Customer Data Platform For eCommerce Business - A Brief
For any business, there is a tremendous increase in the data that gets generated. This data can be related to the different processes, operations, customers, etc. The different customer data include transactional data, behavioral data, demographic data, etc.
All these data help the enterprise to understand their customers and provide the best purchase experience that will prompt them to make their purchase.
The enterprise can make use of the customer data platform (CDP) for collecting consistent customer experience data from the different channels and consumer devices involved.
What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)? What does it offer to an eCommerce business?
The customer data platform (CDP) is a software tool that combines the data from various tools and creates a centralized customer database. This database includes all the data from the different touchpoints and interactions of the customers with the products and services.
This database is useful in providing the details essential for providing a customized or personalized marketing experience to the customers to improve their purchase journey.
The customer data platform for eCommerce uses the data from the various touchpoints like the website, email, social media, and other places from where the customers interact with the company product.
It collects all the details from the data points and consolidates to generate an easily understandable unified profile for the customers and can be utilized by other systems like the advertisement platforms for prompting the customers for making the purchases.
It allows the enterprise to create a personalized marketing strategy by creating advertising for the audiences based on their visit to the specific sites and pages.
It makes use of the different tasks like Identity resolution for the unification of user history across the different channels and devices, building audiences by understanding their intent and integrating the account activity, activating or encouraging the customers to make their purchase by sending the emails, messages, etc.
Do you want to get an understanding of how a customer data platform for an eCommerce business helps you drive better sales?
How does a Customer Data Platform work for an eCommerce business?
The ultimate goal of the CDP platform is to collect and manipulate customer data. It enables the enterprise team to provide hyper-personalized sales to their target audience and to conduct profitable campaigns through the collected customer data.
This section briefs how the Customer data platform for eCommerce works along with its key capabilities. Take a look.
1. Data Collection & Integration
The first and foremost step of CDP is to collect the basic information of customer data like customer basic profile, engaging information, transaction data, and so on.
In most cases, the first-party data collected from the customers are from the devices or channels like websites, eCommerce platforms, mobile, marketing platforms, email, CRM, surveys, and so on. Also, those data would be in different formats and structured/unstructured manner.
Almost every CDP comes with pre-defined integration capabilities, using which the enterprise team can easily integrate the common data sources that are going to be used in sales, support, and marketing.
2. Data Cleansing/Transformation
Once the data collection process is finished, CDPs perform the data cleansing process. The capability of data cleansing of CDPs ensures the collected data delivered to desired channels is consistent and correct.
The data cleansing operation carried out by CDPs includes data identities, removing data duplication, resolving discrepancies, eliminating fake or inaccurate data, and so on. Apart from that, some CDPs come with the ability to manipulate the gathered customer data and transform them according to the requirements to build data pipelines.
3. Customer Profile Enrichment
The ability to enrich the collected customer profile is the most vital thing a CDP can do. The enrichment of customer profiles is carried out by integrating the data of the second and third-party data sources. Well, the data which are integrated with the profiles may be from business data, customer demographic data, weather, finance, or any other relevant sources.
The enrichment process carried out by the CDPs helps to identify the missing or inaccurate attributes and eliminate data duplication from the customer profile. The enriched customer profile helps the enterprise team to build a stronger advertising platform.
4. Customer Segmentation
Based on the data gathered from the customer attributes and behaviors, a CDP tool helps marketers to build consumer segments. This enables marketers to create successful marketing campaigns with improved targets and personalization. Customer segments are rule-based and built using Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The customer segmentation capability of a CDP tool helps to identify and optimize the entire customer journey through identifying data advocacy, predicting customer churn, finding upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and finding target customers based on a relevant recommendation through purchase history.
5. Customer Journey Coordination
Customer journey orchestration capabilities of the CDP tool help enterprise teams and marketers to predict and visualize consumer engagement activities. The stages involved in the customer journey help the brand to have a deep insight into customer channels. The collected information through the channels of the customer journey at each stage helps to predict customer engagement activity.
Are you interested in exploring the capabilities of customer data platforms and how to help eCommerce brands ensure immense growth for your eCommerce business?
How do companies use Customer Data Platform for eCommerce effectively?
The enterprise implements the CDP and uses the details that they get from this tool to provide the best purchase experience to their customers and enhance their business. The different examples give an idea of how implementing the CDP for personalizing the marketing strategy has helped in enhancing the business. These include:
Breather gets better returns on investment (ROI) on advertisements
Breather implemented the CDP that helped them to significantly improve their returns on investments through advertisements. This was achieved by closely monitoring the time taken by the users depending on the advertisement platforms used by most of their customers.
Glossier optimized its customer experiences across the different channels
Glossier used the CDP software for building a more personalized marketing strategy for their product based on the actions observed across the various channels taken up by their customers reaching their website.
Trunk Club provides a personalized style to reach their customers
Trunk Club implemented the CDP for accessing the customer data which helped them to respond efficiently and quickly to their customer’s specific questions. This leads them to gain customer confidence thus increasing their sales and boosting the business.
