Customer Data Platform for eCommerce: How CDP Empowers Your Online Business?
These days, marketing has become one of the most complex activities as modern consumers have a plethora of options to reach companies. Marketers need to concentrate on various channels and platforms to gain the attention of their target audience. Above all, the modern consumer expects more from companies; they expect tailored solutions to meet their requirements. Considering a proven customer data platform for eCommerce, brands can empower their varied marketing activities.
To sustain and beat the market competition, companies around the world are taking innovative measures and steps to meet consumers’ demands and expectations. Companies that fail would face difficulties in their growth and sustainability.
To gain actionable insights, businesses are forced to deliver a consistent customer experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. Also, marketers need unified consumer data to build more effective and personalized marketing campaigns.
This is where customer data platforms (CDPs) become essential for businesses. Let’s see how CDPs help eCommerce businesses fuel their sales and drive better customer experiences in upcoming sections.
What Is a Customer Data Platform?
It is a kind of software that enables businesses to track and collect their auspicious customer data from various sources and customer touch points. From the gathered customer information, the CDP platform manages to build an accurate customer profile by merging all the related data.
The newly created customer profile by the CDP platform will be easily accessible to all the team members and other tools. This results in companies delivering better customer experiences and gaining the benefits of having better customer relationship management.
For today’s e-commerce companies, customer data is the primary weapon to increase their sales and for business expansion. The CDP platform delivers the exact solution that companies are looking for to meet the growing expectations of modern consumers.
This makes the customer data platform for eCommerce the must-have solution for all modern businesses, particularly those involved in commerce activities.
If you are interested in unveiling the advanced capabilities of customer data that empower your varied business operations, don’t miss visiting Customer Data Platform: The Ultimate Guide. It introduces every aspect of CDP and explains how it helps gain business success.
Why Do You Need Customer Data Platform for eCommerce Business?
To run a successful eCommerce business, companies should have a better customer experience. For that, CDP is the best solution. However, before getting into the core importance of CDP for a business, let’s quickly wrap up with the roadblocks an organization faces with bad data.
- While collecting data across multiple channels, it is hard for companies to spot the presence of data silos. When businesses start expanding with more and more channels for customer engagement, more silos appear.
- If companies fail to track the customer journey across their digital platforms, it will be difficult to get a complete picture of a customer and how they interact with the company. This is costing businesses that miss out on personalized customer service.
- Without proper data analysis and data insight, it would be hard for an organization to roll out a successful campaign by predicting customer behavior.
- Without a proper platform, the speed of data processing and action will be low when compared with the level of market competition.
Those are the roadblocks faced by companies with bad data. Having a good customer data platform will get rid of those hassles caused by bad data. Here are the other reasons that trigger businesses to make use of CDP.
- CDP helps businesses to meet the modern demands and expectations of their customers. It also plays a key role in delivering a personalized experience along with providing quality products and services.
- CDP makes the customer interactions much closer with the brands during online shopping sessions and also in post-purchase interactions.
- The customer data platform helps businesses to comply with strict customer data privacy regulations.
To get better insights into the customer data platform’s potential, you must visit Customer Data Platform For eCommerce Business – A Brief
Do you want to attain all the above-listed benefits by implementing a tailored yet robust customer data platform that meets your specific business needs and challenges?
When Do I Need to Invest in a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
Investment in a customer data platform becomes inevitable for eCommerce businesses in this competitive market. Utilizing customer data to deliver more personalized services would be the best choice for businesses to gain a competitive edge.
Also, data personalization improves content and business performance significantly when compared with companies that opt out of implementing CDP.
At the same time, collecting, managing, and optimizing customer data wouldn’t be that much easier for many eCommerce businesses. In particular, enterprise-level businesses involved in eCommerce activities would face a lot of challenges. Take a look at the key challenges they face.
- Data transparency on how they collect data.
- Managing the high volume of data, they collect.
- The speed at which they collect, manage and process the data.
- Data transformation is based on market conditions.
- Data Security
To tackle those challenges, enterprise-level eCommerce businesses would need a CDP solution. Many companies prefer to use Pimcore eCommerce for managing their customer data, which plays an apt role in handling all those challenges.
