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3 Ways to Power Personalized Customer Experiences With Your Customer Data Platform

September 27, 2021

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when mobile communication devices felt more like science fiction than reality. Now it’s difficult to imagine not being able to call, text or email people whenever and wherever you want using the computer in your pocket.

Today’s innovations have a way of becoming tomorrow’s expectations — and personalized customer experiences are no different. Using a customer’s first name in an email or serving up dynamic online ads based on a shopper’s browsing history used to be innovative personalized customer service and experience examples. Now they’re part and parcel of the customer journey.

Your customers expect their interactions with your brand to be a personalized experience – tailored to their wants and needs across each and every touchpoint. But to deliver truly personalized, relevant and authentic customer experiences, you need data — and you need to apply that data to the correct channels at the correct time.

Enter customer data platforms (CDP), your one-stop shop for assembling, analyzing and activating the customer information that fuels exceptional CX. Here are three ways you can use your CDP to create a hyper-personalized experience and exceed expectations, resulting in a loyal customer base.

1. Improve Data Accuracy & Accessibility

Data is essential to understanding who your customers are and what they want from your brand, but 87% of marketers say data is their organization’s most underutilized asset. In fact, more than half say they struggle with data-driven marketing due to a lack of data quality and completeness.

Use your CDP to create a comprehensive profile for all your customers by unifying siloed and incomplete customer records and resolving customer identities. Once you have a 360-degree view of your customers, you can create and assign attributes — such as geographic location, purchase history and more — to individual profiles to gain greater insight into customer behaviors and preferences. Next, assign these profiles to different CDP audience groups to assist with targeting.

Make sure your business users are able to access this valuable data to analyze customer segments and extract insights that can be used to create personalized customer experiences across different channels.

Empowering teams to deliver more personalized service and communications has helped ActionIQ customers improve conversion rates by 80% and increase average purchase value by 20%. It’s also helped eliminate ad hoc requests and reduce wait times to implement new strategies, saving data analysts 40% of their time while simultaneously boosting marketing efficiency by 25%.

One major retailer used ActionIQ to increase data leveraged for customer intelligence and personalization by 1000x while also achieving a 90% reduction in the level of effort demanded of its IT team.

2. Increase Relevance & Speed

Nothing kills customer retention quicker than irrelevant content marketing. While 91% of consumers say they’re more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations, such as personalized emails, 66% will forgo making a purchase if they come across content that’s not personalized for them.

Leverage the customer segments within your CDP to create personalized messaging and determine optimal channel outreach for your specific audiences. Start by suppressing different audiences from communications that don’t apply to them, such as sign-up campaigns for loyalty programs they’re already a member of or content geared toward new subscribers in need of onboarding.

By exporting the audiences you want to suppress to the proper acquisition channels from within your CDP, you’ll avoid annoying or frustrating customers with irrelevant content while optimizing your marketing spending at the same time. By using ActionIQ to strategically suppress audiences across its paid media campaigns, Pandora Media was able to cut customer acquisition costs by 50% in key segments.

Don’t forget the roles timing and placement play in personalization. Even content that’s perfectly tailored to your target audiences will fail to drive results if it’s shared at the wrong time or on the wrong channel. Using customer characteristics and purchase history to determine which products to recommend — as well as when and where — has helped ActionIQ customers increase 90-day purchase rates by 25% after the first order.

Keep in mind that your customers don’t just expect deep personalization — they expect it to happen instantly. Yet even among companies that excel at customer data management, only 24% report being able to conduct real-time analysis on their customers. Use your CDP to provide personalized customer experiences in real time using both in-the-moment streaming data and your customers’ full historical profiles.

For example, re-engage high-intent customers who leave your website before completing a purchase by automatically sending them messages on their preferred communication channels to remind them of the products they left in their online carts. Or help your customer service team resolve issues quickly and effectively by supplying your next-best-action systems with detailed customer profile data to determine optimal next steps.

3. Develop End-to-End Experiences

Your customers don’t want personalized experiences at one time and on one channel — they expect them across all interactions with your brand, no matter where or when they engage with you. But while ​​71% of consumers say they want consistent cross-channel experiences, only 29% say brands are following through.

Orchestrate omnichannel customer journeys for different audience segments — from acquisition to post-purchase — within your CDP, customizing them based on your customers’ attributes. Measure performance at different stages of the customer lifecycle and across touchpoints to continually optimize journeys for your different segments and personalize them further over time. Creating personalized journeys has helped ActionIQ customers increase repurchase rates by 30%, grow customer lifetime value by 25% and reduce acquisition costs by 50%.

By linking personas to specific customer data properties, you can also improve the targeting of your advertising spend throughout the customer journey. Tailoring paid ads to specific audience segments and using customer data to inform who to target and when has helped ActionIQ customers increase return on ad spend by more than 7%, resulting in an additional $5.3 million in revenue over three years.

Personalized customer experiences are the key to growing and retaining your customer base, but you need data to deliver. Enable your organization to dive deeper and provide personalized experiences with a CDP that makes customer data accurate, accessible and actionable quickly and at scale.

Learn More

Download our 2021 CDP Market Guide to learn more about CDPs and the role technology plays in helping you power personalized customer experiences.

This post first appeared on the ActionIQ blog. To see the full article, click here.