Customer Data Platform — Potential Use Cases

Use Case: Cart Abandonment Campaign

Customers can abandon shopping carts for many reasons, including interruptions like needing to find a credit card or technical issues like their phone dying or their checkout page not loading quickly enough, but that does not mean they no longer want or need the products in their carts.

With approximately 75% of customers abandoning their shopping carts globally, this audience segment represents an ideal opportunity for brands to retarget customers. [1] Sometimes customers just need a little reminder of their incomplete purchase to complete the transaction. The right marketing technology combined with the right strategy can save those sales.

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help brands convert these lost sales. It gathers customer data from every available source including real-time behavioral data, such as whether a customer has abandoned their cart. The data is made instantly available to other solutions, including customer messaging solutions, which can act upon the data instantly. That enables marketers to set up automated messaging that responds to cart abandonment in real-time.

Depending on marketer strategy, customers who have abandoned their carts can be targeted in multiple ways. Some of the strategies include –

· Exit-intent browser notifications

· Emails reminding them of the items they haven’t bought

· Personalized messages containing vouchers

Similarly, organizations would not want to advertise to customers who later purchased the items that they had stored in their shopping cart. Using a CDP, organizations can leverage data to create and sync suppression lists to the media platforms to ensure that resources are not wasted on targeting the wrong people thereby reducing the costs. [3]

Use Case: Optimizing Media Targeting with better Lookalike Marketing

Lookalike marketing is a popular practice of using existing customer profiles to find similar potential customers to market to. The concept assumes that a group of people with shared attributes and behaviors will respond similarly to certain offers or campaigns. This technique has significant advantages over more traditional strategies of targeting offers based on data such as demographics or geographic location. [4]

It not only helps organizations to save time and lower their cost of acquisition, but also helps to identify high-qualified customers and expand potential audience segments. Lookalike audiences average a higher CTR (click-through rate) than other audiences 90% of the time. [5]

In the new Cookieless world, there is a need for innovative marketing to drive growth in the absence of third-party cookies.

To fully reap the benefits of lookalike marketing, organizations need should have access to extensive sources of consumer data. This is where a Customer Data Platform comes into the picture.

A CDP allows organizations to integrate their customer data sources into one central repository. This single source of customer data can encompass both online and offline engagement, and all the customer touchpoints, including website behavior, email engagement, purchases, loyalty programs, customer support tickets, product reviews and more. The result is a much richer and more accurate view of customer behavior.

By using this unified customer data, organizations can create segments and profiles based on the customer attributes. The best and most loyal customer segments can then be selected, and marketing campaigns can be designed to effectively target these segments. [6]

CDPs leverage machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze all this data. [7]

Use Case: Location Based Marketing

Location-based marketing has proven effective across customer lifecycles — from discovery and purchase, to engagement and retention. When used properly, location-based marketing allows marketers and organizations to target specific customer segments with suitable offers, while improving customer experience. For example, location-based marketing may alert a prospect that a product they have been considering is stocked in a nearby store, allowing them to pick it up right away.

Location-based marketing has largely been enabled over the past several years by the growth of connected devices. Today it seems that everything is connected to the internet — phones, cars, watches, and more. These devices are often tracking their owner’s location, meaning there is an abundance of location and spatial data available. Insights derived from this data provide marketing teams with greater context into how to reach customers and improve their overall experience. [8]

CDPs combine location data with additional customer insights for a complete picture of needs and preferences. Organizations can then target the customers with customized offerings and enhance customer experience.

When the location data is integrated with the CDP, location-based actions can be automatically triggered across multiple marketing channels. When target audiences enter a specific geographic location, they become an active target of the marketing strategy. Organizations can then target them by delivering relevant content, offers, or some other form of messaging (email and/or SMS text message) to provide the best possible experience.

This can help organizations and marketers to –

· Increase customer traffic

· Deliver more relevant ads

· Drive consumers away from the competition

· Create a better user experience

Tackling Privacy Concerns

CDPs can also help in resolving privacy concerns around location-based marketing. This can help organizations ensure compliance to stringent legal regulations like GDPR.

CDPs can be used in combination with Consent Management Platforms to collect user consent data. This data can then be made applicable to the segmentation rules across different marketing channels to make sure that customers who have opted-out for specific communications do not receive any ads or messages.

Customers are also wary of cyberattacks that could make their data available to malicious audiences. These attacks harm both customers and businesses. CDPs ensure data security by providing a good layer of encryption and by preventing MITM attacks from within the organization. [9]

References:

[1] https://www.mparticle.com/blog/recipe-re-engage-shopping-cart-facebook

[2] https://www.crossengage.io/saving-the-sale-converting-cart-abandoners-with-a-cdp/

[3] https://www.lytics.com/blog/smart-audience-segmentation-and-suppression-with-a-cdp/

[4] https://blog.treasuredata.com/blog/2018/08/28/from-segmentation-to-lookalike-audiences/

[5] https://www.driftrock.com/blog/facebook-advertising-guide-lookalike-audiences

[6] https://www.datatalks.se/how-entertainment-businesses-can-find-lookalikes-on-their-best-customers/

[7] https://www.lytics.com/blog/predictive-audiences/

[8] https://www.marketingevolution.com/knowledge-center/topic/marketing-essentials/locationbasedmarketing#:~:text=Location%2Dbased%20marketing%20allows%20organizations,in%20their%20region%2C%20and%20more

[9] https://www.evolok.com/blog/using-customer-data-platforms-secure-your-customer-data