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.

Today’s consumers undertake complex customer journeys. Over a number of months, an individual might click on a display ad, visit a brand’s website many times, add products to a cart and abandon them, open a few marketing emails and perhaps visit their local store. Without the ability to track the full journey, though, the only customer touchpoints the brand may be aware of are the ones that brought them into the journey and got them to buy.

Traditionally, the lion’s share of online ad spend has ended up in the pockets of two of the biggest marketing services in the world, Google and Facebook. Google Display ads, which are targeted according to web content, theme and client preferences, and Facebook ads, targeted through location, demographic and profile information, have always had above-average marketing clout, since the two services boast such a colossal reach between them.

Companies which collate and analyze customer data, both online and offline, have grown 16% in the last year and are more than twice as likely to significantly exceed business goals and see a strong return on investment (32% versus 14%), according to a global survey of 235 organizations with annual revenues of at least $50m.

By the CDP Institute’s RealCDP definition, a true Customer Data Platform must be able to ingest data from any source, capture the full detail of that data and retain it indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints), create a unified profile of an identified individual (that is, a Single Customer View or SCV), and share that profile with any system that needs it. This sounds like a marketer’s dream – but doesn’t guarantee that marketers will be able to access and leverage that data to gain insights, enrich the customer profile, and meet regulatory obligations. For that, an added user interface is needed.

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):

There’s a lot of hype these days about omnichannel marketing and the importance of crafting a consistent customer experience across every platform. The fact is, though, that all channels are NOT equal when it comes to customer engagement. According to industry analysts Gartner, an Adobe 2018 Consumer Email Survey found that 50% of consumers named email marketing as their preferred brand communications platform, compared with a maximum of 20% who said they preferred any other channel.

Every marketer wants to be doing real-time, cross-channel personalized marketing, but achieving this goal has traditionally been difficult with marketing automation platforms. Now it’s finally possible!

The Holy Grail. Originally a title given to the cup used by Christ at the last supper, which has been much sought after but never found, this term has come to represent something extremely difficult – perhaps impossible – to find or get. For many years, marketers around the globe have been attempting to realize their own Holy Grail of ‘real-time, cross-channel marketing’, yet many have failed in this quest. Now, a marketing tool has emerged that promises to make this dream a reality: the Customer Data Platform.

The explosion in do-it-yourself online bookings and the trend for bundled holiday products over the last decade has made knowing and defining the target market more important than ever within the travel & leisure industry. It used to be enough to segment customers by core demographics – their age, residential location and life stage, for example – but reaching the right customer with the right message in a competitive digital arena has become much trickier.