DigitalOcean making use of advertisements and emails for conversations
The DigitalOcean used the CDP for understanding their customer needs and used the information to build the advertising audiences that helped them in improving their cost-per-conversion by 33 percent.
Do you want to select and implement the right customer data platform for your eCommerce business that is specifically designed to meet your specific business objectives?
What Are the Benefits of Customer Data Platform for eCommerce?
The ability to provide consistent customer data accuracy and integration of customer data of a CDP tool offers numerous benefits to the enterprise team. With the data or information gathered through a CDP tool, marketers can perform various functions and deliver a successful marketing campaign.
Take a look over the vital benefits an enterprise can get through a CDP tool.
1. Offers Collaboration Across Enterprise
A CDPs tool acts as a perfect solution for Siloed data, it collects the customer’s data from various customer touchpoints and also from throughout the enterprise. Apart from that, the tool supports customer interactions with multiple touchpoints.
The data collected by the CDP tool is stored in a collaborative way which enables enterprises to visualize how customers approach the enterprise and what are the ways for the enterprise to improve customer experience.
2. Improves Data Accessibility
A CDP tool stores consumer data in a centralized hub. Consumer data is gathered from every corner of the enterprise by the CDP tool. The consumer data which are collected integrated together by using its CDP tool builds a unique and unified consumer profile for all consumers.
Such consumer profiles can be easily shared across enterprises and marketers can utilize them efficiently to provide more personalized campaigns. Moreover, since all consumer profiles are stored in a centralized location, employees of an enterprise can access them easily at any time.
3. Streamlines Integrations Across Systems
From marketing aspects to the payment gateway system of an enterprise, a CDP tool collects and unifies the consumer data in a centralized location. Almost every system of an enterprise is integrated together by a CDP tool, this allows an enterprise to eliminate the data redundancies, and data error due to humans can be reduced significantly.
Because of the seamless integrations and automated process offered by a CDP tool, the data flow across the enterprise will be quick and accurate.
4. Improves Marketing Efficiency
As mentioned earlier, a Customer data platform for eCommerce creates more robust customer records/profiles by unifying the customer data collected across the enterprise.
Apart from that, the CDP tool introduces automation in many tasks, particularly marketing tasks of an enterprise. This allows marketers to focus more on doing creative and analytic tasks rather than concentrating on consumer data.
With the presence of the CDP tool, marketers can create more accurate modeling for the target audience with personalized campaigns. This eventually increases sales and improves consumer experiences across channels.
5. Stronger Regulatory Compliance
Apart from fastening the marketing velocity, a CDP tool offers more control to an enterprise over consumer data. This enables an enterprise to streamline the data governance process and comply with the regulations.
Almost every brand faces challenges in complying with the regulation across the globe. Using a perfect CDP tool will be the perfect solution for enterprises and brands to have stronger regulatory compliance.
Do you want to leverage all the above-listed benefits by implementing a tailored CDP for eCommerce businesses?
Improve Customer Experience by Implementing Customer Data Platform for eCommerce business
The CDP is a marketing tool that is beneficial to the enterprise in many different ways. The role of CDP in improving the customer experience in the eCommerce includes:
- It allows for delivering a consistent experience to the customers for the product across the different channels and devices used for the sales and marketing of the product.
- It allows for dealing with complex customer journeys as it enables handling the high volumes of customers and multiple sites of interactions across the different touchpoints.
- It leads to improved personalization and customer targeting. This ensures that the right customer gets the relevant message regarding the product of their interest at the right time and in a proper manner.
- It serves as a platform for engaging the customers. It allows monitoring the customer behavior and based on it interacting with them and prompting them to make the product purchase.
- It allows for customer profile unification that provides the 360-degree view data record for the customer thus helping the enterprise for effective personalization of the product and services based on their requirements.
- It allows for personalization for the customers based on segmentation and customer activity across the different channels used for sales and marketing.
- It allows for optimizing the customer journey by enabling the marketers to score their customers and by performing real-time optimizations across the different search, display, and social channels.
- It allows the enterprise to manage the data accurately. It also considers the importance of data governance strategy and data tracking while collecting customer data and management.
- Provide more insightful customer analytics by understanding customer behavior. It gives the details related to product development, marketing, sales, etc. It consists of four main components of customer analytics data collection, data sorting, data storage, and data analysis. This helps the enterprise in taking the product to the next improved level for enhanced customer satisfaction.
- Implementing the Customer data platform for eCommerce enables the enterprise in collecting customer data while respecting customer data privacy. It allows the enterprise to stay compliant with the data privacy law while providing customized services to its customers.
Do you want to get a better insight into how CDP helps eCommerce brands improve the shopping experience and drive personalized customer experience?
Bottom Line
For the growth of any business, it is very important to understand its customers and their needs. If the enterprise can provide their customers with the products of their choice, this will lead to an increase in their sales and an increase in the business.
The customer data platform for eCommerce is an essential tool that enables the enterprise to provide the correct and deep insights about their customers. The details provided by CDP will help in improving the product, marketing, and sales thus enhancing the business. The enterprise should select the right CDP tool based on their specific requirements.
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