Effective marketing is all about understanding your customers: their needs, their behaviors, their relationship to your organization. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) simplify the process and expand the potential of organizations and their marketers using actionable information to build and a better sense of who is your customer, what they want, and improve performance metrics such as cost per action (CPA), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and ultimately drive brand loyalty.

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

As defined by the CDP Institute, founded by David Raab, a CDP “is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.”

Raab emphasizes three key components of that definition: a CDP must be understood as a pre-designed piece of software that can be tailored to the needs of an individual customer (packaged software); is designed to collect and archive customer information regarding things such as purchasing history or site behavior, collected across multiple channels and attributed to one customer (persistent unified customer database); and is able to sync with other tools and systems that can analyze the collected data to the benefit of marketers (accessible to other systems).

These three essential features define what makes CDPs so popular among companies looking to optimize their marketing: flexibility, the ability to curate massive amounts of customer information, and their compatibility with a number of other powerful marketing technologies.

What Can a CDP Do For My FinServ Institution?

CDPs are the best way to build communities of customers, and the best way for institutions to connect with those customers on a personal basis.

For FinServ organizations, it’s often essential to constantly track and manage customer loyalty, to keep an eye on what your customers need and how they’re engaging with your business. Patrons are creating relationships with banks, insurance companies, and financial services mainstays across multiple platforms, and a CDP guarantees that these organizations are able to check in with their customers on the platforms they prefer – whether that be email, telephone, or mobile device app – providing the offers that will pique customer interest the most.

With the data collected via a CDP, FinServ marketers are able to build marketing that is both hyper-personalized and omnichannel, connecting with customers on an individual level across every single device that they use to interact with your brand.

Why Does That Matter?

Financial Brand published a fantastic analysis of the June 2018 study of how banking marketing is evolving, published jointly by Adobe and eConsultancy. Surveying marketers and executives working at major banks, the study sought to understand where these individuals felt their industry needed to focus in the wake of the rise in popularity of FinTech. The results were instructive.

The survey shows that 28% of those spoken to consider optimizing the customer experience to be the highest priority moving forward, which is especially interesting when compared to the fact that, as the report contends, only 19% of marketers working most other industries would consider that the highest priority. The study further asserts that its results show that 23% of respondents listed as their highest priority “data-driven marketing that focuses on the individual.” A later excerpt shows that when asked what they believed would be “very important” for digital Customer Experience (CX) over the next few years, 81% of banking providers the majority selected options such as “optimize the customer journey across multiple touchpoints,” or “ensuring consistency of message across channels.”

Personalized marketing, consistent across channels: the perfect task for a CDP.

FinServ Marketers Must Adapt to the Demands of Their Clients

As customers become comfortable interacting with businesses via multiple devices, and as they’re trained to expect content that specifically responds to their individual wants and needs, marketing teams must build strategies that take these realities into account. The alternative is being left behind.

FinServ Customer Data Platforms, like Lemnisk, offer marketing teams a versatile tool to address these very demands: to better understand their customers across various touchpoints, and to design marketing collateral and sales campaigns that are molded to these individualized preferences and behaviors.

As FinServ organizations look to reinforce customer loyalty and attract new clients, they must find the tools that not only suit their unique needs, but those of the people they are targeting. The careful, strategic use of customer data platforms have revolutionized how organizations in myriad industries evolve their marketing.

For FinServ marketers, it’s a sterling investment.

Do You Want to Create a Unified Customer Experience for Your Prospects, Leads, and Clients?

Learn more about how Lemnisk’s CDP Empowers Smarter Marketing for FinServ Institutions or visit their profile page.