BlueLlull. BlueLeibniz. BlueEuler. If our name had been inspired by anyone else, BlueVenn just wouldn’t be the same. Sure, John Venn may not have been the first to use schematic diagrams to represent set collections and all their possible logical relations, but he was the first to popularize them.

The days of plastering a message on a billboard or running an ad in a newspaper is not as effective as it once was. Not least because tracking the results of marketing spend using these traditional methods is much harder than through digital mediums.

Now, marketers have to utilize all their marketing channels to ensure that a message is seen, and heard. Moreover, that their brand is visible in the right place at the right time, no matter what digital channels consumers touch as part of their customer journey.

With so many marketing touchpoints and strategies to orchestrate, how can marketing departments better coordinate their efforts efficiently?

A long-standing problem that marketers experience time and again is their lack of access to quality, usable data. This inability to utilize data at the time when it’s needed means that it's difficult to communicate the right message to the right customer at the right moment. And with your data spread over multiple silos, it’s an overwhelming challenge for marketers to wade through different pools of data to find the information they need.

So how does a Customer Data Platform (CDP) solve these problems?

Marketers are always looking for new and improved ways to make personal connections with their customers. Yet as technology, websites and the online experience develops, so do customer expectations of a personalized brand experience.

It can be a relentless challenge trying to keep up with new technologies, not to mention all the acronyms and buzzwords that come along with them.

Our new eBook, A Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms, is here to clear up some of this confusion by delving into precisely what a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is and why it’s vital for marketers to recognize the differences between them and other forms of data solutions.

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.

As technology, websites and the online experience advances, so too do customers’ expectations of a tailored experience. As a result, marketers are always looking for new and improved methods of creating personalized connections.

Today we exist in two worlds – the offline world and the online world. The two are fusing by the day.

Both worlds capture traces about our lives: how we spend our money, where we live and where we go. It records what we drive, where we work and our family status. Add to this our daily step count, the web pages we browse, our mobile behavior, our social media engagements and so on. The amount of data generated by an individual on a daily basis is almost unquantifiable.

The problem? All this data is in many different databases and it’s not always easy to get at. How can a Customer Data Platform help solve these problems?

Last year saw the world of retail suffer several high profile casualties. Joining Toys R Us was RadioShack, Payless ShoeSource, and a significant number of others who went into administration.

While a tough retail climate claimed many of these businesses, the consensus is that those aforementioned might have avoided bankruptcy had they been quicker to adopt an omnichannel strategy. That is, an integrated customer experience across all of their online and offline channels. How can brands implement their own omnichannel strategy?

At BlueVenn, we’re quick to promote the benefits of database marketing. That’s not to say we’re oblivious to the challenges that come with it. Thankfully, when weighing up the pros and cons of database marketing, being aware of the pitfalls means you can avoid some of them.

Here are five challenges of database marketing…