Customer Data Platforms are here to stay. Find out 30 workable reasons to use a CDP to elevate and optimize your eCommerce strategy.
Customer Data Platform
July 28, 2020
A CDP is an empowering tool to make sense of your audience’s needs. This tool will help you increase engagement, improve the buying journey, and elevate the customer experience, turning your e-commerce into a growth engine.
With so much ongoing information being generated at every moment, from anything and anywhere, you surely have considered some marketing platforms to elevate your e-commerce strategy based on what you know about your customers.
By now, you can probably name a few tools that deal with customer data. Still, popular platforms—such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM)—don’t draw the most reliable insights throughout several different sources and put all of them in a single place.
Most tools lack a sense of urgency and convenience. This is why a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is so important.
A CDP picks up the most relevant information from several channels across the physical and digital worlds and organizes it, so it is easy to visualize and act on. The data delivered by a CDP can be quantitative and qualitative, meaning that it should give you a broad picture of your customers’ behaviors as consumers and their feelings towards your brand.
When used for eCommerce, a CDP pulls out vital information to improve marketing and sales strategies. Here, you will find 30 reasons to use a CDP to optimize your eCommerce and turn it into a growth opportunity.
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It is impossible to imagine a world where you and your team handle uncountable amounts of data manually.
When using a CDP, you find out how simple it is to build workflows that provide automation. This tool collects, filters, and organizes data according to your requirements to elevate your Customer Data Management.
CDPs democratize information sharing. Besides, your team, executives, product managers, salespeople (and so on), will benefit from a central digital hub that supplies immediate information at all times—and this optimizes work related to your eCommerce as well.
When used right, a CDP will facilitate the comprehension of the ideal experience your customers expect to witness throughout the journey.
This happens because data clarify how users behave and react to the interactions on your website and other channels related to your brand. With this information in hand, you ensure your eCommerce adds value to customers regardless of the lifecycle stage they’re.
By using artificial intelligence and machine learning, CDPs are ready to go through behavioral, transactional, demographic, and many other types of diverse information to unleash untapped marketing potential.
Would you like to hear an example? Using a CDP will help you muster different pieces of information to come up with segmented marketing campaigns—and this is a fantastic opportunity to speak directly and more persuasively to a specific target audience you want to attract to your eCommerce.
Today customers are willing to pay more for personalized experiences.
For example, if your customers see an online advertisement for a product they have already bought, chances are they will grow frustrated (and irritated, quite honestly). The opposite happens if you give customers fittable product suggestions based on what they have previously purchased as soon as they navigate your website.
A CDP will help you avoid blind spots in your communication and leverage data to build tailored touchpoints.
Shoppers expect to have unified customer experience in both digital and physical environments. It doesn’t matter if they are using an app, a desktop website, or walking into your store.
Gladly, CDPs provide information that is hugely relevant to plan and execute experiences that will delight and retain customers, whether they are online or offline. It also gives you insights into when and how these experiences should occur in the conversion funnel.
How is your conversion rate? Are customers spending enough time on your pages? How often do users abandon the cart and the checkout?
You have probably already heard that “you can not manage what you can not measure” A CDP will allow you to assess metrics and KPIs to measure your eCommerce initiatives.
The world is changing at an incredible pace, and being aware of real-time audience information has never been so important.
In a CDP, updates happen real-time, giving you access to the freshest information available in the market. This way, you can quickly reply to changes, whether they’re coming from the market or a specific customer.
CDPs give you a 360-degree view of your customers, both online and offline. Their reports and dashboards will tell you how consumers behave, where to find them, their preferences, and more.
Another CDP advantage is that accessing data from multiple channels is a fantastic source of supply to make a better sense of your marketing personas and create a unified ideal customer profile.
When your brand is ready to react to market changes and customer preferences quickly, you have a substantial competitive advantage.
This is already a reality. A recent Forbes study showed that 93% of marketing executives believe that using data helps their teams meet complex challenges and stand out from the competition.
It costs less to keep existing customers than it does to acquire new ones, and increasing your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a powerful way to drive your eCommerce growth.
Using a CDP will assist you in measuring feedback from existing customers at all key touchpoints. Like this, your team should be ready to work on interactions in the customer journey that retain your customers and make them brand loyal.
A right CDP ties digital and physical together by combining data provided from both worlds to give a more reliable customer picture.
