Communicating more effectively with customers is a key objective for every marketer. Using customer data for marketing has long been an integral part of this process, but often it is a complex task to efficiently analyze this data in order to spot customer trends and patterns. Particularly with much of this data held in disparate business databases and difficult for marketers to access.
With an inability to create a complete and reliable picture of each customer, this leaves marketers unsure who best to target. But with new technologies emerging on to the market, connecting with customers on a personalized level has never been more achievable – for example, with a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Through the matching, merging, standardizing and de-duplicating of customer data, a CDP will unify the data from all your online and offline channels, leaving you with clean, accurate records – the highly desirable Single Customer View (SCV). It provides you with a structured record of each customer regarding their interaction with your services, including contact channel information, campaign engagement and transactions.
A CDP is valuable to any data-driven business because it:
- Provides you with an accurate view of who your customer is – By combining different silos of data, an SCV centralizes data from both your online and offline channels to give you a refined insight to each customer.
- Improves your decision making – The CDP cleanses your customer data to provide you with reliable insights. This clean SCV therefore enables you to make accurate, informed marketing decisions.
- Allows you to react instantaneously to market trends and changes – A CDP connected to journey orchestration tools (which some CDPs include) allows you to visualize and analyze your data rapidly so you can identify, locate and target your marketing efforts on those customers who are most valuable to you, ensuring a greater ROI.
It’s important to note that every SCV is unique to your business and your customers. It’s not an off-the-shelf product that can be easily replicated. In fact, an SCV is not a product at all – it’s a process that your data is put through by a CDP in order to be usable for marketing, insight and analytic purposes.
Take care of your data and your data will take care of you
While an SCV brings valuable customer insights to a business, building one can be an expensive project. Most organizations will need theirs to be constructed by an outside provider. Therefore, it is essential to know how they work and what you are buying before purchasing one.
What do you need to know?
- In many cases, businesses do not get to keep the schema used to build an SCV. Usually all the algorithms, rules and data processes used to provide it, are retained by the company who built it for you.
- Before signing off a project, you should always determine if you gain ownership of the schema used to build an SCV. If you fail to obtain this intellectual property (IP), you could be at risk of losing your SCV if or when your contract with a CDP vendor ends.
- If you employ a technology provider to build your SCV but then decide to use another agency further down the line, often the data that is being used to form your SCV will be returned to you in its original state – i.e. pre-cleansed and disorganized.
Empower your business with the BlueVenn CDP
A Customer Data Platform is an attractive business asset for a multitude of reasons and it’s not just being used by marketing departments. Through collecting customer data from multiple channels into a single system, an SCV allows you to provide an omnichannel experience, making the customer journey a seamless process. As a result, this makes the roles of customer services and sales teams more effective because they have all the information they need about the customer right in front of them at the first point of contact.
The BlueVenn CDP gives you what you need to communicate effectively with your audience. And unlike many CDPs, we leave you the ‘keys’ to keep an SCV running, even if you opt for a different way of managing it in the future.
To discover more about the BlueVenn CDP and how it can be an attractive asset to your business, contact us today for a demonstration from one of our consultants.
Download our new eBook today
To discover more about how CDPs differ from other data management platforms, as well as what makes BlueVenn different to other CDPs, take look at our new eBook, A Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms – available now!
