Blog

There are many businesses out there that operate with a mindset of “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it.” Unfortunately, this type of close-minded thinking can lead to a great deal of waste.
Tasks may be unnecessary to achieve the final goal, processes may be repeated multiple times when one would be sufficient, employees may be wasting time on superfluous responsibilities, and materials may be wasted during manufacturing.
When this occurs within an organization, employee satisfaction decreases so turnover increases, quality suffers so customer satisfaction and retention is decreased, and one look at the books will likely indicate the company is hemorrhaging money.

You might think that this type of operational inefficiency only occurs in large corporations and organizations, however, it’s just as prevalent in small-to-medium-sized businesses and can be seen throughout every department.
Efficiency is the name of the game for successful businesses, and you’re about to learn one of the best ways to turn your business into a lean, mean, money-making machine.
Lean Process Improvement
What is lean process improvement?
Lean process improvement is a concept originally developed by Toyota to decrease the amount of time it took from receiving an order to delivering it. While lean process improvement is often discussed in a production environment, the concept can be applied to service, healthcare, technology, and even government.
Consider a marketing department that has multiple people working on the same project but not communicating. Rather than each handling a specific aspect of the campaign, several people tackle the same task while other activities go unhandled.
It’s not a traditional production environment, however, the team could benefit from creating an easy-to-follow process that looks at the desired end product and finds the simplest route to get there.
The whole idea behind this way of thinking is that when you look at the big picture, you can find ways to eliminate waste, whether that’s financial, physical, time, or employee energy that could be spent elsewhere. This concept may take a while to implement, and that’s okay. It’s not meant to be a short-term solution, but rather a change to the entire mindset and culture of a business.
What are the benefits of lean process improvement?
Businesses that incorporate lean process improvement see a variety of benefits from this shift. These include:

Less waste
Less inventory
Increased productivity
Better quality
Happier customers
Fewer costs
More profits

It makes perfect sense that when you remove the redundancy, streamline processes, and create less waste, your bottom line will increase. When your customers receive their product faster and with less hassle, you’ll have happier customers who return and recommend you to others. With more customers, your bottom line increases once again.
If you’d like to see this type of improvement in your organization, read on to learn lean process improvement steps.
How do I incorporate lean process improvement into my business?
You guessed it … there’s a process to lean process improvement. There’s actually a series of nine steps you’ll need to implement to create this level of efficiency in your organization. Let’s take a closer look at lean process improvement steps.

1. Review the process you want to improve.
This step is essential because if you don’t know what you need to work on, you won’t know where to focus your efforts. In order to do that, you need to talk to employees on the front line.
The biggest mistake companies make during this process is implementing changes without ever speaking to the people who do the job day in and day out. Interview your frontline workers, and ask them what’s not working well in their daily routine.
2. Identify what improvements need to be made.
Once you’ve identified what needs to be fixed, it’s time to involve your team once again. There’s a very good chance that they already know how to fix the problem and just haven’t been able to implement it because of a “That’s-how-we’ve-always-done-it” mindset.
3. Implement the suggested changes.
How will you put the changes into action? Create a plan so everyone involved understands and buys into the process. This is the best way to ensure organization-wide success.
4. Monitor how the changes are impacting your efficiency.
While it would be great if your first attempt at execution was a success, the reality is that once the process is tested in the field, it will need to be further refined. The only way to do this is through constant monitoring and reevaluating. As new issues appear, you can address them and make the necessary changes.
5. Identify what activities add value.
Throughout these steps, you’ll be assessing every single action and every aspect of your process. During this time, you must evaluate every single activity to determine whether it adds value to your process, or detracts. If an activity is deemed unnecessary, it should be removed and the process tested without it.
6. Limit risk.
Production and often business, in general, is inherently risky. This time should be used to identify any risky activities or aspects that are part of the current process and eliminate or simplify these tasks. This may involve automating an activity or simply changing the way in which it’s executed.
7. Standardize the process.
As you create and refine the process, document your progress thoroughly. This allows the process to be repeated, properly, by other employees or depending on the specific process, by other teams or departments in your organization.
8. Ensure compliance.
While lean process improvement should be a company-wide shift in culture, your industry or governing body may have specific metrics, procedures, and standardized measurements that you must adhere to. Compliance may not be sacrificed in the name of efficiency.
9. Improve the customer experience.
In determining the success of a lean process improvement plan, Marketers consider the customer experience to be “the moment of truth.” Ultimately, whatever improvements you make during production or service must trickle down to positively impact the customer.
Lean Process Improvement Tools
As you embark on this journey, there are a number of tools available to you. These tools can help you organize your thoughts, identify issues, and implement your plan. The following are just some of the tools you can look to for support.
Just like any other tool, the one you choose must be the right one for the current job. If you start out with one and don’t find that it meets your needs, consider trying another.

