{"id":4249704,"date":"2021-05-11T12:36:30","date_gmt":"2021-05-11T10:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.deptagency.com\/insight\/how-customer-data-platforms-help-brands-understand-shopper-needs\/"},"modified":"2021-05-11T12:36:30","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T10:36:30","slug":"how-customer-data-platforms-help-brands-understand-shopper-needs","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.deptagency.com\/en-nl\/insight\/how-customer-data-platforms-help-brands-understand-shopper-needs\/","title":{"rendered":"How customer data platforms help brands understand shopper needs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\n\t<\/svg>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tBack to all articles\t\t<\/span>\n\t\n<\/button>\n\t\tHow customer data platforms help brands understand shopper needs\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/picture>\n\t\n\t<\/div>
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\n\t\tLizzie Powell\t\t
\n\t\tVP of Growth, Experience and Engineering\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t11 May 2021\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\n\n\t\tCustomer journeys are no longer linear. Instead, customers are empowered to engage with brands on their own terms, interacting across a vast range of platforms and touchpoints without a defined route. Having grown used to a more personalised service,\u00a076% of customers<\/a>\u00a0expect brands to understand their needs. And, if they don\u2019t, they will take their custom elsewhere. But how is it possible to monitor and analyse such a vast range of interactions to predict what customers want from your company? The most forward thinking businesses are applying technology, specifically customer data platforms, to develop effective,\u00a0data-driven marketing strategies<\/a>.\t<\/h2>\n\n\n\t\tOnline shoppers now criss-cross between a brand\u2019s e-commerce product pages, social media, blog, online marketplaces and physical stores, making it increasingly difficult for companies to keep up with all customer touchpoints. As customer journeys continue to expand and diversify, never has it been more of an imperative for brands to implement a customer data platform (CDP). The shift from mass communication to personalisation has led to a focus on delivering the right message, to the right person at the right time; putting greater demand on marketers. CDPs make this possible, bringing together and analysing multiple sources of data to give a unified view into customers\u2019 needs and develop smarter marketing campaigns.\t<\/p>\n\n\n\t\tWhat is a customer data platform?\t<\/h2>\n\n\n\t\tA\u00a0customer data platform<\/a>\u00a0is software that aggregates and analyses customer data from a variety of sources. It collects real-time first, second and third party data to create customer profiles based on their demographic, historic behaviour and browsing activity. This can include data from the CRM, web forms, events, email, social media, websites and many more. The\u00a0CDP Institute<\/a>, a vendor-agnostic organisation dedicated to helping marketers manage customer data, defines it as \u201ca packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.\u201d\t<\/p>\n\n\n\t\tCDPs exist because customer data has become crucial to e-commerce business and marketing operations. Whereas customer information would traditionally be managed by the customer service or sales team, CDPs are more often owned by the marketing team, which utilises the data to create truly targeted campaigns; making sure the right products are put in front of customers at the right time in order to drive sales.\u00a0\t<\/p>\n\n\n\t\tCDP vs CRM vs DMP\t<\/h2>\n\n\n\t\tWhile CDP implementation isn\u2019t currently as widespread as DEPT\u00ae expects it to be in the near future, companies sometimes wrongly dismiss the need for a CDP. They often believe they are already operating optimally with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform and a data management platform (DMP).\t<\/p>\n\n\n\t\tWhile CRMs are also built with the purpose of collecting customer data, profile building is limited to general and historical data. These systems aren\u2019t built to ingest huge volumes of data from multiple sources and are unable to autonomously create customer profiles from data gathered across online and offline channels. Rather, CRM tools only track a customer\u2019s intentional interactions with a company.\t<\/p>\n\n\n\t\tDMPs use cookie data to enable the targeting and retargeting of digital advertisements. They\u2019re focused more on anonymous customer segments and categories rather than specific customers, and the data within a DMP expires at the end of the 90 day cookie lifetime. Whereas a CDP creates a persistent customer profile, storing all data and history to develop a database of customers that can be used for much more than just online advertising.\u00a0\t<\/p>\n\n\n\t\tAbandoning data silos\t<\/h2>\n\n\n\t\tMany companies have a tendency to work with data in silos. For example, when looking at paid social, brands tend to work only with the data that an individual platform (like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) provides; without taking into consideration how they can use data from other sources to get a better picture of their customers. The same thing happens when it comes to SEM and SEO, with brands primarily using Google Ads and Google Search Console as the primary data source.\t<\/p>\n\n\n\t\tWhile some brands do work with data from multiple sources, it is often only a maximum of three to four. Although this can generate good results, it\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg. Other data sources, such as the CRM, DMP and physical stores, offer additional customer insights that can further improve targeting and marketing efforts. This is where CDPs come in, enabling businesses to collect data from all sources and work intelligently to create better customer journeys, while saving money.\u00a0\t<\/p>\n\n\n\t\tCDP in practice\t<\/h2>\n\n\n\t\tCDPs assist brands in better identifying customer segments and understanding behaviour. When looking beyond data silos, unified customer data allows companies to prioritise and target users in different ways than before.\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n\t