Brands Need A Customer Data Platform

Why your DTC eCommerce brand needs a Customer Data Platform

Published On: Sunday 4th December 2022

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a powerful tool in a Direct To Customer (DTC) brand’s technology stack. A CDP harmonises data from multiple sources to create a foundation on which intelligent first party campaigns can deliver brilliant customer experiences.

This blog post discusses why you need a CDP to deliver incremental business value.

Think Omni-Channel

Putting customers at the heart means meeting them where they are. They see a brand as an entity that can be seen across multiple communication channels and where they can purchase across multiple channels too. Customers also want a connected experience.

Customer centric brands have an approach called KYC – Know Your Customer. This means striving for a unified understanding of who they are, their attitudes, behaviours, preferences and needs.

Thinking omni-channel allows brands to strive to connect customer touchpoint experiences with everything they know about their customer. A CDP moves a brand far closer to an omni-channel, customer first world that improves experience and long term value.

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

A CDP is a centralized data management tool that brings together data from multiple sources and allows users to analyse and act upon this data to create a more personalized customer experience. A CDP gives brands the option to use their data the way they want and, at the same time, cleanse and enrich it to ensure that the data is accurate, reliable, and consistent.

CDPs are widely used for customer acquisition, retention, and engagement. CDP’s enable brands to streamline their data-related processes and activities, ensure data quality, and reduce costs.

Through a CDP, brands can also access more actionable insights and create an effective strategy for growth. CDP’s can be used to manage data from different channels and systems, such as eCommerce, CRM, marketing automation, and customer service tools, among others.

One of the biggest benefits of a CDP is it’s ability to orchestrate and automate. It’s this ability to perform at scale that makes a CDP an attractive component of a MarTech operation

Core Features of a CDP

A CDP addresses the key challenges faced by marketing leaders.

Gartner Says 63% of Digital Marketing Leaders Still Struggle with Personalization, Yet Only 17% Use AI and Machine Learning Across the Function

In our experience at Hexdon, brands often invest in solutions that are too complex for their internal teams to make sense of. They either don’t have sufficient resource to implement against the plan or, they simply don’t have the right skills. This is when brands turn to hexdon. Read our winning case study here.

  • Customer Data Ingestion covers sources such as Customer Events, Customer Records & Attributes, Transactional Data, Product Data and Behavioural Data to name a few. CDP’s have an open architecture, ready to ingest the sources that matter to your business.
  • Identity Resolution is a data management process that checks, validates and appends data from multiple devices and digital footprints. A matching process is performed to create a single, rich profile for a customer, consolidating duplicate records as necessary.
  • Single Customer View ensures that available customer data is unified to a single customer record. This ensures the brand has a full picture of their customer and associated attributes.
  • Segmentation allows brands to group customers into meaningful cohorts based on data available within the CDP. These cohorts have an associated value and can be activated with personalisation on an individual basis to deliver award-winning business results.
  • Campaign Automation ensures efficiency and scale by triggering campaign events from customer behavioural triggers. e.g. a customer visits the website as part of a segmented re-activation campaign, but abandons their session. A CDP would pick up this behavioural data point and trigger a communication to engage the customer again.
  • Campaign Orchestration brings together customer journey flows that support the best experience for the customer i.e. the right time, channel, message etc.
  • Reporting & Dashboards enable the rich customer data across Customer, Product, Transaction, Campaign and Commercial pillars, to be presented in meaningful and interactive ways. Comparison against previous periods, targets and benchmarks ensures meaningful analysis of brand performance. Note that CDP’s aren’t fully fledged Business Intelligence tools, but do have sufficient features to deliver meaningful value.
  • Deep Dive Analytics can be performed via a CDP to better understand customers, their engagement journeys across platforms and their value.
  • Real Time Activation features ensure brands can be present where the customer is when they need support. In todays world where attention is an advantage, deploying real-time communications is a competitive advantage.
  • Mass Personalisaiton ensures brands can create meaningful and personal experiences at scale. From <first_name> personalisation through to location triggers, mass personalisation ensures a resonant and memorable experience for the customer.
  • 3rd Party Connections are important for CDP’s as this is the path in which use cases are activated. The most unified CDP’s have email and sms capabilities to help brands connect directly with their customers. At the same time, passing customer data compliantly to ad platforms enables look a like audience targeting to increase reach, awareness, consideration, purchase intent and revenue.

Which CDP should you consider?

Gartner maintain an up to date assessment of the best CDO’s in the market. At Hexdon, we’re proud to be a Bloomreach partner. They are considered the world’s number 1 commerce experience cloud for good reason. They help brands like yours to delight your customers and drive a lifetime of brand loyalty.

CDP’s Deliver Competitive Advantage

Brands turn to a CDP to connect online and offline worlds. They help deliver advanced customer experiences by unifying data and connecting to 3rd parties. Segmentation, personalisation and campaign orchestration are central to their operation and results are enhanced when propensity models are applied to use cases.

Importantly, CDP’s allow greater scale and flexibility across the marketing tech stack, delivering additional ROI.

These are the reasons why DTC brands turn to CDPs in order to win.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your business, contact our team – we’ll help you enable your CDP and deliver meaningful ROI.

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