Why Analysis: By asking “Why?” repeatedly, you can identify the root cause of the challenges you’re experiencing.

Ishikawa Diagram: Also known as a “Fishbone diagram” or “cause-and-effect diagram”, it allows you to examine a problem from multiple angles, including measurements, materials, people, methods, machines, and environment.

Affinity Diagram: This works great in the early stages of lean implementation as it can help sort and organize large amounts of data. Identify the value you bring to the customer and then uncover problems with your existing processes.

FMEA Analysis (failure mode and effects): Catching issues before they get out of hand can help you eliminate waste and save money. This tool allows you to examine your flow and identify problems early on.

5S Dashboard: This approach can help you organize your workspace for maximum efficiency. While the original tool has five S’ based on Japanese terms, many businesses have added a 6th practice. These stand for:

Sort
Set in order
Shine
Standardize
Sustain
Safety

Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) Cycle: Create continuous improvement by repeatedly analyzing a problem, testing a hypothesis, reviewing, and then analyzing the results, and finally, putting the plan into action once it’s successful.

Lean Process Improvement Techniques
There are a number of approaches that have been created to assist in lean process improvement. Just like the tools, it’s important to find the right technique for your project and your organization. For example:
Six Sigma (DMAIC Model)
With a goal of reducing the variation in processes, Six Sigma works to increase both external and internal customer satisfaction by standardizing workflow. The DMAIC Roadmap stands for:

Define
Measure
Analyze
Improve
Control

Kanban
These boards allow you to visualize your workflow and use value stream mapping to break down your workflows into stages. Having a visual representation of your workflow, and all the activities that make it up, can assist you in identifying inefficiencies.
Sharing this board with your entire team allows anyone to stop the process when a problem occurs. Now, it becomes everyone’s job to find a solution.
WIP Limits
Within Kanban boards exist a concept known as WIP Limits or “Work in Progress Limits”. Every stage in a Kanban board workflow is represented by a column. WIP limits force you to stay under a maximum number of work items for each stage. This can be per person, per work stage, or for the entire project.
Having these limits in place ensures that current tasks are finished before new ones are started, and helps to complete activities faster.
Final Thoughts on Lean Process Improvement
Now that you understand how important lean process improvement is to a successful, efficient organization, it’s a good time to reiterate that this is an ongoing process. If you attempt to overhaul your entire organization overnight, you will undoubtedly fail and most likely make things worse than when you started.
Identify the biggest sources of inefficiency in your organization and target these first, one at a time, until you’ve created a well-functioning business.
Finally, remember that your most valuable assets are the employees getting their hands dirty every day. Attempting to identify problems and create solutions without getting their input is akin to driving blind when you could simply open your eyes.

As a marketer, a big part of your job is to convert qualified website visitors into leads. Simple enough.
More specifically, inbound marketing requires you to create remarkable content they’ll want to trade their contact information for. From there, those leads turn into opportunities, who turn into customers and even promoters.
Clearly, conversions are a big deal. So how can you optimize yours? By creating conversion paths optimized to most effectively convert your ideal visitors into leads.

While not all conversion paths are identical and depend on the type of business they’re for, they have a few common attributes: a landing page, a call-to-action, a content offer or end point, and a thank you page.

Landing page: A landing page is a specific page on your website designed to collect a visitor’s contact information in exchange for a resource, like a course, ebook, or other product.

Call-to-action: A call-to-action is a section on a webpage or advertisement that persuades the visitor to act or do something. These can take the form of buttons prompting website visitors to sign up, subscribe, or buy a product.

Thank you page: The thank you page shows your visitors that you appreciate them for taking a desired action. For example, a thank you page might appear after a visitor has signed up for a newsletter or filled out a form.

