How to get the most out of a new CDP: Top Data Experts Share Their Secrets

By the twelve month mark, you should start to run marketing programs that use CDP data and be getting measurable business results. By 24 months, you should be ready to manage cross-channel programs with the CDP as the connector between different delivery systems.

Also important is easier integration with the wide range of platforms that can both take advantage of the data and contribute additional results back into the CDP.

6 Months – Highly targeted marketing is now operational. Stakeholders are empowered to self-serve insight and execute personalized campaigns in significantly reduced timeframes. Customer data and insight becomes something that precedes campaign strategy, informing what campaigns are run rather than finding the best audience for an existing campaign. Acquisition audiences in Paid Media are tuned to high LTV looks alikes targeted with relevant products providing a materially reduced CPA and higher ROAS. Customer are being intelligently engaged on both Paid & Owned channels with relevant cross and up sell offers to improve LTV. Low value or Churned customers are suppressed out of audiences to reduce media waste.

12 Months – Increased focus on the customer leads the development of rich personas and differentiated products and services tailored to those customers.

Improved operational efficiencies are creating opportunities for cost saving initiatives or new value-generating activities. Data science and analysts are spending less time on low value list queries and are performing more sophisticated customer analytics.

Marketers are more agile, testing and learning in each campaign and have increased campaign volume and audience numbers.

The efforts around acquiring high LTV prospects and targeted cross & upsell activities have increased customer LTV growth providing the business confidence to move away from ROAS based acquisition investment. The business now takes a longer view providing a CPA cap optimized to each customer segment first-year LTV significantly increasing acquisition volume.

24 Months – Companies are more creative and adventurous with customer data. They are capturing additional information from customers earlier in their engagement in order to offer differentiated experiences.

Automation is a key strategy to create additional bandwidth for further innovation and development.
2nd Party data exchange becomes a viable strategy to drive additional growth and insight opportunities.

A CDP can be used to shake things up! And brand that are on the road to change towards more data-driven marketing or restructuring of current efforts around a central database.

Start small, with one or two use cases that have a direct impact on profits or internal processes and can be implemented quickly. Quickly can be quite quickly, like a few months. This will help to increase internal support for data-driven marketing as a whole.

You can communicate it as “…everything after that will be gravy.”

By now having the infrastructure in place, the first use cases can be built out, or more uses added. You can expect, like with all change, some resistance to organizational and workflow changes at first.

Hopefully, new data products as well.

One customer of ours just segmented their customers by mean discount rate and used this for targeting during a current sale. They direct their customers to the products and categories that match their discount threshold.

They wanted millennials to relate and subscribe, but had an aging publication. With the CDP, it created an awareness campaign specifically to university students by targeting:

• Titles that read, “student,” “intern,” or “graduate student”
• Email addresses ending in .edu
• IP addresses from courses or universities in North America

A predictive engagement scoring model is used to serve up offers based on a reader’s subscription status.

Using behavioral scoring, this company started pushing out content to readers based on preferred relevancy and consumption format. It also created content hubs based on specific topics driven from modeling. The campaign also ran segmented ads on Facebook, Google, and Snapchat.

Results
The campaign delivered an over 35% improvement on its ad spend return compared to historical campaigns.
More than 33% of the new ad-generated subscriptions were with millennials.
Website visitor engagement helped drive up digital subscriptions by 4X with behavioral scoring.

With data and a CDP as the “hub,” you are able to connect “spokes” with email, mobile, social, website, and advertising to dramatically build awareness and generate new subscriptions. I am beginning to see similar stories in retail, financial services, and other industries.

Also interesting is the identity resolution and the speed with which it can be accomplished, that also adds value to those campaign workflows.

We’ve talked to a lot of customers over the last year who are either implementing CDPs or planning for it. They often turn the discussion to “how will they drive value from the CDP” and “how quickly can we do that” once it is in place.

This comes down to being able to harvest the vast amounts of data in an efficient and effective way and quickly leads to the idea of using some form of AI or machine learning to accomplish that — something that can understand the data and either put it directly to use or make it a lot easier to understand and use. They are looking to decrease the time to value.

A good example is PerriconeMD that bundles offers and promotions like most skin care brands. Customers acquired via different channels may be value orientated. We want to identify our best, highest value loyal customers and bring them closer to the brands. While also surprising and delighting them with appropriate offers.

For our value customers we continue to provide great value, but look to structure content and offers based of what we know from our CDP to improve their experience and value.

For everyone else in the middle we target them more closely to increase purchase frequency and by reducing the amount of generic promotions also protect the brand from the risk of being overly promotional.

In terms of customer acquisition, there is also an opportunity for our brands to be more efficient and effective in how we acquire new customers. With our CDP we can define and identify high lifetime value audiences and their characteristics and build audiences via performance channels that resemble these real customers. This makes our marketing spend more efficient as we become more targeted, but also ensure we focus on acquiring the most valuable customers.

Finally, where we have brands that are looking to extend their product offering out off their core categories in to adjacent categories, we want to evolve messaging and target based on what we learn from customers who have or are making that transition. For example, a brand that sells primarily denim and is now focused on building a broader lifestyle business.

I like the example of how HelloFresh used a Customer Data Platform for their winback campaigns. They could use many channels for that, but which combination is most effective?

For example: Facebook retargeting via custom audiences, email marketing, mobile push notifications, SMS, their own site(s) and integrated personalized offline letters.

Through the use of CDP they were able to coordinate the different channels, and do cross-channel campaign testing. They tested several channels against each other and also different combinations (like the winning combination with email + direct mail). Just setting this up would have been an enormous effort without a CDP.

I’d be diligent because the tools can be quite expensive and impactful. Make sure you have your use cases and a business case worked out at the start of the software selection to a rather detailed level.

Ask the CDP vendor for references of companies that have done a similar thing or had a similar set-up as yours and talk with the references about their implementation. This will give you a better notion of what to expect and many marketers would be glad to share their experience with you.

But most of the value comes from using the data in analysis and marketing programs. This takes additional time and results can rarely be estimated in advance. It’s important to realize that CDP is a foundational technology, like your Web CMS or email system, which only makes it possible to do things that create value rather than creating value directly. You might have some cost savings from users spending less time on data preparation and extracts, but that is a very small piece of the picture and not the reason most people buy a CDP.

CDPs can help, but most CDPs and CDP users are at the early stages of maturity so implementation has its own set of considerations that may affect various teams or the whole company. The questions go on and on. I would recommend that you make up a detailed list of considerations and questions and have the team answer them honestly.

I think a CDP implementation can be a priority after a team can positively address all the considerations and can dedicate the time, resources, and budget to make the implementation successful. Make time to plan for success with a strategy. Don’t just jump to execution.

This is very common integration for CDPs that is often not otherwise possible. Connecting online channels to call center is another high priority task that a CDP can facilitate. Problems with data quality for training predictive modeling systems is another priority application.

Is there enough buy-in to select – implement and execute on the CDP and the projects you were thinking to use it for. Ridiculously important and often misunderstood. Especially in organizations that have been struggling with their data projects in the past, internal support can be low (especially from people who lived through projects managed badly and disappointed in the past) or highly bureaucratic organizations. A big red flag for trouble down the line, think twice!

Are we leapfrogging a bit too far ahead? If the basics aren’t in place yet, it might be too early to change. In the order of things, get the basics in place first. Sometimes that means to get the data and tech structure arranged as a foundation. Often it means to get more product and services out the door first (just market and sell).

I also read in some articles about GDPR / data regulation and subsequent data management being a valid reason for data centralization with a CDP. It’s hard to make that case. If it would be the only reason for your organization to centralize your data, I’d not go there.