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Every business needs to do two things to grow — find and acquire new customers and increase the lifetime value of those customers. Most businesses use a range of technologies to achieve these growth objectives.

Traditionally, customer data platforms (CDPs) have focused on unifying and managing known customer data and activating several customer channels, including email, mobile push, paid media, and others. This has tremendous benefits for the objective of increasing the lifetime value of existing customers. In a recent survey conducted by Adobe of marketing and customer experience leaders, we found 47% of respondents credit their CDP with helping them have more direct relationships with their customers, and 40% report increased customer loyalty. But if focusing on known customers is the only way your CDP has helped you grow, you are likely missing out on bigger opportunities.

Finding and acquiring new customers involves activities often characterized in the industry as upper funnel. These include prospecting campaigns that introduce new customers to the brand, lookalike initiatives that attempt to find new audiences who share characteristics with loyal customers, and login encouragements for unauthenticated website visitors. Brands and technologies that focus exclusively on known customer use cases do so at the detriment of new customer acquisition and upper-funnel activities. This is a short-sighted approach because these upper-funnel initiatives introduce new prospects to the brand and ultimately create more known customers at the bottom of the funnel.

A challenge emerges when brands use separate customer data management systems for upper-funnel and lower-funnel activities. It becomes difficult to understand customer lifecycle engagement and deliver meaningful, personalized experiences to individuals as they move from new prospect to recognized visitor, first-time customer, and finally loyal customer. Data silos are inadvertently created by teams using different systems for new customer acquisition and known customer engagement. Many brands purchase a CDP to eliminate data silos between teams and channels, but unfortunately new silos are created if their CDP cannot support acquisition and prospecting use cases.

Streamline your customer data management with Adobe Real-Time CDP

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a single system for customer data management across the customer lifecycle — from a prospect that has never engaged with the brand before to a first-time site visitor, return visitor, converted customer, and loyal frequent customer of various products or services across lines of business. To deliver this vision, Real-Time CDP supports brands’ ability to expand customer acquisition and increase the lifetime value of those customers.

Enhancements within Real-Time CDP improve customer prospecting and acquisition

Hundreds of current Real-Time CDP customers are already familiar with existing capabilities to increase the lifetime value of known B2C and B2B customers. New enhancements support upper-funnel use cases, including prospecting and enrichment with partner data, data collaboration, lookalike audiences, and composing audiences from first-party and external data sources.

Enriching existing audience profiles

Partner data support allows Real-Time CDP customers to work with the data providers they choose to acquire new customers or enrich existing audience profiles. Adobe Real-Time CDP will agnostically support partner IDs so brands can ingest data associated with the identifier of their choice. This capability enables the upper-funnel use case of running a prospecting campaign based on a partner-provided list to acquire new customers. With Real-Time CDP, you’ll get a consistent view of the individual as they engage with your brand, which enables relevant personalization across touchpoints. Profiles are created and activated in Real-Time CDP from a prospect list. First-party events and attributes are stored in profiles as new visitors engage with the site, qualify for audience segments, and become known customers.

Supporting data collaboration between brands with Segment Match

Adobe Real-Time CDP supports data collaboration between brands and publishers through its Segment Match feature. With functionality like a data clean room, Segment Match provides a privacy-safe approach for cross-brand insights, data sharing, campaign planning, and onboarding. Applied to new user acquisition, brands may choose to suppress known customers when working directly with a publisher — or that publisher may run a lookalike model against overlapped users to find similar audiences within their properties. Shared insights between brands and publishers also create upper-funnel opportunities to cross-sell and introduce existing customers to new products and services.

Introducing lookalike modeling

Adobe customers have used lookalike modeling to find new audiences that share similar characteristics with valued seed audiences, and soon functionality will be available to execute this use case within Real-Time CDP. Brands and publishers will leverage their first-party data foundation to expand the pool of targetable audiences for a campaign. This can help quickly move a new visitor toward becoming a loyal customer, reducing time to conversion through improved audience qualification and better customer experiences.

Integrating data from third-party systems

Finally, Adobe Real-Time CDP is introducing new capabilities to easily ingest and work with external audiences from any non-Adobe system. This accelerates time to value when utilizing partner data or audience segments created in a data lake or other systems internally managed by IT teams. With an intuitive canvas, brands will be able to curate, enrich, and compose actionable audiences from first-party and external datasets for activation via Real-Time CDP destinations.

Real-Time CDP drives business results across the funnel

With these enhancements, Adobe Real-Time CDP strengthens its support for full-funnel marketing use cases. Marketing and IT teams are under tremendous pressure to do more with less and find efficiencies in technology stacks. Real-Time CDP offers a lifeline to teams facing siloed, disconnected, poorly adopted, and inefficient applications from both a workflow and a financial standpoint. This unfortunate state creates fragmented customer experiences, which can impair a brand’s ability to drive lifetime value and loyalty among customers.

Businesses using Adobe Real-Time CDP build actionable unified profiles to find and attract new customers while improving the lifetime value of their existing customers. Execute both objectives while delivering great customer experiences — all within a single system.

Find out how this solution can benefit your business. ‎Request a demo today.

Matt Skinner is a product marketer for Adobe Real-Time CDP and Adobe Audience Manager. He joined Adobe in 2016. Prior to this, he spent 10 years in media buying and media strategy — both agency and client-side — with a focus on integrated digital marketing.