End point: This may be in the form of a content offer, which is any material or resource given to a visitor in exchange for their contact information, completing the conversion path. These materials could be guides, ebooks, courses or other products. For e-commerce, instead of a content offer, a conversion path may end in a purchase.

In order to convert into a lead, a visitor sees a content offer of interest to them (or product in the case of e-commerce), clicks on the call-to-action button to access that content, and is then taken to a landing page. On that landing page, the visitor can provide their information on a form in exchange for access to the offer itself. Upon submitting that form, the now-lead is taken to a thank you page where they receive the offer.
Voila! Conversion path complete.
By designing and implementing the right conversion paths, you can most effectively move website visitors through the buyer’s journey and help them become customers and promoters.
Conversion Path Example

Let’s say you’ve been lured to the landing page above after searching online for tips for preventing frizzy hair.
You’re then prompted by a CTA (pictured below) that invites sign up for their email list in exchange for 10% of their products.
You decide you’d like to try one of their satin-lined caps to fight frizz and take them up on the offer.
A thank you page pops up once you’ve filled out the form giving instructions on how to access your discount code. Once you get the code from your email, you use it to purchase one of their caps. Ta-da! The conversion path is complete.
What makes a good conversion path?
Well as you might have guessed, you need content, a call-to-action, a landing page, and a thank you page. But with so many conversion paths out there on the internet for your potential customers to explore, it’s more important than ever to create the RIGHT paths — paths that your ideal customers are drawn to and most effectively convert the right visitors into leads.
What are the steps to creating a conversion path?
Let’s explore the key items you need in your inbound toolkit to create effective conversion paths that turn casual visitors into customers.
1. Attract your target audience with context-appropriate content.
Content is the fuel that powers effective inbound strategies—and it’s what you’ll use to convert those website visitors into leads. The good news is that content is everywhere! Content is what your website pages are filled with, what goes into your emails, and what’s hosted on your blog — your website pages, emails, and blog are just vehicles to deliver that content.
Although content is in no short supply, in order for it to act as your inbound rocket fuel, you need to create the right content. As you can probably guess, the right content is optimized to appeal specifically to your buyer personas. It should focus on the challenges they’re trying to overcome and the goals they’re looking to hit. Most of all, it should be relevant and interesting to them.
But here’s the kicker — it’s not enough to just create persona-specific content. That content needs to be relevant to your persona based on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey is the active research process your personas go through leading up to making a purchase — and specific content is more relevant to your personas at different stages of that journey. This is where the “context” piece comes in: It’s not enough to just create content for your personas. You have to make sure that content is relevant to what they’re interested in and hoping to learn more about.
Most visitors to your site are still at the very beginning stages of that journey — they might not even know what your product does or how it can help them. All they may know is that they have a problem or there’s an opportunity at hand. So, the content that will most appeal to your personas when they’re first visiting your website and converting a lead will generally be high-level and educational in nature.
In order to be an effective tool in your conversion path toolkit, make sure you have remarkable content tailored to your buyer personas and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
2. Create landing pages that speak to your personas.
After you’ve developed a remarkable content offer that speaks to both who your personas are and where they are in the buyer’s journey, the next step is to leverage that piece of content to convert website visitors into leads. That’s where landing pages come in.
Landing pages are specialized website pages whose sole purpose is to collect visitors’ contact information in exchange for something of value to them. Landing pages contain forms that potential leads must fill out and submit before getting access to your remarkable content offer. And like that offer, great landing pages must also be tailored to both who your personas are and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
In order to most effectively convert website visitors into leads, your landing pages must present the benefits of your offer that are most relevant to the particular problem your persona is experiencing — and discuss the aspects of that problem that are most important to where your persona is in the buyer’s journey.
Imagine, for example, you work at a pet store and have created an ebook on raising a puppy. Someone who’s at the beginning of the buyer’s journey probably won’t be too interested in downloading your ebook if your landing page talks all about how your ebook contains the best techniques for housebreaking. Instead, an effective landing page for this persona might highlight how your ebook discusses how to choose the right dog breed for you.
Great landing pages focus on both who your personas are and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
3. Use attention-grabbing calls-to-action.
While having a remarkable content offer and great landing page are key to creating a successful conversion path, your website visitors need a way to actually access that landing page in the first place. That’s where calls-to-action come in.
Calls-to-action or CTAs, are buttons you can embed throughout your website that advertise your content offers. When a visitor clicks on one of these calls-to-action, they’ll be taken to your landing page. In effect, every call-to-action you have on your website is the beginning of a conversion path.
To create calls-to-action that get those clicks and act as key steps within your conversion paths, you must ensure that the message displayed on your call-to-action aligns with the message on your landing page — and the content itself.
Great calls-to-action should be just that: action-oriented. Since their main objective is to garner clicks and direct people to landing pages, ensure that they’re click-worthy by using actionable language and colors that help them stand out from the rest of your website.
4. Close the deal with optimized thank you pages.
If a call-to-action is the beginning of a conversion path, a thank you page marks its end. Thank you pages are the final item you need in your inbound toolkit to lead your website visitors down a conversion path to become, well, a lead.
Thank you pages are specialized website pages from which your now-leads can download the offer promised by your call-to-action and landing page. They’re also an opportunity to move people further along in the buyer’s journey, by including things like additional calls-to-action that complement the offer you’ve just provided your lead.
Improving the Mobile Conversion Path Experience
Designing for mobile is no longer optional, it’s a must. According to a 2020 report from Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA, formerly Groupe Spécial Mobile), nearly half the world’s population uses a mobile device to access the internet. By the end of 2019, 3.8 billion people were mobile internet users, an increase of 250 million users from the previous year.
With those numbers in mind, there’s a good chance visitors will access your website from their phone or tablet versus a desktop. If you want to create an effective conversion path, It’s imperative to consider the mobile user experience. Follow these steps to create a mobile conversion path that sets visitors up for success.