PIM for eCommerce is a critical component when it comes to driving a perfect digital commerce strategy. It helps businesses to manage all the information collected from various channels and sources and store it in a single location. This helps various departments of a business to access it easily whenever they need it.
How Does a Customer Data Platform Work?
The ultimate goal of a customer data platform is to collect and unify customer data in a single location. This enables companies to build an accurate profile of the people who do business with their company. The customer profile will help businesses to get a detailed image of their consumers and how they engage with the company.
With a clear picture of customer data, companies can deliver effective and personalized services across all channels to their consumers. The entire process carried out by the CDP is termed customer identity resolution.
The information collected by the CDP platform includes a consumer’s email address, physical location, and other relevant cookies across various systems. All that collected information is stored in a unified database and made available to the users in real-time.
Apart from data collection and creating a unified database for customer data, a customer data platform does two more primary functions, which are discussed below. Take a look.
Customer Data Management (CDM)
The CDP tool can gain full control over the data flow. This allows various departments of an organization to have better utilization of data, particularly the marketers, allowing them to create effective marketing campaigns.
Apart from that, with full control over consumer data, businesses can manage their data efficiently. Even the management of first-party data, consumer data privacy, and compliance with data rights regulations become easy.
Activation of Customer Data
It is the process of taking necessary and insightful action on a customer’s data. With such insightful action, businesses can be able to utilize the data gathered from customer interaction to create more targeted marketing campaigns.
In addition, the CDP comes with the ability to update the databases automatically from various data sources. Also, it structures the collected data and creates accurate customer profiles to identify engaging customers. This helps businesses deliver more personalized services to target customers.
Do you want to have a demonstration of how a customer data platform works and contributes immense value to your business growth?
How to Use Customer Data Platform for eCommerce to Leverage Customer-Driven Marketing?
Without any doubt, one can easily say that CDP too helps various departments of an organization achieve their goals by offering reliable and accurate customer data. The CDP tool plays a straight role in gathering significant amounts of customer data, which are generated throughout the buyer’s journey.
The tool allows businesses to leverage all the consumer data and turn it into actionable insights. It empowers businesses to deliver a better and more engaging experience to their consumers by understanding their consumers and their needs.
Here are the lists of some key capabilities that promote organizations involved in commerce activities to deliver customer-driven marketing campaigns.
- Unified view of customer data
- Data segmentation
- Insights and Data Analytics
- Creating target advertising/marketing campaign
- Real-time personalization
- Cost savings through automation
With those capabilities, CDP helps departments achieve their goals easily. However, companies involved in commercial activity need to be more accurate in deciding what their business objectives and goals are before investing in the right CDP tool.
Advantages of Customer Data Platform for eCommerce Businesses
Managing huge amounts of data will be an overwhelming task, particularly when a business starts expanding. In such a situation, analyzing the customer data manually becomes a daunting task. So, opting for software or tools like a customer data platform to manage customer data becomes inevitable for modern-age eCommerce businesses.
Customer data platforms (CDP) help companies predict customer acquisition and retention. Also, it helps businesses communicate with consumers in real-time. In addition, here are the lists of some key benefits offered by CDP to e-commerce companies. Take a look.
1. Streamlines Customer Data Management Operations
The CDP tool streamlines the entire operation of consumer data collection, organizing and utilizing the process with perfection. Furthermore, the CDP tool provides great flexibility and agility by performing automatic updates whenever new data becomes available. This ensures that the customer data gathered is up to date and accurate.
Apart from that, the customer data platform also offers more efficiency by allowing businesses to utilize multiple data sources in real-time. The automation process eliminates the hassles involved in manual data management, manual data verification, and removing data duplicates manually.
2. Offers a Unique Source of Truth in Customer Data
The customer data platform tool offers a single view of the customer data in a unified and comprehensive way. The capability of the CDP tool allows business authorities to eliminate all the data silos and make sure all the data stored in the database is accurate.
The platform acts as a unique source of truth and allows businesses to share accurate data across multiple channels and touchpoints.
This enables various departments of a business, like marketing and sales, to access high-quality consumer data to create a seamless customer experience.
3. Compliance with Regulations
The customer data platform allows businesses to gain full control over their consumer data. This empowers eCommerce businesses to comply with the privacy regulations set by GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws. This gets the needed trust factor from the regulators.
