Boost eCommerce Business with Customer Data Platform
Customer data is information that you have about your customers. The main purpose of collecting customer data from several touchpoints is to produce actionable insights as well as ideas for experimentation.
Data comes in quantitative data and qualitative data types at the highest level. You can explore the Customer Data Platform basics and make certain how to use it for boosting your eCommerce.
What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a piece of software that combines data from several tools for creating a single centralized customer database including data on the complete touchpoints and interactions with the business. This database can be segmented in endless ways and make personalized marketing campaigns.
A CDP is software that aggregates and organizes customer data across so many touchpoints. It is efficiently used by other software systems and marketing efforts. It collects and structures real-time data into centralized and individual customer profiles.
You can prefer and use this packaged software for successfully creating a unified and persistent database accessible to other systems.
Do you want to discuss about the hidden potential of Customer Data Platform that fuel your online business and increase sales and revenue significantly?
4 types data managed by Customer Data Platform
Customer databases are very important for both businesses and marketing operations in our time. Customer data is information customers leave behind when they use the Internet and interact with the businesses online and offline, especially through blogs, websites, eCommerce portals, and in-store customer interactions with the businesses.
The four types of customer data collected by the CDP are as follows.
1. Identity Data
Identity data is used to build the foundation of every customer profile in the customer data platform. It lets businesses uniquely find every customer and prevent expensive replications. It includes the following.
- Name information
- Demographic information
- Location information
- Contact information
- Social information
- Professional information
- Account information
2. Descriptive Data
Descriptive Data expands on identity data and provides an overview of customers. The main categories of descriptive data vary as per the company. The descriptive data includes,
- Career information
- Lifestyle information
- Family information
- Hobby information
3. Quantitative or behavioural data
Quantitative data lets businesses understand how every customer has engaged with their businesses. It includes,
- Transaction information in particular the number and type of purchased or returned products
- Email communication information such as email responses and dates
- Online activity information such as website click-through and social media engagement
- Customer service information such as query details and communication dates
4. Qualitative data
Qualitative data provides context for the complete customer profiles and gives customer data personality. It collects any motivations, attitudes, or opinions expressed by the customers of the business. It includes,
- Motivation information
- Opinion information
- Attitude information
Do you want to manage any or many or all types of customer data platform from the above list to enable shoppers with the highly contextualized and relevant customer experience?
What do you need to know about customer data? – capabilities of Customer Data Platform
The main capabilities of CDP include, but are not limited to the following.
Data collection
Data collection is all about the ability to ingest first-party and individual-level customer data from several online and offline sources in real-time devoid of any storage limit. Data persists within the system until it is needed for processing.
Profile unification
It is the ability to consolidate profiles at the individual level and connect all attributes to identities. It includes linking several devices to a single individual once that person has been successfully identified and deduplicating the overall customer records.
Segmentation
An interface lets the marketer make and manage segments. The basic offerings support rule-based segment creation. Modern segmentation features include predictive analytics, automated segment discovery, and propensity models.
Activation
It is the ability to send segments with complete instructions to activate them to tools for mobile messaging, email campaigns, and advertising. All users of the Customer Data Platform get an array of benefits from these CDP capabilities. They are confident and happy to suggest the CDP to like-minded business people.
Key Benefits of Customer Data Platform
As a beginner to the Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can pay attention to its overall benefits.
1. More organized data management
Customer data management is all about the process of acquiring, organizing, and using the complete customer data. Customer data platforms make such a process simple by organizing the customer data in a particular way that makes it usable.
It is a suitable time to know some resources designed to assist users to learn about customer data organizing and managing issues.
2. Best principles for great management
Making data useful and precise needs so many steps. You can use this guide and become skilled in the overall importance of a data governance strategy, how breaking data silos is a vital part of the customer data management, and data tracking plan.
3. Scalable data governance
Useful data needs a data governance method. It is easy to collect useless data or gather data in the wrong methods without such a method. Any unorganized data is really hard to use regardless of whether you know what you seek.
4. Data Tracking
A data tracking pan is a very important component of the data governance strategy. The data plans are documents or spreadsheets used across organizations and serve as project management tools and reference documents.
5. More insightful customer analytics
Customer analytics involves understanding the customer behaviour all through the customer journey for making business decisions associated with product development, marketing, and other things. The main components of customer analytics are as follows.
- Data collection
- Data sorting
- Data storage
- Data analysis
A good combination of all these components makes the CDP platform a powerful platform for customer analytics. You can use the proper customer analytics system in place and improve customer loyalty and retention. You can learn the following things.
- Analyzing customer data to raise the company’s ROI
- An introduction to multi-touch attribution
- Improves product usability to the next level
6. Improved data protection and privacy
Data privacy is more important than ever, especially with the advent of so many data privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You must know how CDPs assist a lot in improving data protection and compliance with some categories of privacy laws.
7. Customer data protection
CDPs assist users to protect their customer data by limiting the data amount they collect in the first place. You can use the data plan and data governance strategy alongside your CDP to make certain that you only collect data essential for your marketing efforts.