Start with a responsive design: A responsive design adapts to both desktop and mobile devices by rendering the display differently based on screen size. Visitors won’t have to pinch or zoom in while browsing your website via mobile, which leads to a better user experience. Additionally, having a responsive design signals to Google that your site is mobile-friendly, which will help improve your rankings in search results for mobile users.

Nix cluttered landing pages: When it comes to smaller screens, minimalism is a virtue. Having long-form, relevant content, images and video may translate well on desktop, but can be too busy for mobile devices. Avoid unnecessary text, images, and features that may make it difficult for visitors to find the information they’re looking for. Visitors can’t become leads if they can’t navigate your website. Consider the information most relevant to your audience, and leave out the rest.

Keep CTAs to a minimum: As noted above, with smaller screens you’ll want to take extra care with how that real estate is allocated. Opt for one (or a few), clear call-to-action button as the main focus that your potential customers can easily find. Keep sign-up forms short, only asking for the information you absolutely need. Avoid burying the call-to-action at the bottom of the page after several paragraphs of text. In most cases, mobile users will not scroll down to the end of the page to see it.

As people become increasingly attached to their phones, taking the mobile user experience into account will improve your chances of converting more leads.
Conversion paths are invaluable in inbound marketing as they convert website visitors into leads. When done right, an effective conversion path can move leads beyond an initial conversion, ultimately turning them into customers.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May, 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

GroupFiO’s Quote-to-Order Solution provides an enterprise-ready solution that optimizes complex selling processes for faster sales cycles, improved margins, and true customer satisfaction. Know more, please visit here : https://www.groupfio.com/quote-to-order/ (OR) Call : +1 8003469549 Mail : [sales@groupfio.com](mailto:sales@groupfio.com)
submitted by /u/Bubbly-Cauliflower-8 [link] [comments]

Learn how to maximize your audience growth in a FREE webinar on December 7th. In this webinar you’ll learn:
Top email and influencer marketing trends for 2022 How to push your email strategy and create the ideal email narrative How to best leverage Influencer Marketing through your customers

It’s also the perfect opportunity to ask all your questions live! Register today: https://app.livestorm.co/sendinblue/email-and-influencer-marketing-for-growth?type=detailed
submitted by /u/NEXbv [link] [comments]

Learn how to maximize your audience growth in a FREE webinar on December 7th. In this webinar you’ll learn:
Top email and influencer marketing trends for 2022 How to push your email strategy and create the ideal email narrative How to best leverage Influencer Marketing through your customers

It’s also the perfect opportunity to ask all your questions live! Register today: https://app.livestorm.co/sendinblue/email-and-influencer-marketing-for-growth?type=detailed
submitted by /u/NEXbv [link] [comments]

Looking for new ways to grow your marketing agency? Here are the 10 best agency partner programs to earn money for recommending tools you’re already using.

