The proliferation of customer information is helping companies everywhere to develop trusting and productive relationships with millions of customers, but managing customer data is one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing. Collecting and making sense of billions of bits of online and offline data can be a significant hurdle in digital marketing and, for many companies, an overwhelming task that seems insurmountable.
This doesn’t have to be the case. For any enterprise looking to effectively manage its customer data, a customer data platform (CDP) can be an incredible resource that drives sales, increases engagement, and enhances the overall customer experience.
A CDP serves as a mission control center for marketers, bringing together data from across the organization and simplifying the process for creating customer experiences in today’s omni-channel marketing world. Having spent more than a decade providing the strategy and technical execution that allows leading global organizations to leverage that technology, here are three benefits our team at CI&T see to incorporating a CDP into your business:
1. Unified 360 Profile
Business leaders are pushing for a higher level of data integrity and a “single source of truth” for all data that drives their business insights, as they are with other important functions. C-suite executives are eager to partner with internal leaders, including from marketing and sales, to deliver aggregate views of critical business intelligence.
We work closely with our clients to develop the right data governance strategy and approach to collecting and preparing information based on goals, consensus, and operational fit. The majority of our engagements start with a deep dive into what types of data is collected, where it is sourced, and how it is stored from a data privacy perspective. With a heavy emphasis on solving data quality problems, we then develop a solution to ensure data preparation best practices are embedded into the enterprises’ operations. An experienced, strategic view guides the CDP integration process and ensures your strategy generates ROI for the business.
2. Precision Targeting
A CDP gives marketers innovative tools to filter, analyze, and segment customers with deep granularity. It allows an organization to take that massive volume of data and zero in on a specific target audience that you want to communicate with. We work alongside our partner Acquia to integrate their state-of-the-art CDP for clients. Acquia CDP uses AI and machine learning (ML) to deliver advanced segmentation and data activation capabilities across all marketing and customer engagement channels.
Being able to analyze customer behavior down to shopping and location preferences and to store these preferences gives marketers a tremendous edge in segmenting and building targeted campaigns. These capabilities also include opportunities to easily filter people who live in a certain region or who have a high likelihood of interest in a certain product category. From a relationship perspective, making sure you send the right message to the right customer and the right time increases brand loyalty and trust.
3. Scalability
Having a CDP that can scale and handle huge spikes of data flows is critical for high-growth enterprises. Our retail clients, for example, are extremely active around the holidays, requiring their CDP to process hundreds of millions of customer records and billions of transactions and events daily. The same can be said for new store openings and partnerships. A CDP that can handle additional volume allows retailers to seamlessly integrate customer data so it can easily be scaled and replicated across new locations.
CDPs can react to changes in the marketplace, new data sources, new channels, and new outbound channels. This can be done through open source CDP platforms, making the data available through APIs and data sharing mechanisms. We have also seen clients implement a CDP and later decide to change the direction of their strategy, using the CDP as a core component of their new direction.
Marketing today involves analyzing dozens of technology applications and finding opportunities to act on a growing volume of customer data. An investment in a CDP is a long-term venture and one that continues to pay dividends over time. Today’s advanced CDP gives marketers state-of-the-art technology to successfully engage with customers according to their own personal preferences, driving sales and marketing ROI.
Luis Ribeiro is the Head of Engineering at CI&T. He has more than 15 years of software development experience, working closely with large global enterprises to deploy advanced technology to support their business growth. Ribeiro and his team at CI&T deliver sophisticated software engineering services focused on marketing technology, customer relationship management systems, and ecommerce platforms. He is an expert in Drupal and DXP Enterprise Architecture, having completed thousands of projects for global companies across industry.
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