Connecting both environments plays a crucial role in omnichannel strategies, and helps you understand how customers navigate through different devices to map your customer journey accurately.
Once you rely on customer opinion and factual, qualitative data, it gets easier to make improvements on products and services.
See what is lacking in your customers’ point of view and turn your data into actionable strategies to make those improvements palpable.
A CDP is all about delivering the right message at the right time.
It also supports marketers in optimizing strategies to attract qualified customers—it engages with potential customers’ needs and sheds light on how you should approach people who are most likely to buy from your brand.
Whether we talk about quantitative or qualitative data, CDPs track product views, social media mentions, click rates, CTAs clicked, and more, to measure customer engagement. All these convey insights to acknowledge the relationship between your customers and your company and manage it on your eCommerce platform.
A CDP will gladly complement the core tasks of other marketing tools that boost your eCommerce sales and customer engagement.
From email marketing to social media, live chats, CRM, affiliate programs, and analytics, a CDP can be connected with several existing mechanisms to maximize their potential.
There is no denying that anomalies exist, as hard as you might work to avoid them in your eCommerce.
The best way to deal with unwanted situations is to keep yourself attentive to anticipate and constrain them, and a CDP will bring trustworthy hints, so you do both as soon as possible.
Knowing what will probably happen next is an excellent way to work on more convincing and compelling calls-to-action and appropriate content on your eCommerce.
CDPs are equipped with predictive models that correctly guess how your customers will behave in the future. Using machine learning, the ideal CDP identifies data gathered in the past to generate powerful pattern insights that amplify customer prediction.
Besides concentrating information in a single place, a CDP can be configured to follow unified rules and frameworks on different digital and physical channels. This shortens data processing and saves you many working hours.
Consequently, the time your team would use to collect and assess data continuously can be used to make the most out of the insights a CDP provides—something that still requires human attention.
Collecting data from many sources will clarify how much customers are willing to pay to avoid setting irrational prices on your eCommerce.
Having historical data towards the price you get from suppliers will surely help you negotiate better prices as time goes on.
Want to know how your last campaign is resonating with the public? Or to get fresh feedback from a promotional page, you have just launched? Or understand what affiliates are bringing the best profits?
Having a CDP is the quickest way to get these answers, as it tracks and monitors customer feedback so you can act on it, whether it is positive or not.
Ecommerce managers are always investigating why customers put products in the cart and leave without making a purchase.
There are many ways data deepens your investigation to improve the cart process and avoid hitches that stand between your customer and the checkout.
Say your cart doesn’t show how many items have been added to it in a specific mobile device, and customers are giving the purchase up because of it. A CDP will immediately tell you how many customers are facing this issue so you can work on fixing it, improving your cart process, and attract them back.
Checkout abandonment can be influenced by a great variety of factors: complicating pages, inconvenient payment methods, customer carts that don’t show on the page, etc.
Checking why customers leave your website after starting the checkout process is also essential to find root abandonment causes, and a CDP is a fantastically in this inspection.
If you want to understand why your clients are leaving after a few purchases, use a CDP to measure and act.
By tracking customer interactions, data is a sound source to map why your customers don’t want to buy from your eCommerce anymore. Was it a wrong website usability? Generic communication? Poor social media support? What can be done to lower churn rate and retain your customers? Data will help you figure it out.
We know how wonderful it is to see store visitors becoming paying customers.
Data-based e-commerces are designed to make this shift more plausible since their communication and usability are built following the audience’s preference and perfect timing. This keeps people on your website for longer and convinces people to purchase, increasing the conversion rate.
With a broad customer understanding brought by a CDP, your marketing team will work on specific communications to drive organic traffic to your eCommerce.
Live content and social media networks are good examples of how to gain attention from your customer’s first touchpoint and take them to your pages.
Social media accounts have an amazing impact on customer engagement. They provide ways for your users to interact with your brand, sharing your content, seeking support, and directly talking to other customers about your products and services.
A CDP looks out for social media, showing you how to engage customers further and what you need to do to make them more invested.
There is lots of information out there to be collected and processed, right? Whether you decide to buy data from other companies or step ahead and implement a CDP in your company, data frameworks have never been so important and will determine which companies will remain relevant.
Want more insights? Download Arena’s Customer Data Platform 2020: the future of marketing and sales ebook and learn more about the benefits of using a CDP for your eCommerce.
