Customer data is crucial for developing and streamlining CX. But with so many new ways to capture customer information, it’s more complicated than ever to manage the amount of data your business generates. Discover how to use a CDP to make your data work harder in our new how-to guide.
Customer data is crucial for developing and streamlining CX. Without it, your decisions are just guesswork, and knowing which strategic direction to head in becomes fraught with error. But with so many new ways to capture customer information, it’s more complicated than ever to manage the amount of data your business generates. Sure, you’ve got a wealth of facts and figures at your disposal. But putting them to work and extracting insight can become a challenge as the volume and complexity increases.
If you find you’re not quite sure how to derive value from the customer data you collect, you’re not alone. And thankfully, there’s a solution: a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
CDPs are crucial for every business. But what makes them so important?
At a basic level, a CDP consolidates all of your data into one source of truth that’s easy to navigate, share, and keep secure. But the real power of a CDP is in unlocking actionable insights. Because when you have your data stored in a CDP, everything else becomes easier: from segmentation and advertising, to implementing AI tools and staying compliant.
As demand for exceptional customer experiences continues to increase, the use of a CDP becomes all the more helpful. Businesses are under more pressure than ever to be unique, engaging, authentic, and demonstrate a commitment to serving their customers to the best of their ability. It’s hard enough to make your business stand out, but having a disjointed tech stack, siloed tools, and terabytes of dormant data makes it near impossible – and if you don’t have a CDP, that’s probably the set-up you’re dealing with.
So, we know CDPs are useful for data consolidation. But what else can they do?
Enrich customer profiles - Delight customers with smart predictions on how to provide the right customer experiences for each individual user in real time.
Activate customer data - Save time by using pre-built connectors to get your data into unified customer profiles, then put them to use with tools to help you make decisions based on the information you've collected.
Optimise ad spend - Create cost efficiencies and drive conversions with AI-powered ads that are predictive, precise, and personalised.
Boost cross-sell and upsell - Increase revenue by using AI to anticipate customer needs and show them the right deals at the right time to maximise conversion.
With the abilities above, your business can use its data in increasingly smart and sophisticated ways, giving you an edge over competitors and helping build stronger relationships with your customers. In turn, this will unlock new opportunities, powering growth as you scale, all while taking the stress out of managing your data.
We’ve established that a good CDP makes your data work harder. But with so many helpful features, where should businesses start when it comes to unleashing the benefits of their new platform?
Here are our three key recommendations on how to get the best ROI from your CDP:
Unify customer movement
Simplify data management for your engineers by having all your information about the entire customer user journey in one place.
You’ll be able to understand a user’s interaction with your business across web, mobile, server, and third-party partner touchpoints in real time, using an online and offline ID graph with support for cookie IDs, device IDs, emails, and custom external IDs.
How does it work? Linked Events (from your CDP to your data lake or warehouse) create a map of your customers' activities, giving your marketing team the full context of data in the platforms they use downstream – and therefore a better foundation to base decisions on.
Do you know who your most valuable customers are? Historical count (the number of times an action was performed) can inform more high-value experiences for customers. Whether your goal is to increase conversion, click-throughs, or brand awareness, you’ll be able to effectively build core behaviours or launch new products with a clear understanding of your conversion moments.
How? By examining the exact moment in the customer journey where new users transform into high-value customers. Once you've pinpointed the golden opportunities within your sales funnel via your CDP's conversion analysis tools, you can then channel the right customers to the right pages, resulting in higher customer retention.
Stop guessing what your customers are going to do next, and start letting AI make smart suggestions. With CustomerAI Predictions, you'll be able to launch personalised ads across platforms, designed specifically to appeal to each segment, or even each individual user.
These easy-to-use, out-of-the-box predictive models are built on trusted, AI-ready data. By enabling you to quickly create predictive traits, you’ll gain the power to provide more timely, targeted, and precisely personalised customer experiences on every channel. In turn, this will increase trust between your business and your customers, and amplify the impact that your communications with them can have.
Now you know how CDPs can be used to squeeze maximum value from your customer data, it’s time to choose which one is right for you.
As the leading CDP, Twilio Segment does everything you’ve read about here and more. Segment works hard for every team in your business, with useful features for data engineers, marketers, product managers, and more – including plenty of no-code functions to minimise the requirement for engineering team input. It simplifies the process of collecting data and connecting new tools, allowing you to spend more time actually using your data, and less time trying to collect, categorise, and maintain it.
There's no easier way to activate your warehouse data and start making better, faster, more impactful decisions than Twilio Segment.
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