The best customer experience is one that is consistent, so brands should have some sort of magic force aligning messaging and offers across all these touch points. This is precisely what CDPs are designed to do.
Also, it is obviously challenging to measure it all, which is why typically it’s worth having a separate data storage that’s cheaper than a real-time system (like a CDP), and use it for analytics and feeding AI/ML-driven tools, such as the product recommendation engines.
Still, which tool is the most important?
Similar to the way an orchestra needs a conductor, you cannot improve your direct-to-customer activities without a unified “orchestration” control center and data centralization.
This is where the second bottleneck arises, as you must choose between an integrated system (including a CDP) or a decentralized stack with the CDP/data warehouse at the center of it.
Both approaches have their pros and cons. Regardless of the choice, there is still one step required to unlock the CDP’s potential. By itself, a CDP, or even an integrated CDP, is not a silver bullet and won’t set up and test marketing experiments.
It’s crucial to have the right team and the right processes in place. The team should be cross-functional to avoid interdepartmental interactions, and they need to have a startup mindset.
Also, the marketing team must have a clear and measurable business goal with a proxy metric. For example, at Netflix, the key business goal is monthly retention, while the proxy metrics are “percent of members who add at least one member to their Friends list within six months” or “percent of members who stream at least 15 minutes of video in a month.” The company’s former vp of product management Gibson Biddle defines a proxy metric as the “percentage of members/new customers/returning customers who do at least the minimum threshold for user action by X period in time.”
And of course, they need to have operational freedom to be able to experiment in pursuit of the most efficient marketing strategy.
Communication tools provide loads of features, but they need to be used ethically. Constantly spamming your clients about an uncompleted purchase will not always result in a sale. In fact, it may cause them to become annoyed and go elsewhere.
According to Spamlaws, nearly 60% of all emails are spam, and advertising makes up 36% of all global spam content. When contacting your customers, try to implement a more thoughtful approach.