 

 

As the company matures, its MarTech stack grows more or less complete and it leaves less room for new tools and improvements, not to mention the costs, that grow rapidly. Yet, the CDP market growth estimations show some whooping values, and this fact clearly indicates that even mature companies see the potential in enriching the stack with Customer Platform. This happens, because CDP not only integrates seamlessly with the existing MarTech stack without major changes or costs, but unlocks the potential of this stack in the first place, making money invested in the MarTech in the past pay off more. In this article we will explain, in detail, how. 

 

CDPs and CIPs rapid rise and the question why?

 

It is estimated that the customer data platform market will grow from USD 3.5 billion in 2021 to USD 15.3 billion by 2026, at CAGR 34.6%.

 

 

During the same forecast period, the global analytics market size is estimated to grow from USD 9.6 billion in 2021 to USD 25.3 billion by 2026, at CAGR 21.3%. 

 

source

 

TheNext Gen CDPs or AI-empowered, Customer Intelligence Platforms, which are basically the same, fall simultaneously into these two categories. On top of this,  84% of marketers plan to include AI capabilities in-house. AI plays an essential role in a modern CDP.

 

Companies around the world adopt CDPs into their MarTech stack, and they do it rather rapidly, like it would be a must-have for a company to even keep up with the competition. 

 

But why? 

 

As we will show in the next chapter, the current MarTech stack, modeled on an average, mature eCommerce company, is already rather impressive. Various expensive systems already are supposed to work in synergy, to provide the companies with outstanding customer insights and assure unparalleled customer experience throughout all the touchpoints.

 

The truth is, that they don’t. Or actually didn’t, until Next Gen CDPs / CIPs entered the stage. Each of the tools in the model stack works well, does what it was designed to do. It is their orchestration that proves to be lacking. 

 

In this article we will uncover the reason behind the rapid CDPs market growth, by explaining, how the adoption of a CDP not only adds it’s individual value, but, finally, unlocks all the repressed potential of all the tools already in disposition, enabling true synergy and becoming functional foundation of the modern MarTech stack. 

 

First let’s take a look at a model stack, often in use today.

 

Traditional MarTech stack model

 

There are plenty of tools in a typical MarTech stack. In this chapter we will briefly introduce some of them and explain how they are supposed to work together to collect the customer data and then activate it in various channels/touchpoints.

 

Data collection

 

Enterprise Tag Management

 

Tag management systems control the deployment of all other tags and mobile vendor deployments via web interface, without any software coding. Tag management systems make it easy to add, edit or remove any tag with point and click simplicity.

manages data collection
manages third-party tags
manges digital data distribution

 

Digital Analytics

 

Digital analytics tools gather and analyze digital data from various sources like websites, mobile applications, among others. It provides a vision on how users or customers are behaving. Through digital analytics, companies obtain an insight into the areas where they need improvement. 

behavior and segmentation
analytics
historical segmentation

 

Data Management Platform (DMP)

 

A direct predecessor to CDP platforms, that was “almost it”, emerged in the early 2000’s. DMP gathers and organizes second and third-party data and shares it with other marketing technology systems to gain deeper insights into customers. It can also segment anonymous ID’s.

customer recognition
audience segmentation, activation and orchestration
look alike modeling and third-party data

 

CRM

 

As of 2021, we can easily call Customer Relation Management the legacy system. It came into existence even before DMPs, in the early 1990’s. It is a technology for managing a company’s relationships and interactions with all of its customers and potential customers. It started with sales, then customer service and marketing came along. Finally commerce joined. Primarily however, CRM works with operational data of known customers. 

customer data, scoring and attributes
opt-in preferences
products/orders

 

Data Activation

 

CMS and eCommerce tools

DAM and Content Management
Template creation and publication
Content authoring

 

On-site and app personalization tools

A/B and MV testing
Targeting and personalization
Recommendation

 

Media tools

DSP/Ad Server
Retargeting platforms
SEM tools
Paid social platforms

 

Cross-channel Campaign Mgtm.