In addition to that, the CDP tool provides the option to track the history of data, like how and when the data was collected and from where. Also, the tool offers essential suggestions to its users on how to utilize the collected data effectively.
4. Allows Businesses to Take Insightful Decisions
The CDP tool gives you a holistic and complete view of the customer journey as it is. It also provides the full details of all the consumer interactions held both in-store and post-purchase with the company.
This allows businesses to track and build an accurate consumer profile. With an accurate consumer profile, teams can do data analysis and easily predict what consumers are looking for and provide the same.
Also, business stakeholders can take insightful decisions on the consumer profile data to initiate business expansion or to improve business sales.
5. Easy integration with other platforms
The CDP tool allows business stakeholders to integrate with other platforms like ERP and so on. With such easy integrations, businesses can easily communicate with other departments in real-time. This enables companies to handle customer queries more effectively and quickly.
In general, eCommerce businesses that have an ecosystem of real-time response with consumers will generate a high customer satisfaction level. With such effectiveness in solving consumers’ queries along with a higher customer satisfaction level, consumers will shop again and again.
6. Data Unification & Retargeting
As discussed above, the CDP tool can unify all relevant consumer data, which is collected both offline and online. This allows eCommerce companies to build a unified customer identity across multiple channels.
With such accurate customer identification, they can easily predict target customer behavior. This allows eCommerce businesses to create unique strategies to cover loyal consumers and focus on new consumers.
Visit How Does Customer Data Platform for eCommerce Benefit Your Online Business? to explore more benefits of considering customer data platform for eCommerce.
Do you want to build a feature-rich customer data platform that enables you with all the lucrative advantages that fuel your mundane processes through automation?
How to Select the Best Customer Data Platform for Your Company?
As mentioned earlier, maintaining big data and creating good relationships with customers is not an easy task for eCommerce businesses. This is where the customer data platform comes into play. However, in today’s market you can find numerous CDP tools, and picking the right one isn’t easy.
Here are the expert tips on choosing the right customer data platform. Take a look.
Budget
Developing your budget before investing in any new system is highly appreciated because the new system will be a minefield when it gets integrated with the business. Just like that, you need to be sure of how much you are going to invest in CDP. Investing a lot of money that your business can’t afford will be a waste of money and time.
Determine The Cause
Just like the budget factor, you need to determine the exact needs of your business for the CDP tool. so that you can be pretty straight about picking the right CDP tool for your business. In many cases, the sales and marketing teams will find it difficult to manage and pick accurate data to yield a better customer experience.
Be Clear About CDP Requirements
Unifying customer data and de-siloing data is the basic feature of almost every CDP tool. Apart from that, you need to be more specific in picking your CDP requirements. so that you can be able to spot the right tool for your business. In many cases, businesses would need a CDP tool offering a single customer view, better management of data, and data security.
Consider ROI
In terms of financial measures, the CDP tool that you are going to choose needs to deliver value that should meet your business requirements and objectives. Picking a CDP tool with detailed documentation will help you make ROI projections easily.
You should consider spending on the CDP tool as one of the investments for your business. In general, customer data platforms should reduce operational costs and increase business revenue by improving efficiency.
Choose potential vendors
Once you are determined with the CDP requirements and the benefits you are going to yield from it, you need to be more cautious in picking the right vendors. You need to shop around and research potential CDP vendors who offer seamless CDP that meets your requirements along with other essential services.
Here, services include system integration, setting customer view, aftercare support, and so on. Always prefer experienced vendors who have high ratings, good reviews, and excellent reputations among customers.
Keep an eye on your additional tools
Having a CDP tool will always deliver benefits to your eCommerce business. However, you need to make sure whether the chosen CDP can be integrated seamlessly with the existing vital tools your business has.
So, you can easily optimize your business workflow. Picking a CDP tool that can be easily integrated with both internal and third-party tools is essential. This determines how efficient choosing a CDP tool would be for your business operation.
Are you looking for a technology partner that has proven experience in building customer data platforms for eCommerce brands and ensuring delivering the best brand experience?
Conclusion
The goals and objectives of e-commerce businesses differ, and so does the data collection process. However, the benefits and capabilities of a customer data platform like PIM for eCommerce will do wonders. All they need is to have a clear vision of their goals and to choose the right CDP tool for their business according to their needs and requirements.
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