8. Customer Data and the GDPR
GDPR legislation affects the company based on how the company collects customer data. You must understand your business classification under it and use your CDP to prepare and manage the customer data.
9. Prepares CCPA for future data privacy regulations
The CCPA is the same as the GDPR. It is applied to businesses in the geographical areas of the legislation. You have to comply with it when you collect data about customers or visitors to the website and such visitors live in California.
Don’t miss to read How Does Customer Data Platform for eCommerce Benefit Your Online Business? to explore the CDP benefits for eCommerce business.
Do you want to build a powerful Customer Data Platform that enables your eCommerce brands with all the above listed benefits?
How to choose the best Customer Data Platform for your business
Have you decided to be aware of the realistic method to choose the best Customer Data Platform for your business? You are at the right place. You can focus on the following details explaining 6 steps for selecting the best customer data platform.
1. Being stakeholders in the process
You have to bring internal stakeholders into the process before deciding which customer data platform you wish to evaluate. The CDP you select must work with data from several departments within the business and all must be bought in.
Do not forget to get an answer to the question of who else collects data that your customer data platform handles. Your customer relationship management platform stores data that your customer data platform has to access. Sales stakeholders must be part of the buying process.
Your customer success team uses all tools designed to handle the customer data. A stakeholder from the customer success team is likely to be part of such a process. There is no need for every stakeholder to individually evaluate every customer data platform.
You require inputting on so many parts of the buying process. You have to talk to each stakeholder at last and let them know why you want to buy a CDP and what you wish to get out of it.
2. Define use cases
This is advisable to get an answer for what is the reason you wish to use a CDP in this stage. Though you get an idea to use a CDP, you have to find and make certain the real need behind its usage. A CDP is designed to consolidate data into a single customer database.
Though data consolidation does not make you maximum data-driven, you have to use every chance to choose the right CDP on time and define use cases ahead of time. You have to know what your wish is for your customer data platform to help with and talk to stakeholders regarding their ideal use cases. You can easily identify some ideal use cases from there.
- Fully understanding the customer journey
- Creating a customized customer experience on the website
- Creating targeted multichannel advertising campaigns
- Combining online and offline data
3. Determine the tools needed
You require investing in tools your business uses that get connected to the customer data platform. You can focus on the use cases to find and make certain what tools and functionality you require. You have to make a list of such tools designed to interact with customers in one or another way.
This is worthwhile to include website tools, customer relationship management systems, email platforms, real-time live chat, and help desk systems in the tool list. You can go to other stakeholders and make certain that you have not missed important resources you need to be connected to.
In general, customers start with
- Analytics tools
- Advertising tools
- Customer success and live chat tools
- Business intelligence tools
- Data warehouses
4. Gather requirements
A CDP is useful for more than just consolidating data and solving use cases. You have to think that other needs for your CDP. The overall requirements are different when compared to the use cases as they are more like features instead of outcomes. Some common requirements that our customers have are as follows.
- CDP must help with GDPR and CCPA compliance
- CDP has to help us to get an overview of the customer journey
- CDP requires top-notch security
5. Compare vendors
You require a list of CDPs that fit your use cases, and essential integrations, and meet the overall requirements. You can compare each customer data platform. You must not consider pricing.
However, you can consider your industry first. You can find CDPs with customers similar to your business. Your CDP must have a track record of accomplishing the use cases, a solution for data compliance, the right integrations for existing and upcoming use cases, and excellent customer service.
6. Consider ROI
The return on investment of the customer data platforms is the last thing you have to consider. ROI is about which option gives you the best value. You can use the reliable ROI worksheet and determine the cost of your engineers’ time as engineers have to spend several hours building and maintaining integrations for all tools without a CDP.
To explore essence of customer data planform for your business, you mut read How Does A Customer Data Platform Help to Transform Your Business? Get profound understanding on the abilities of CDP that improve customer retention and conversion for your brand.
Are you looking for a reliable and experienced technology partner that helps you select the right CDP for your eCommerce business and improve buyer’s shopping experience?
How Customer Data Platform boosts your eCommerce business?
An effective CDP data boosts the eCommerce business in the following ways.
Nurture loyal customers
Good data can be used for predicting which customers have maximum lifetime value. You can identify such users early and reap benefits from customization for nurturing their interactions with the business.
Convert one-time buyers
you wish to efficiently use the Customer Data Platform, then you have to convert one-time buyers. You have to identify personas and retarget them with suitable follow-up offers. You can use it for messaging.
Acquire high-value customers
Build rich profiles of high-value customer types using geographic, demographics, psychographics, product preferences, and historical and predictive data.
Promotion reduction
Many companies offer consistent blanket promotional offers. You can use your data and segment audiences into those that only purchase when there are special offers and those who buy without a requirement of any promotion.
Do you want to discuss about the CDP features and functionality that contribute considerably in making the customer journey engaging and exciting?
Bottom Line
Everyone in the competitive eCommerce business sector can prefer and use one of the most suitable customer data platforms. They can get an array of advantageous things from the customized Customer Data Platform and confidence to recommend it to others. You can use the CDP as per guidelines and achieve your goal of eCommerce development.
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