The marketing industry often uses the terms omnichannel marketing and multi-channel marketing interchangeably. However, there are key differences between the two, which can fundamentally impact the way you build your marketing technology tool-set to complement an omnichannel or multi-channel personalization strategy.

The CDP Institute (CDPI) is basically THE body providing key resources for organizations that are researching Customer Data Platforms. As a vendor-neutral organization, its main aim is to act as an authority on customer data management and distribute materials or news that will help marketers to make the best use of their data. Every year the CDPI member survey is sent out in an effort to better understand the CDP buyers’ needs around customer data management.

For those that want to read the full CDP Institute Member Survey 2020 report, you can access it here, or for a summary of the key findings from the report, alongside commentary from Anthony Botibol (BlueVenn's VP of Marketing and CDP Institute Advisory Board member), read on:

When 55% of marketers globally are seeing their budgets cut or frozen, and customer purchase behaviors are changing rapidly, the need for increased efficiency is critical. Marketers looking to do more with less,  and defend budgets and resource, are therefore investing in multi-touch attribution solutions to help measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and marketing strategies.

Next Best Action (also known as best next action, next best activity or recommended action), is a customer-centric approach to marketing that considers multiple different actions that could be taken for a specific customer and then decides on the best one to provide. Moreover, Next Best Action commonly requires the need for automated self-learning decisions, using machine learning, to make a decision in real-time that will improve the chances of a conversion at the moment that a customer is making a purchase decision.

Customers expect to be able to mold their personal experience with a brand to meet their exact requirements, and in the current climate that means a seamless online buying experience. As they go meandering through seemingly unlimited marketing channels - perhaps browsing on a mobile device, hitting independent review sites, heading into a store to examine the product (remember that time?!), before summoning up a discount code and placing an order over the phone - the marketer's challenge is to keep up with the customer, and predict these outcomes in advance so they can deliver the best customer experience at scale.

How can marketers stay one-step ahead of this seemingly random journey to push the customer towards a purchase? How can they measure what effect marketing efforts are having on the customer experience?

When it comes to data protection, a storm has long been brewing. First came worries about Alexa eavesdropping in people’s homes and recording conversations (in November 2018 a New Hampshire judge ruled that audio captured in the home of a murder victim could be used as evidence in court). Then the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal broke, with data harvested off people’s Facebook accounts being used to drive political advertising, potentially affecting the U.S. election result. Consumers’ growing concern has led to harsh new data protection regulations – GDPR came into force in Europe on 25th May 2018, then the California Consumer Privacy Act became effective in the state on 1st January 2020.

As an enterprise organization, do you know what your customers want? What they really want? Ask a corner shop owner and they can likely tell you everything about each individual customer’s behavior, needs and desires. They will be able to make recommendations based on that customer’s buying habits and family, and confidently cater to their needs or wants. Of course, smaller businesses benefit from an emotional, invested customer relationship, but how can you create this corner shop customer experience at scale for millions or tens of millions of individual customers?

Data privacy is a hot topic these days, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcing stricter guidelines for the use of personal data for EU citizens and the forthcoming California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) offering stringent powers to consumers who feel that their personal data has been misused.

These data management regulations, and similar laws in countries like Australia, Japan and Brazil, are starting to put pressure on organizations to establish systems and processes that demonstrate the responsible use of customer data.

Although it faces some competition from the Scott Brinker Supergraphic, Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising’ is arguably the most awaited martech and adtech market visualization of the year. While the Supergraphic is one dimensional and doesn’t really say a lot about a product’s journey, the Hype Cycle plots the reality versus the myth of every technology wave.

Gartner is able, through its global presence and position of authority, to accurately measure the technology talking points of the moment (CDP, DMP, machine learning, etc.) and provide estimated timelines for these innovations to reach the stage where customers will start to see their maximum value. Similarly, the Hype Cycle will alert the market to anything that has hyped too far and predict its obseletion, i.e. that it will cease to be talked about and developed, before it reaches maturity.

Over the past three years, there has been a lot of confusion about what a Customer Data Platforms (CDP) can and can't do, and subsequently what benefits a CDP can bring to a company. Here are the 5 most frequently asked questions about Customer Data Platforms:

1. Can I use our home grown solution to create CDP-like benefits?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) will typically be controlled and used solely by the marketing team, so the information stored will be customer-related (contact information, customer activities/behaviors and transactions). Its raison d’être is to create a Single Customer View (SCV) by normalizing the customer data collected from marketing and operational systems across the business, and drawing together all known information about the customer into one ‘Golden Record’. During the Single Customer View creation process the CDP will cleanse the data, correct incorrect or inconsistent formatting, and merge duplicate entries. The data is also persistent, which means that it is retained indefinitely (unless required to be removed by law), including every change or process, which is then timestamped for 100% traceability.