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.

A use case is a statement of what a marketer wants to get out of a project, system or platform. Whether they work for a single or multi-brand retailer, if the business operates on at least two channels, marketers are going to face these use cases as the Top 5 requirements for a Customer Data Platform (CDP):

BRISTOL, England and TOURS, France, (November, 2019) 

BlueVenn, creator of a leading, award-winning Customer Data Platform (CDP), has signed an agreement with Avanci, France's most experienced multi-channel database marketing agency, to deliver its end-to-end CDP and multi-channel marketing hub to French speaking organizations in France, Switzerland and Belgium.

Under the terms of the partnership, Avanci will provide a full sales, implementation and support package to deliver BlueVenn's highly-regarded CDP technology in the agreed countries. The partnership is the first of its kind in France, with organizations set to benefit from Avanci's extensive expertise in database marketing, alongside BlueVenn's technology that provides B2C and B2B brands with a better understanding of their customers and the ability to deliver highly targeted, personalized and compliant marketing campaigns.

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.

Once used by only the most prosperous businesses, marketing automation has the ability to mechanize marketing activities – such as SMS, emails, social media and other functions. The aim of marketing automation is to free up the time of marketers to focus on other, less laborious and time-consuming tasks.

After its emergence in the 1980’s, marketing automation was reserved only for the wealthy and powerful businesses with vast customer bases. It was an incredibly expensive, highly bespoke tool that could only be built in-house.

However, due to the rise of third-party suppliers and the development of technology over recent years, marketing automation platforms are more available than ever before, and the benefits they provide and the reasons every marketer should be using them just keep on growing. As of 2018, 49% of companies are now regularly using marketing automation.