Direct Marketing automation management
Contact and Offers management

 

How they all are supposed to work together

 

This classic package of tools is fundamental to lay a baseline for digital data collection and activation. 

 

In the collection part, data from the Tag Management tool is sent for analysis and segmentation to the Digital Analytic tool. Such prepared data is then sent to DMP, that should provide customer recognition, segmentation and orchestration, using third-party data. DMP also exchanges the data with the legacy CRM, enriching it and taking what is needed for recognition and segmentation. From this central, DMP part, data is then activated.

 

The data is transferred to various activation systems: CMS and eCommerce, On-site and app personalization tools are used to manage the content of the websites and apps as well as for testing, targeting, and personalization of this content. Media tools optimize the content for paid external media, and Cross-channel Campaign Mgtm. has the use in Direct Marketing, like email, sms or chat channels.

 

In reality, such a stack does not work smoothly enough to feed the activation tools with real-time, unified data. 

 

Traditional MarTech stack painpoints

 

Dispersed data

 

Systems like DMP and CRM keep the data in their own silos. They are connected, they are able to mutually enrich or correct their datasets, but none of them puts them all together to create a unified, single source of truth about the customer.

 

From this problem another emerges. Traditional MarTech stack suffers from connection issues between different tools and technologies. The difference in implementation of these tools results in loss of data consistency across the stack. 

 

Security and privacy issues

 

When there is inconsistency and connection issues, the often invaluable data gets inevitably lost. Traditional MarTech stack puts the companies at a major risk of either have their customer data stolen by the outside agent, or misused by i.eg. marketing team.

 

It is next to impossible to control and protect from the hackers all the data flowing back and forth between different systems and technologies, when each has its technological weak spots and it is hard to determine if a data loss, leak or change was an effect of connection problems, human error or outside intrusion. It is no less difficult to manage the customer marketing consents in this situation. 

 

Identity resolution

 

Another problem, linked to data consistency and time to activation, is insufficient ability of the traditional MarTech stack to solve identity resolution. Without a single source of truth about the consumer for the company, marketers are forced to use third-party data in their efforts to unify the customer profile. Third-party data are, as for 2021, becoming a thing of the past. Not to mention, how much time and effort has to be put into, in the end, futile trying to achieve a unified customer profile.

 

Time to activation and time to market

 

Marketing teams and, actually all teams in a company, struggle to deliver the effect of their efforts to the market on time. They are forced to manage the data using too many systems and tools that capture different datasets.    

 

Unfulfilled potential of the MarTech tools

 

All these problems combined diminish and repress the potential that each of the tools in the stack has. Fed with inconsistent data, transferred across differently implemented systems, the tools work slow and fail to produce really usable results. And delivering them in real-time is out of the question.

 

To put it simply, traditional MarTech Stack fails in the task of providing consistent, connected and actionable customer experience in all touchpoints offline and online.

 

CDP / CIP definition

 

The Customer Data Platforms emerged to deal with this problem exactly. Before we explain how the CDPs work, let’s define them. They were designed not to displace all the expensive MarTech stack, but to finally unlock it’s potential and make the data gathered in it usable.

 

The most clear and understandable definition of a Customer Data Platform is probably this on, provided by Gartner: “A customer data platform is a marketing system that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels to enable customer modeling, and optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers.”. 

 

Another, also interesting, has been coined by the CDP Institute. According to them, the Customer Data Platform is a “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.”.  

 

“Packaged software” means that CDP is ready-to-use, off-the-shelf software, provided usually by the vendor. 

 

The part about “persistent, unified customer database” means that CDP collects the data from many different sources, basically, all the company’s touchpoints, where acquiring first-party consumer data is possible, like sales, loyalty, customer service, social media, etc. Data from different sources is stored in CDP, then merged and unified into a single customer profile.

 

Finally, “accessible to other systems” means that customer data is shared with any other system that needs it, like those used by sales, marketing, commerce. 

 

Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP) is the next step in CDPs evolution. CIPs include zero-party data along with first-party data to provide insights. And they leverage AI and machine learning to understand, resolve and evaluate both structured and unstructured data available to the company.  

