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!

As a top British daily news brand, our customer reaches 1 in 5 UK adults every day and 70% of the population each month. In 2019 it launched a tablet and smartphone app that allows users to enjoy content from the UK or Scottish editions of its daily periodicals, along with exclusive daily radio broadcasts, podcasts and videos from leading journalists. This draws 34,000 weekly users, with an impressive dwell time of 47 minutes per day.

Nobody buys a new car in a hurry. After all, a car is the second most expensive purchase that people routinely make (after a home), and those purely interested in utility or seeking an emergency replacement tend to shop second hand. A new car is a status symbol. It represents who you are, how you live, and what you like to do in your spare time – and that’s without thinking about keeping your family safe, the likely weather and road conditions, and your mileage and environmental preferences. Automotive clients know what they’re looking for and are willing to hold off until they find it. So, the buying journey can take years and approaching the right customer in the right way is absolutely critical.

Customer Data Platform series: 5 of 5

Over the next 5 weeks, read a new blog each week from our CDP Series as our CMO helps you to understand the CDP landscape, capabilities and functionality.

Let's just get something straight; it's common (and understandable) to assume that 'tag management' means organizing either the tags that make blogs more searchable or the meta tags used to improve the SEO of a web page. That isn't what we're talking about here.

This blog focuses on management of the snippets of code (tags) embedded into a web page to record information when a customer accesses and interacts with a company’s website or mobile app, or to help launch the functionality of marketing technology products. In the latter case, the vendor of the martech will request that the customer embeds the code. Just like a Customer Data Platform, the main function of a Tag Management System is to help manage large amounts of first-party information collected by companies about their customers. 

Customer Data Platform series: 4 of 5

Over the next 5 weeks, read a new blog each week from our CDP Series as our CMO helps you to understand the CDP landscape, capabilities and functionality.

The basic raison d'être of both a Master Data Management (MDM) solution and a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is similar. Both exist to ensure that a business has a supply of carefully curated, unified, accurate and reliable corporate data, a single trusted view to deliver insights and drive business innovation, but that's where the similarities end.

For a start, MDM is a discipline and a set of processes designed to transform organization-wide data, especially in large companies, while a CDP is a packaged software product with a specific purpose to deliver a single view of the customer that the marketing department can use for the improved personalization of marketing campaigns. Another key difference is who stands to benefit from their use and how they are managed within the organization.

According to Gartner, “Access to customer data, in real-time, unifying profiles across channels and ability to measure comprise the competitive playing field that will define the coming years,” allowing retailers to effectively personalize cross-channel customer journeys.

A Customer Data Platform, or CDP, helps by bringing in huge amounts of online and offline customer data from a multitude of sources, then cleansing, deduplicating and unifying this information into a Single Customer View that can then be accessed by all other marketing channels, platforms and business intelligence tools.

To then unify these profiles across channels, look for a CDP with ‘orchestration’ or campaign management capabilities, which will function as a ‘smart hub’ to orchestrate and trigger all your channels from a central decision-making point.