Successful marketing is customer-driven marketing. It’s what makes any business work or fail. Customers require our full attention as marketers, and you must put them at the center of your strategy if you’re aiming for success. To be able to do that, you need actionable customer data.
Enter Customer Data Platforms or CDPs. Such a platform acquires and delivers the information we need to align our business and messages with customers’ needs.
Customer Data Platform software can elevate marketing campaigns and strategies.
That’s why we at VibeTrace created sophisticated CDP software to personalize your customer journeys and optimize conversion rates.
How does such a platform work, and what can it do for you? That’s what we’ll answer in today’s article, so make sure you don’t miss a word!
What is a Customer Data Platform?
Customer journeys, the paths people take to complete a purchase, are a zig-zagging nightmare of touchpoints. Customers hop between product lists, blogs, social media accounts, e-commerce sites, and even physical locations when available and arrive at a buying decision long after they first interact with your brand.
To keep up with their customers, brands need to personalize every interaction. That goes for you too, if you want to go from interactions to conversions. Below we’ll explain how a CDP works and guides all your marketing efforts.
How Does a CDP Work?
A Customer Data Platform:
- collects and organizes data at every touchpoint;
- provides actionable insights that you can use to create tailor-made marketing campaigns and personalize interactions with your customers;
- creates detailed customer profiles based on the gathered data that comes from a variety of sources.
VibeTrace’s sophisticated Customer Data Platform enables you to automatically harvest information from transactional systems, CRM, your website and forms, blog and product lists, and omnichannel marketing campaigns.
The gathered information is organized and stored as customer profiles that give you a clearer picture of your ideal buyer and target audience.
As marketers, we must know our customers better than we know ourselves. Data became crucial with the rise of the digital age. But what exactly is it? Below we’ll discuss the types of data you can gather with a CDP.
Types of Customer Data You Can Gather
Depending on your sources and the software you might use, you are going to gather various data types. Available customer information generally falls into one of these categories:
- Profile Data – that’s information that can describe your customers. It can be as detailed as personal name and location, contact information, and social profiles, to something broader as demographic details, from lifestyle to hobbies and preferences.
- Transactional Data – it covers any transactional interactions a customer has with your business. That can be any purchase, returned orders, abandoned carts, or even provided feedback. It can show you how recent a given order is, how frequently a specific customer makes purchases, and even their monetary values.
- Events Data – that’s information that paints a clear picture of your customers’ behavior when they land on your website. How often do they land on your website, and what steps do they take? Where are they coming from? That brings me to a more specific type of events data.
- Marketing Events Data – Customer Data Platforms track customers’ interactions with marketing campaigns. That helps you in several ways – figure out the channels that bring in the most traffic and/or the most conversions, identify ones that need optimization and those you’d want to drop, as well as figure out what messages and types of campaigns have a greater impact on your results.
Why Use a Customer Data Platform in E-commerce?
Customers want personalization.
They want to see that brands and businesses care about their needs and preferences.
The ability to gather data on anonymous users, analyze customer behavior and track data both online and offline turned Customer Data Platforms into an invaluable tool for e-commerce owners in personalizing customer journeys.
Here’s how:
Provide Personalized Experiences
Businesses create buyer personas to improve their understanding of customers.
CDPs remove the guesswork from the process. That helps you develop and execute customized marketing campaigns that align with customer interests.
Fast-growing brands generate 40% higher revenues through personalization.
You can use the actionable insights and the generated customer profiles in-sync with product recommendations engines.
Find your customers wherever they are with just the right offer. And the best part? You don’t even have to build a recommendations engine yourself.
You can use white label product recommendations software and save on costs and time.
Create Better Customer Journeys
There are multiple touchpoints between customers and your business. When you’re gathering information about the interactions at these touchpoints, you can massively improve the overall customer journey.
You get a clear picture of how customers behave and react to various interactions – emails, ads, surveys, even push notifications and SMS.
You can then create an engaging and persuasive omnichannel communication strategy, thus making the overall journey better, regardless of the stage in the customer’s journey.
Target Specific Segments with Specific Offers
A Customer Data Platform like the one we built at VibeTrace uses sophisticated machine learning algorithms and powerful AI to sift through and organize gathered data.
That helps you create specific segmentation, as detailed or generalized as you want.
In the VibeTrace CDP, you can use various characteristics to segment your audience – from personal information to customer behavior and transactional data. Add tags, attributes, and events to group customers and anonymous visitors as you see fit.
That’s actionable information that allows you to execute better campaigns and target different segments with different offers. And all that’s left is to go full circle, as you’ll see in the next section.
Get Real-Time Data on Campaign Results
Once you’ve executed your targeted campaigns, it’s time to analyze them. The Customer Data Platform software provides you with real-time information on campaign performance and customer interactions:
- Interactions with campaigns – keep an eye on metrics like Open Rate, CTRs, Unsubscribe Rate, Response Rate (for customer surveys), etc. You can gather information from omnichannel campaigns. As a result, you can make your messages more efficient across all channels.
- Interactions on the website – can vary from conversions, cart abandonment, viewed products, top-rated products, viewed categories, purchased products, and so on. In other words, overall customer behavior.
