One of the questions I hear the most from marketers is how they can onboard or activate their customer data without bringing in IT, developers or consultants. It always comes back to the data. Always. If their data is unified, then their communications and marketing will be personalized, and they can deliver three crucial results that will change their campaigns which lead to a higher conversion rate and reduced customer acquisition costs.

  • Relevance. How much do we all hate pointless spam?  Unified data allows marketers to say the best things and helps cut through the noise and get responses from their campaigns.  
  • Timeliness. This might sound like a no-brainer but so many campaigns miss the mark on timing. You shouldn’t send your in-store sales campaign to customers when everyone is in quarantine. 
  • Customer delight. Happy, sticky customers that spread the word on how great your brand is will bring you more happy customers. 

But what’s stopping marketers from personalizing their campaigns today is a combination of a few things. It comes down to control. First, it’s super hard for a marketer to unify all their data, information is in so many different places – silos across the organization. 

Second, it’s hard to get started when organizing or finding relevant data requires expensive IT and consultancy, like the Adobe, Salesforce, or Oracle platforms, none of which were created from the ground up to meet the marketer’s needs.

Third and last, marketers have to make sense of all that data. Unifying user identities and identifying meaningful audience segments is an art. For example, the top customer on your web store purchase history could also be your biggest product returner according to customer support returns shipping data. Without joining the dots you could end up sending the wrong messages or offers to them.  

These big tech brands tend to require complex setup and ongoing consultancy. They make most of their money from consultancy after all. These costs force the inclusion of IT, but most importantly, it slows marketing down – both in terms of launching the campaign and also the response times to adapt to market changes. 

Choosing a big brand like Adobe or Salesforce, may feel like a safe bet, especially if a brand like Adobe has historically been used for something else. It probably sounds easy to add this new feature or the IT team already has a corporate relationship in place. Still, those components aren’t designed for the most critical asset the marketer needs — unifying data in a way that marketers can immediately use.

The value of first-party data, and using a CDP to create personalized marketing campaigns, is priceless. It’s easy to use what you already have and know to make use of your first-party data – why are people spending, what they are buying, who, when, etc., but you can also use that insight to improve personalization. You can use it to improve the user experience or send the right thank you messages to your customers.

For example, I browse the electronics company’s online store to research a new big-screen TV. I go to place an order, and they offer me a collect in-store option. I noticed they have one locally, so I abandon my shopping cart, jump in the car, and just go and buy it immediately. 

The next day I start getting irrelevant (some might say dumb) offers from their website. First, the reminders tell me to complete my purchase (annoying); next, I get 10% off the price, which is annoying because I just bought it (insulting). I’m not a happy customer. What they should have done was unify all of their first-party data and send me offers for products that compliment my big-screen TV purchase – offers for cables, BlueRay players, etc.  

The question isn’t what are the benefits of having highly personalized marketing campaigns for your first-party data; it is the risks if you don’t have it. Angry, disengaged, insulted customers who are annoyed by irrelevant communications at the wrong times. That sort of communication gets you ignored and the more of it you send the worse it becomes. Less is more when it’s focused.

When marketing’s campaigns are personalized easily and quickly, a brand can achieve three significant wins: 

  • Customer attention – people listen more frequently and pay attention.
  • Engagement and retention – customers are less likely to churn and will respond more.
  • Sales growth – customers more inclined to spend and tell their friends.

Want to turn your data into Tada? Learn how Audiens makes it easy for you to unify your data with one click, sign up here for free.

By Marko Maras, Founder and VP Product, Audiens