MarTechTalk: Increasing conversions through smarter use of your Customer Data Platform

 

On 25 April, MarTech Talk host Luke Edwards was joined by Jaron Best, Sr Manager, Product Management, Gap inc.;Haakon Moss, Head of MarTech, Sopra Steria; Alexandra Sardarian, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Udemy; and Pratyush Sinha, Head of Marketing, Blenheim Chalcot.

 

Views on news

59 % of marketers use CDP mainly as a data consolidation tool as per a Merkle 2021 Customer Engagement Report despite CDPs having powerful analytics capabilities that consolidate data and assess it to derive meaningful insights. Surprisingly, business outcomes are not the top or most immediate concern when implementing CDP. First is the question of data quality.

 

As third-party cookies for advertising are on their way out, by next year, CDPs may rely on a data architecture or an automation engine that does not hinge on third-party cookies. Beside new deployments, it’s also important to integrate existing and new tech stacks to have a full view of the entire customer journey, as well as managing and cleansing, optimising and enriching data.

 

Experts are expecting a 70% consolidation in the CDP sector. In a cookiless future, marketers will have more control of and responsibility for meeting customers’ expectations. To achieve this, first marketers and tech professionals have to find a common language they can communicate in. 

 

CDPs for tracking and responding to customer behaviour in real time

The most valuable aspect of CDPs is that they serve as a single point of truth. But the real challenge lies in migrating all the data from all functions and customer touchpoints to a single, centralised system. Another problem is that sometimes data from different platforms can’t be stitched together. In the light of the EU’s AI regulation, it will be a dilemma in the future whether models that have been trained on internal data that falls outside the scope of regulations will be regarded as legitimate for external use.

 

New tools are expected to be developed for creating organic data without the use of cookies, which will be a game changer for marketing. About 60% of customers seem to be excited about improvement in their customer experience via the use of AI trained on their customer data. From a data protection perspective, marketers need to make sure that they deal with the opt-ins in real time and adjust their datasets accordingly. One of the draw points of CDPs is that they enable businesses to communicate with their clients directly without giving the impression that they’re stalking them. CDPs that work in real time enable marketers to see changes in customer behaviour, as well as the latest trends. 

 

Customer sentiment analysis will probably be one of the most valuable new tools that come with CDPs. Marketers will be also capable of seeing which devices have achieved the highest conversion rates. But most importantly, the ultimate measure of the efficiency of a CDP to drive customer lifetime value (CLV).  Another metric getting popular among e-commerce businesses is RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value). What seemed to be a marketers’ pipedream, is technically viable now, i.e. to see what prospects actually do after seeing an ad. There are hundreds of CDPs on the market to choose from. Establish first whether you already have a single source of truth and identify where do you need further integrations, then consider interoperability and compliance requirements. Sometimes you’ll have to make trade-offs between interoperability and functionalities. 

 

The panel’s advice

Find the use cases that you need the CDP for (data consolidation, gated silos of external data, training AI etc.)
Find tools that can address the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in your data base. 

The winners will be companies that know who their customers are. 

Strive to build trust with data rather than break it.