You can cross-reference campaign results with customer profiles created by the Customer Data Platform and adjust them to improve conversions and customer satisfaction. That is just the tip of the iceberg when talking about the value of CDPs and why it’s worth building one for your e-commerce business. Below, we’ll cover the rest in more detail, so keep reading.
Top 10 Benefits of Building a Customer Data Platform
Marketing automation helps you deliver offers that customers desire at the most opportune moment.
And you can achieve better results by feeding marketing automation workflows with valuable, actionable customer data. With a CDP, you can manage the overall customer journey and reap numerous benefits, including:
Centralized Customer Data Management
Customer Data Platforms put an end to collecting random information and stitching customer profiles from bits and pieces of data coming in from various channels. You need all the data you can gather to create targeted campaigns optimized for conversions.
That’s what a CDP does for you – it aggregates information from various sources, eliminates customer profile duplication, and helps you create a 360-degree view of your target audience. That’s the way to go if you want to grow a customer-centric e-commerce business.
Power Personalization Through AI
Businesses from various industries adopt AI at a rapid pace. E-commerce is one of them – personalization relies heavily on real-time and historical data. AI can help with successful upselling and cross-selling opportunities, but that’s not all.
Apart from generating relevant recommendations based on gathered data, AI can help exclude customers unlikely to convert. That way, you can focus your resources and campaigns on higher-value prospects.
Create Omnichannel Campaigns & Experiences
Customers can have both online and offline interactions with your brand. Having a unified approach toward those touchpoints requires you to know how your customers behave regardless of when and where they interact with your business.
Furthermore, communication channel preferences evolve. Through AI and machine learning algorithms, a powerful Customer Data Platform will segment customers based on various criteria and trigger the most relevant omnichannel campaigns, adapting to changes in customer behavior.
Enhance & Prioritize Customer Lifetime Value
Customer retention is always cheaper and easier than acquiring new customers. E-commerce stores benefit more from returning visitors than from trying to boost traffic. That’s why you should care more about the so-called Customer Lifetime Value.
CLV is a customer’s total worth throughout their relationship with your business. With a Customer Data Platform, you can identify those customer segments that have the highest lifetime value and serve them with relevant, high-converting offers. Staying relevant will improve the overall experience those high-value customers have with your brand and help you build strong relationships.
And loyalty leads to revenue.
Increase Generated Revenue
CDPs are powerful marketing technology that improves customer retention and helps you carry out focused customer acquisition. You’ll be able to capture quality leads and optimize your conversions through better, targeted campaigns.
One of the underestimated effects CDPs have on revenue is through insights into pricing. Customer profiles and segments can hint at how much customers are willing to pay. That way, you can easily adjust pricing strategies and generate more sales.
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Enhance Customer Satisfaction
By creating detailed customer profiles and specific segments, CDPs help you stay relevant for your customers even when their behaviors and preferences change.
Relevant offers corresponding to your customers’ interests help you differentiate yourself from the competition. Buyers experience that additional touch of personalization. Even if they come for the discounts and offers, they stay for the enhanced personalized experience.
Reduce Checkout & Cart Abandonment
Data gathered through Customer Data Platforms holds powerful insights into otherwise hidden problems.
One of the greatest mysteries marketers and store owners try to solve revolves around checkout and cart abandonment.
When you track customer behavior, you can identify segments with high cart and checkout abandonment rates and investigate potential reasons for that.
For example, carts might not show the number of items inside, while checkout pages might have a confusing payment process.
Boost Customer Engagement
Whether on your social media channels or directly on your store, a CDP can track customer interactions and behavior that hint at how their relationship with your customers is evolving.
You can measure content and campaign performance easily and use the information to serve more relevant and engaging content.
Create Efficient Marketing Automation Workflows
Marketing automation workflows are a must for every e-commerce business today. When using a CDP, you can quickly and easily create automation workflows.
You can target specific segments and execute multichannel marketing campaigns with a hands-free approach.
Discover New Customer Segments
When you collect data online and offline, you can develop a huge variety of customer segments.
All that raw data can help you identify different audiences, including new ones, like loyal customers, discount buyers, impulse purchasers, etc.
When you segment those further, you can outline similar audiences, customize your messages and make your targeting even more specific.
Those are just a fraction of the positive effects a Customer Data Platform can have on your e-commerce business. From staying GDPR compliant to overcoming third-party cookie loss, a CDP helps build trust, strengthen relationships, and optimize conversions.
If you’re ready to start creating high-value recipient lists, dynamic segments, similar and smart audiences, you’re in the right place!
Getting Your Customer Data Platform
Building a Customer Data Platform can have a massive effect on your business.
From reduced costs to preventing the loss of profits, CDPs are the future of e-commerce. But if you don’t have the patience or resources to gather a team of developers and build your CDP from scratch, you can use a ready-made, sophisticated solution like VibeTrace.
It’s an all-in-one marketing tool with a built-in Customer Data Platform powered by AI. And it can be extended and tailored to your specific needs. Check out its features and book your demo now!
