CDP Integration & Personalization: A New Standard of Marketing
Discover how integrating CDP with CX can deliver tailored marketing experiences.
JR Sherman, CEO of RainFocus, shares how in the past decade, event marketing has made great strides in adopting sophisticated behavioral data integrations due to martech and emerging CDP implementations. He further elaborates how marketers can leverage these integrations to connect with the customers and enhance their customer journey.
The events marketing industry made impressive strides in the past decade with increased access to data, more sophisticated data analytics tools, and the introduction of meaningful integration with the martech stack. Despite the many tech advancements and the myriad of new tools at our disposal, challenges for marketers remain.
To put it plainly, marketers have dealt with several seismic shifts in the industry this past year. While the diversity of solutions allows for endless possibilities, the increased variety and narrowed scope of current technology present the challenge of fully utilizing or integrating them while balancing and standardizing siloed data from varied sources. Having a large volume of data at your fingertips can be great, but it also makes it imperative to focus and utilize data wisely. Finally, some marketers are struggling with the demise of third-party cookies and increased scrutiny of data usage, ensuring that their current processes for obtaining zero and first-party data are compliant and secure.
In 2023, marketing leaders will continue to meet consumer demand for seamless experiences, build brand reputation through establishing consistent and memorable brand interactions, ensure that data insights are targeted to most effectively meet customer needs, and fully embrace first-party data while dealing with more obstacles than before. More than ever, it will be important to invest in personalization to be successful this year (and beyond).
The Current Challenges of Marketing
The ubiquity of data clearly presents challenges for marketers but how does this affect end users? While many end users are willing to share data to support better customer experiences, many don’t always feel their data is used effectively or securely. This willingness to share can be overshadowed by privacy concerns and lead to a loss of brand trust if marketers don’t ensure customers’ data is adequately safeguarded. By securing customer data in a compliant and transparent manner, customers are far more likely to give brands their trust.
Other data challenges, like excessive siloing, make it difficult to use data. That makes integration so important – ineffective integration can result in inefficiencies, inaccuracies, and compromised data security. Marketers are increasingly dissatisfied with a “suite of services” approach that relies on multiple solutions and tools to execute. Reliance on third-party cookies raises privacy concerns and could leave brands scrambling as third-party cookies face regulatory scrutiny. Why does this matter, though? These data challenges present barriers to creating first-rate experiences and interactions with customers and must be addressed to meet customer expectations.
Solutions for the Future of Marketing
Yesterday’s challenges have led to essential solutions for the future of marketing. Through the end of this year, we’ll see how marketers approach building technology into event marketing strategies, creating new standards for capturing attendee data that organizations can align with to effectively track, understand, and build in-depth attribution throughout the customer journey. With advancements in customer data platforms (CDPs), marketers can do just that, synthesizing targeted data insights in a novel way. This will also force marketers to be more thoughtful and ensure that data insights directly translate to tangible and memorable customer experiences and result in sales conversion.
If brands leverage insights from solutions like CDPs to meet customers where it is most impactful, they’ll be rewarded with improved brand recognition, memorability, and viral word-of-mouth marketing. By keeping purpose top of mind and focusing on building meaningful customer experiences, brands will optimize data decision-making and ensure that all activations support the end goal of superb customer experiences without getting lost in technical processes.
Changing Landscape of Marketing
The thoughtful integration of CDPs and customer experiences is of vital importance to the integration of the martech stack. Advanced CDPs can deliver deep insights that can be leveraged for personalization at scale. Instead of traditional marketing segments that rely on demographic data, experiences can be tailored to numerous customers through a well-thought-out CDP solution. CDPs also provide the advantage of real-time data functions that can form a significant bridge between marketing and sales. While the relationship between the two has historically been challenging to navigate, real-time updates can inform marketing activations and drive sales in a more targeted manner. According to a 2021 Gartner marketing survey, 43% of respondents reported having a CDP, though many still aspired to attain a complete 360-degree customer view.
CDPs can enable data standardization and the creation of more consistent data sets, making multichannel marketing and enhanced customer personalization possible. As the name would suggest, the success of multichannel marketing strategies requires the unification of customer data across multiple platforms and while the streamlining of marketing processes on its own may not be glamorous, it underpins the personalized customer engagement that today’s customers have come to expect. 62% of respondents from the same survey indicated that integrating customer data is a moderate to significant obstacle in executing a multichannel marketing strategy, demonstrating the foundational role of effective CDP solutions for today’s marketers. 63% of respondents felt that augmenting existing customer profiles with new data posed a moderate to significant obstacle to effectively utilizing available customer data. For marketers in 2023, the primary data challenge and the area where CDPs can create the most value is not in obtaining more data for its own sake, but in removing obstacles to effectively using data and harnessing maximum value from existing data.
The end result of CDP and CX integration is streamlining processes into one platform. This centralized platform creates a “home base” for project management, data exchange, creation of data standards and reference architecture, and secure collection of first-party data. Rather than using separate tools to address disparate data needs, brands that unify CDPs with CX have enormous potential to reduce friction throughout the customer journey.
In turn, this will increase the ROI for first-rate CDPs. Marketers that intentionally build out their CDP platform with in-depth customer data profiles will be fully equipped to provide the most meaningful engagements throughout an event and an entire customer journey. Data insights can be leveraged to develop sophisticated customer data profiles that inform customer targeting. For example, customer buying behavior can inform more accurate customer data profiles and support marketers in sharing promotional offers and product recommendations that will most likely result in sales conversion and customer satisfaction.
According to research from PwC, poorly timed or irrelevant brand communication can result in customer frustration and an “experience disconnect,” illustrating the prime importance of targeted personalization. However, the same study found that brands providing personalized customer experiences see increased customer loyalty and can command a price premium of up to 16%. Additionally, 63% of consumers surveyed would be more open to sharing personal data in exchange for superior experiences. With this in mind, marketers can build a virtuous cycle of trust by utilizing data to provide first-rate experiences, resulting in greater ROI, customer satisfaction, retention, and access to customer data.
So What Does the Future of Marketing Look Like?
This year, we expect to see martech continue to evolve as marketers establish a new standard for data capture that can then be aligned to effectively track, understand, and build in-depth attribution throughout a customer’s journey, allowing the field of marketing to expand beyond traditional media, and focus on live customer experiences. Customers will no longer be left to fend for themselves, seeking the information they desire. Rather, brands will leverage data to thoughtfully and efficiently guide customers through every brand engagement, forming a cohesive customer journey that paves the way for an ongoing relationship. In turn, ongoing customer relationships will drive recurring sales conversions and long-term results for the bottom line, brand value, and brand loyalty.
The thoughtful integration of CDPs and customer experiences is vital to integrating the martech stack. Advanced CDPs can deliver deep insights that can be leveraged for personalization at scale. Instead of traditional marketing segments that rely on demographic data, experiences can be tailored to numerous customers through a well-thought-out CDP solution. CDPs also provide the advantage of real-time data functions that can form a significant bridge between marketing and sales. While the relationship between the two has historically been challenging to navigate, real-time updates can inform marketing activations and drive sales in a more targeted manner.
The end result of CDP and CX integration is streamlining processes into one platform. This centralized platform creates a “home base” for project management, data exchange, creation of data standards and reference architecture, and secure collection of first-party data. Rather than using separate tools to address disparate data needs, brands that unify their CDPs with CX have enormous potential to reduce friction throughout the customer journey
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