’s say that a company wants to learn to know its customer better – either to increase sales, to develop its product or service, or to increase visibility. CDP makes it possible to collect all contact points left behind by a person – for example, a social media page, a company’s website and other channels where some kind of communication has taken place. After that, these points of contact become a conveniently managed customer profile that can be used, for example, to set up precisely targeted ads on Facebook.
This means that each person will have a unique profile. Can it also be applied to large customer groups and different segments?
Yes, this process allows you to create a campaign created precisely for each person, and it does not matter how large the total number of people with different interests is.
In addition, you can quickly and code-freely segment people who, for example, left an order unfinished, submitted a support request to customer support on a previous order and submitted a customer survey with a negative score in the last two months. You can engage in follow-up communication with them or make a new offer.
Indeed, this identification and analysis of consumer buying behaviour is beneficial for companies from a marketing point of view, but how do you see its impact on the consumer?
The more time goes on, the faster we want answers and solutions. After all, we want the correct phone model, colour, price and availability to reach our search window as soon as possible. Companies will inevitably personalize their marketing channels and messages. Hopefully, this will improve customer communication, and fewer and fewer offers will pop into our mailboxes that we are not interested in.
What does Salesforce’s experience show, and what results have companies achieved after adopting a customer data platform?
The feedback from customers is quite incredible. The results show that companies get almost 50 per cent more sales leads, can create customer segments 30 times faster and achieve almost double the return on investments.
If more numbers are given, such results are achieved because the artificial intelligence on the CDP platform can identify more than 200 different types of data for each customer, which helps to analyze a person’s purchasing behaviour.
Finally, one more important topic – how is all this legally regulated?
CDP is designed with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in mind. What makes this platform special is that it collects first-party data from various touch points, combines it, cleans it and creates a single unified customer profile.