 

CDP / CIP is just one system, collecting and analyzing data from all other tools/systems/touchpoints simultaneously, and building a unified customer profile, providing a single source of truth for the whole company in real-time.

 

Four CDP steps in making data consistent and usable

 

The CDP actually provides consistent, connected and actionable customer experience in all touchpoints offline and online. Unlike in the case of traditional MarTech stack, without CDP, where data is integrated in every tool separately, Customer Data Platform simply does it all, utilizing the whole stack and touchpoints, physical and digital. 

 

Collecting data from omnichannel sources

 

The  first task for CDP is to collect data from all channels, physical, like stores or call centres, and digital. The data originating from these omnichannel is sometimes anonymous, sometimes nominative. For example when they are linked to an email account or loyalty number.

This data, gathered in real time, is then linked to a wide range of attributes: promotional campaign, content consumed, purchase history, and stored. The goal is to gather all the precious first-party data to help develop customer intelligence.

personal and demographic data
onsite bahavioural data
engagement data
transactiona data
mobile data

 

Matching data to the same individual

 

Traditional marketing primarily targets devices. Today’s approach builds the contact around the person, the individual customer for better relevance.The next step CDP does is matching collected data for a people-based approach.

Cross-channel and cross-device matching is a painful task. First-party and zero-party data can prove useful in helping link information originating from different channels and devices to one single person. CDP also makes use of the existing stack, as the CRM, to extract old and nominative information that it can employ to successfully build a unified customer profile.  It can also take data from CRM and send it back enriched from other sources.

preparation
integration
enrichment

 

Segmentation and activation

 

Personal relationships with the consumer is a fundamental goal for modern marketers. To provide the means to do this, CDPs have  the ability to precisely segment profiles. This is its third step.

 

The CDPs task is to increase the number of possible segments based on several criteria: demography, geography, behaviour, etc. The CDP will then use these audience segments as a foundation to activate the solutions available, i. e.g. Dynamic Creative Optimization or personalised advertisements, marketing automation sequences or website personalisation.

The CDP can also activate data in physical touchpoints such as stores and call centres.

defining rules
building the audience
real time
email
push messaging
sms
social
web

 

Analyzing and optimizing

 

In the third step  activations are applied to segments and the subsequent results are analysed and serve as feedback to further refine these segments and activations. For example CDP gets the best out of A/B testing solutions. CDP can be connected to DMP to provide segments obtained from advanced statistics module as predicted ones.

 

The CDP breaks down metric silos and minimises interpretation bias for campaign results. In the case of the traditional MarTech stack, the attribution models are still rather basic.  The ways in which the performance of i.e.g. campaigns are too isolated to provide the company with sufficient, unbiased results. CDP’s central coordinator role allows for distinct performance metrics from one scenario to another.

modeling
analysing
automation

 

CDP fit into marketing stack

 

Since CDP effectively utilizes all existing MarTech stack employed by the company, one can ask, what this platform really is and how it fits into the existing stack? Is it just another solitary, monolith solution? A system built from several services? Or maybe an architecture, putting together and squeezing the most of already existing tools? 

 

Since the answer to all above questions may easily sound “yes” it is clear that CDP means for the company more than just its definition. 

 

The most practical role or a function for CDP in a MarTech stack is to be its foundation, making all the data gathered in there a single truth, actionable for all the company’s divisions. It does not change the precious stack itself, instead acts as a support for each and every individual tool and adds a value to it. 

 

Challenges for CDPs in the future

 

As for 2021, the biggest challenge for CDP’s, both platform providers and their clients, is an accurate assessment of how much data is actually enough. 

 

Everybody knows that more data provides the analyses with more context and provides the company with more meaningful results. But the major obstacles for unobscured customer data landscape can be summed up in these questions:

How can deeper insight into customers’ patterns be gained?
How to store all this data?
How to do it safely?
How much of it is actually useful in terms of enhancing customer experience?

 

Currently, we work to address all these issues, in order to provide our clients with even more useful datasets that will be actionable across all the company’s touchpoints on the customer journey.

 

To see what immense possibilities in providing consistent, connected and actionable data a modern CDP can offer you today,  request a SALESmanago demo.