Data-driven marketing has been a buzzword for digital marketers for a while now; it has long been emphasized as the tactic behind marketing success. In fact, the majority of marketers in a recent survey cited data-driven marketing that focuses on an individual as “the single most exciting opportunity” emerging in the industry.
What is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing is an approach where you use customer data to decide who to target, what to send, and when to send it. That data includes:
- Customer details
- Purchases
- Website and app behavior
- How people engage with your campaigns
The goal is to make every experience more relevant to the individual, which can help you grow revenue, increase conversions, and keep customers coming back.
Data-driven marketing depends on connected data. When your customer data is spread across systems, every decision is based on part of the picture. Bringing it together is the first step, and a customer data platform (CDP) is one way to do it.
What is a customer data platform (CDP)?
A customer data platform (CDP) is a system that collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single, accurate customer profile.
A CDP brings together your first-party data. That’s the data customers share with you directly or create by interacting with your brand. It includes contact details, purchases, website and app behavior, email and SMS engagement, loyalty activity, and consent preferences.
From there, a CDP does three jobs:
- Customer data unification: It pulls data from separate systems into one place and standardizes it, so the same field means the same thing everywhere
- Identity resolution: It works out which records belong to the same person. A website visitor, an email subscriber, and an in-store shopper might all be one customer
- Unified customer profiles: It combines everything it knows about each person into one profile that updates as they interact with you
Together, those profiles give you a single customer view, which is a complete picture of each customer’s history, behavior, and preferences in one place.
Many CDPs connect directly to your engagement channels, so you can use that data to build segments, trigger automations, and personalize messages.
What is data unification?
Customer data unification is the process of collecting, connecting, and standardizing customer data from multiple sources, so it can be used as a consistent, unified view of each customer.
In practice, that means three things:
- You bring data in from every system that holds it
- You match records that belong to the same person
- You clean and format the data so it means the same thing wherever it’s used
The result is unified customer data your whole business can trust, whether you’re building a segment, planning a campaign, or reporting on performance.
Why is unified data important?
Today, most companies are ‘data-rich’. That is, they have vast amounts of data on their audience. The trouble lies in a company’s ability to tap into that data. When you have unified data, you will have a comprehensive and trustworthy picture of your company and the processes it carries out daily. Using your customer data more accurately and reliably will benefit your company.
What to consider when streamlining and unifying your martech stack
For true organization-wide success, you need to go further than unifying your internal systems. Being able to understand and interpret online and offline customer behavior will empower your marketing team, offering new ways to automate and optimize marketing spend and feed the sales funnel.
Unfortunately, the constant evolution of marketing solutions and changing expectations of customers means that martech stacks often become a mishmash of systems.
The biggest perceived barrier preventing marketers from creating the ultimate customer experience is ‘poor integration between tech systems’. But, when looking deeper into the problem, it is more likely that the true problem lies with marketers either using multiple technologies or vendors, without a unifying platform.
Unifying your data sources can reduce costs by 25-35% and increase speed to market by 30%. Bringing together your marketing stack, pruning legacy systems, and modernizing applications will enhance customer experiences, drive customer retention, reduce costs, streamline marketing and sales workflows, minimize code maintenance, and end data silos. Now, let’s look at what you need to consider when unifying your stack.
Single customer view
90% of people now travel across devices and touchpoints to complete a single task, generating tons of data along the way. Legacy and outdated systems like CRMs can no longer process, sync, and interpret this data in real time. A single view of the customer pulls all this information together.
What is a single customer view?
A single customer view (SCV) is a single location for every individual you interact with. It provides you with an overview of all the data you’ve collected throughout their relationship with your brand.
Your SCV should sit at the heart of your business. Customer-centricity is essential for survival in this modern, digital-first world we live in. An SCV gives all departments and teams access to valuable information to improve performance. Executives can use it to make key business decisions supported by accurate and insightful data. Marketers can use it to deliver more personalized and profitable campaigns. Customer support agents can use SCV insights to resolve issues faster. The potential for growth and success is limitless.
Overall, the improvements you can make to the customer experience will improve retention, increase customer lifetime value (CLV), and directly impact your bottom line.
Cross-account reporting
As your business grows and develops, you need a martech stack that grows with you. Whether you have multiple storefronts, operate in different regions with individual currencies, or manage separate brands under one umbrella group, you need to be able to pull information on your sales, campaigns, and marketing activity across all facets of your business.
Getting a bird’s-eye view of your performance through cross-account reporting across all regions and business divisions gives decision-makers in your company a clear view of what’s happening. This helps all teams identify risks, weaknesses, and missed opportunities where performance can be optimized. Similarly, campaigns and activities that yield high rewards can be doubled down on, invested in, and used to drive business profitability.
Open integrations
When streamlining your marketing systems, you need to know your data unification platform plays nicely with others. That means it is open to integrating with the vast number of other systems out there.
With so much data at your fingertips, you need to have confidence that you can tap into this and gather insights with speed. At the same time, you don’t want to find yourself limited by your platform’s ability to integrate with new tech as you grow. You need a platform that can do it all.
Open APIs and self-serve functionality enable you to continue to grow your martech stack while keeping your systems streamlined.
Data unification = data action + data collection
Data unification is not a ‘nice-to-have’. It’s essential for efficient data-driven marketing that drives profits, growth, and customer retention.
We’re in a new era of customer expectations. Changes to data regulations and increasing privacy consciousness mean customers are more engaged with brands’ data collection methods than ever before. At a time when trust in brands is at an all-time low, customers want to know the value they will get from sharing their data. How will marketers put it to use to improve their experience?
It is your brand’s responsibility as data stewards to use data respectfully and create valuable customer experiences. Marketers must think about what actions they want to take and what data they need before they begin collecting data.
Unifying your data into a single source makes this data and insight accessible, not just to the marketing team, but to the whole business. Decisions can be made across the business with your customers in mind. True customer-centricity is only possible if you connect all your data.
