“Do we require a Customer Data Platform when we already have a robust MarTech stack?”

One of the common questions that our sales personnel encounter from our prospects is “Do we require a Customer Data Platform when we already have a robust MarTech stack?”

As an organization grows, its technology needs become more nuanced, requiring integration between previously disparate silos, systems, and teams. The proliferation of new channels is witnessing a diversification of target audience profiles — they are no longer satisfied with a generic message; they want to be spoken to as individuals. However, this also makes them quickly aware when they are being addressed in such a way that isn’t authentic; they expect the communication they receive from brands and organizations to be specific to their tastes, preferences, and needs.

MarTech Stacks have Grown in Complexity

Marketing organizations have grown in complexity, complexity that’s visible in their technology stacks. What used to be a single tool for email marketing has grown into multiple tools for managing and activating data for different channels. These technologies tend to make isolated copies of customer data, making it difficult for marketers to follow the customer across touchpoints and channels. Having too many silos makes it hard to coordinate personalized experiences that span digital, email, social, and mobile channels. 

This is where Customer Data Platforms can come in handy. They are a single source of truth for customer data. So you don’t have to worry about keeping track of each piece separately or trying to integrate disparate sources into an integrated view of your customers’ journeys with you. CDPs can help marketers get the most out of their other systems. They can be used to tie together existing systems, like marketing automation and customer relationship management, so they work together seamlessly and can be managed in one place.

For example, if you have a CRM system that tracks leads through an email nurture campaign, but the emails are sent from different departments within your company (marketing vs sales), then you will have to manually merge them into one list — which isn’t ideal! Using a CDP is another way for marketers to centralize this data so it becomes easier for them to do what they do best: communicate with customers on a personal level by building relationships over time based on their interests and preferences.

Why Do You Require a Customer Data Platform

If your business is based on direct mail or email marketing campaigns, you may want to segment your customers based on their behavior or interests (e.g., people who open more than 50% of their emails). You could also target people who have recently purchased an item from Amazon or another e-commerce platform (like Walmart) with an offer for a discount on something else they bought from that retailer in the past year—this way you are able to re-engage them with a coupon code when they come back into contact with your brand again!

A CDP has multiple features and use cases with the major ones being segmentation, targeting, and personalization, omnichannel campaign orchestration, and real-time decisioning.

Segmentation, Targeting, and Personalization

• Segmentation: Before you can target your customers, it’s important to know who they are. If you don’t have this information, then how will you know how to reach them?

• Targeting: Once you’ve segmented your audience and figured out what works best for them, then comes the hard part—targeting. You’ll need some way of figuring out which messaging works best with each individual person within your audience so that when someone clicks on one piece of content from a platform like Facebook or Google Ads, they’re actually seeing something relevant (and not just an ad).

• Personalization: Once all of these pieces come together in order for someone to engage with messages (meaning click through), there needs to be some sort of personalization involved as well. This means being able to tailor messages based on whether or not someone has previously interacted with an offer or product before; if so then maybe make sure those same offers show up again later down the line when visitors return later on after visiting another page the first time around.

A CDP does all the above by helping you segment the right audience, know which audience to target with what message and personalize each user’s experience on their preferred channels.

Omnichannel Campaign Orchestration

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that enables companies to communicate with customers across all channels, including digital and physical stores. Omnichannel campaign orchestration (OCO) is the process of creating an integrated workflow for managing multiple campaigns at scale across multiple channels. OCO with a CDP helps you build more effective campaigns by automating repetitive tasks and making it easy to monitor performance across all channels.

Real-Time Decisioning

Real-time decisioning is about taking action on data in real-time, without the need for human intervention. It can be used to improve customer experience and optimize marketing campaigns by using machine learning and predictive analytics to make better decisions at scale. 

A CDP plays a vital role in real-time decision-making by helping you understand a user’s real-time intent and crafting the ideal 1:1 personalized campaign as per his/her needs.

Get the Most Out of Your MarTech Stack with a CDP

CDPs can be a great way for marketers to get the most out of your martech stack and other systems. They allow you to unify customer data from disparate data silos and make it easier for marketers to personalize campaigns based on each individual customer’s behavior, needs, and preferences—in real-time.

For example, if you have multiple channels (from the website, app, Facebook, email, SMS, etc. ), CDPs can pull in information from these channels so that you can target specific audiences more effectively. In addition, since they’re integrated with other technologies like CRMs and ERP systems, they offer better reporting capabilities than any other channel or platform would alone because they’re able to pull together all relevant information into one place at once rather than having separate reports created individually by different departments within an organization (which adds another layer of complexity).

In Conclusion

With all these benefits, it’s no wonder that marketers are integrating CDPs with their existing martech stacks as a way to reduce siloes, manage their customer data, and extract more value from it. 

Interested to know how Lemnisk CDP can integrate with your martech stack and immensely help your organization? Request a free demo and our experts will get in touch with you!

By Bijoy K.B | Associate Director – Marketing at Lemnisk