Having a Wonderful Customer Journey, Wish You Were Here

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

In his famous line from Hamlet, Shakespeare describes a situation in which the main character’s chaotic behavior conceals his true intent. With the proliferation of channels and devices today, including the growth of IoT and virtual reality, the way users engage with brands and products appears to be trending toward chaos. Marketers are tasked with understanding and leveraging a vast continuum of user behavior. Meanwhile customer journeys continue to push the boundaries of complexity. Companies are more challenged than ever to discover the intent behind omnichannel behavior and leverage it to drive measurable marketing success.

Being omnipresent for omnichannel is worth the time and effort. According to a recent Wunderman study, as we zigzag between devices and touchpoints, 87% of us measure our brand experiences against digital leaders like Netflix, Uber, and Amazon. Omnichannel users spend and engage more with brands and products both online and off-line than single channel customers. The more channels customers use, the greater their lifetime value.

The takeaway for marketers? Revenue and loyalty are increasingly won by effectively masking complexity across channels and devices, and delivering simple, streamlined, consistent, personalized customer experiences. Touchpoints where brands should be present with engaging content and messaging but aren’t can adversely impact marketing outcomes. This experience gap is a risk to effective engagement and omnichannel marketing success.

Closing the Experience Gap

How can companies understand and capitalize on omnichannel behavior when haphazard customer journeys are increasingly the new normal? Omnichannel marketing success requires a comprehensive understanding of user behavior as well as the ability to transform behavioral and demographic data into timely engagement and conversions.

To future-proof marketing effectiveness companies need to define and implement data-driven approaches to marketing that are continually informed by analytics. It’s imperative to engage users across touchpoints with timely, personalized messaging. This calls for cohesive data strategy and marketing technology solutions to help close the experience gap.

A customer data platform (CDP) can help forward thinking marketers organize their data, enhance their audience segmentation and campaign planning, increase content engagement, streamline cross-channel marketing orchestration, and optimize analytics efforts. Strategy and cohesive technology solutions are vital to long term success. With the right strategy and CDP solution, marketers can transform omnichannel complexity and uncertainty into competitive advantages and measurable results.

CDP Benefits and Advantages for Omnichannel Marketing

How can CDPs help enable marketing success in the complex, uncertain world of omnichannel?

Benefits to explore and acquire

• Open, extensible data architecture
• Flexible enterprise data integration
• Data accessibility
• Feature & function rich marketing execution
• Unified and streamlined marketing orchestration from planning through execution
• Business friendly UI/UX
• Continuous marketing process improvement

Omnichannel advantages to be gained

• Unified customer profiles with cross-channel behavioral attributes
• Identity resolution, device stitching, data enrichment
• Ease of audience analytics, precision segmentation and targeting
• Increased conversion rates from more and better engagement across channels
• Machine learning readiness (for content personalization and next-best actions)
• Seamlessly coordinated cross-channel engagement with fast activation of customer segments across channels
• Timely, contextually relevant, and optimally formatted messaging across touchpoints
• Closed loop analytics that inform segmentation and campaign strategy
• Agility and overall speed to value
• Streamlined marketing execution across the extended enterprise/partner ecosystem
• Cohesion of paid, earned, and owned marketing platforms and point solutions
• Streamlined reporting and analytics
• Rapid response to changes in user behavior across channels
• Effective data governance

About the author

Fred Maurer is a Chicago based marketing technology consultant with over twenty years of digital & data driven experience from strategy through execution. His hands-on customer data platform (CDP) experience includes business strategy, vendor platform evaluation and selection, data strategy, data integration, platform integration, business deployment, and stakeholder engagement. He can be reached at fredrick.maurer@gmail.com.