Marketers shifting ad money from Search to e-commerce & social channels? – Exchange4Media

Imagine a marketing department in a stylish office tower. Meet Sarah, a seasoned marketer with an ambitious goal: to revolutionise her company’s customer engagement game using the latest tech wizardry, known as Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).  

Sarah is armed with dreams of personalization, customer insights, and skyrocketing sales. But little does she know, she’s about to embark on an adventure filled with twists and turns.  

Her journey begins with the discovery of CDPs, known as the holy grail of marketing, promising to unite all the scattered pieces of customer data. In her quest to harness the power of CDPs, she stumbles upon the realm of data silos. These silos are like unbreakable walls, guarding important nuggets of customer information.  

Quite a journey, isn’t it? 

Sarah represents a majority of marketers in today’s world, who are grappling with data integration complexities. A recent Wavemaker report explained that data can just be numbers, but making stories out of that data is what makes it insightful. 

This is exactly what a CDP does.  

The Challenges

Experts, however, agree that data silos are a long-existing obstacle that marketers face on their journey to creating insightful stories.

Vyshak Venugopalan, Director, Solutions Consulting at Adobe feels that indeed, the implementation of CDPs for cross-channel campaigns is a complex and nuanced task.  

“Marketers often find themselves needing support with respect to data quality and integration. In response, CDPs ought to proactively tackle these concerns by prioritising data accuracy and achieving smooth integration with pre-existing systems, all while fostering collaborative engagement with IT teams and maintaining customer trust and privacy. A truly open and extensible CDP is what will help in overcoming these challenges for the marketers,” he said.  

Now, let’s get Sarah back in the picture.  

Just as she was figuring her way out of silos, a new subplot emerged – the evolving landscape of data privacy. She must now navigate the delicate balance between personalised marketing and respecting customer boundaries, as regulators cast watchful eyes on the marketing realm.  

The recently passed Digital Personal Data Protection Bill has just acted like a cherry on top. The Bill that has brought a massive transformation in India’s data privacy landscape, has also hit marketers with equal intensity.  

Mukesh Vij, Founder of Hashtag Orange says that obtaining consent from customers and complying with proper data governance practices has become crucial in steering clear of any legal challenges. “I see many businesses struggling to proactively offer more time and energy in ensuring overall compliance with regulations that call for ethical customer data use,” he shared.  

Vij further recommends not looking at this as a challenge but as an opportunity to build trust.  

Unified Consumer Personas using CDPs 

Take for example, a D2C brand that needs to know in detail about where its shoppers are shopping, how many times they are searching for the brand, whether are they on the marketplace or the brand’s website etc. But the brand wants unified i.e., individual shopper details, amongst a massive pool of consumer data. 

Enter CDP. By now you can figure they are maybe not all about challenges.  

According to a recent Adobe study, 96% of Indian business leaders have integrated CDPs into their strategies, 57% established deeper direct customer relationships, 46% witnessed an upswing in customer loyalty, and 43% reported increased transaction volumes and values. 

At its core, a CDP serves as a repository for accumulating and unifying diverse customer data from a multitude of sources.  

This reservoir of information forms the bedrock for crafting a comprehensive and unified customer profile.  

In the realm of cross-channel marketing, this unified profile takes centre stage, ushering in an era of hyper-personalised, relevant, and seamless communication. 

Marketing expert Prasun Kumar shares that by capturing consumer behaviour, preferences, engagement triggers & buying patterns, CDPs contribute immensely in creating multiple consumer personas allowing marketers to run effective programs for acquisition, retention & revenue maximisation.  

“Personalisation has proven to be a potent lever for acquisition and that has been enabled due to unified personas. The same goes for meeting consumer expectations around cross-channel seamlessness, real-time and on-demand fulfilments and overall better experiences.  Unified personas help in reducing marketing wastage via improved targeting, cross channel optimisations on cost as well as performance, solving attribution issues leading to better ROI,” he further explained.  

Karan Kumar, Group Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, ART Fertility Clinics added that a unified customer profile also ensures message consistency across all channels, creating trust amongst customers. “This unified view streamlines targeting, reduces unnecessary spending, and provides richer customer insights for more strategic marketing decisions,” he said.  

Enter AI/ML (ofcourse!)  

Now, in an AI led world, it is also fair for one to wonder whether or not integrating the buzzwords ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Machine Learning’ with CDPs would make the above mentioned tasks even more seamless.  

When coupled with CDPs, these technologies have ushered in a new era of cross-channel marketing optimization.  

“Highly accurate customer propensity AI/ML models can help businesses to better segment and target their customers and also help them understand the reasoning or influential factors behind a certain customer or channel behaviour,” said Venugopalan.  

For instance, a leading software company using Adobe’s Real Time CDP saw an overall performance of 3.85X lift in conversions when they used AI/ML generated segments based on propensity to convert followed by highly targeted email with different CTA’s.

Vij mentions that with AI/ML in play, marketers can harness the intel to analyse customer behaviour across channels and touchpoints while providing a better understanding of their journeys.

“Marketers can use these insights to anticipate customer needs, identify potential churn, and proactively engage customers with personalised offers or recommendations,” Prasun mentioned.

Karan added that AI-driven automation in CDPs allows for the automatic delivery of personalised content across multiple channels based on customer preferences.

Experts advise

With a multitude of CDPs available in the market, each offering a unique array of features and capabilities, selecting the right one for your specific business needs has become a strategic imperative. The process of choosing the optimal CDP involves a careful consideration of factors, that the experts further elaborate.

Vij mentions that in addition to CDP, businesses can use data analysis tools to identify the latest data trends and modify their operations to tap into the relevance of marketing angles.

Prasun advised that before implementing any CDP, marketers must clearly identify & articulate the need & opportunities that the platform needs to serve or tap. Clearly defining objectives and goals, clarity on the kind of data needed to collect, integrate, and analyse is critical.

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