In this video, Impression’s Technology Director, Aaron Dicks, explains what a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is and what data feeds into this platform which you can utilise for reporting, customer nurturing, segmenting, and more.
Mike Weir: So, lots of our clients and customers are starting to talk about CDPs. I was wondering if you could sort of help explain why they’re becoming so popular for different companies?
Aaron Dicks: Yeah, definitely. Well, a CDP or a Customer Data Platform is really the all-in-one database essentially where all of your customer information can get stored. So it’s a central place where you can connect your web traffic information, you can connect your Order Management System if you’re E-Commerce, Physical Retail Point of Sale, your Support System if you do aftersales care, and all sorts of other connections. Obviously, you can upload customer data into it as well. And the idea is that it gives you that singular customer view, you can really analyze on a per-customer basis or per cohort basis the longer-term behavior of your customers. So that might be activity across a certain channel, or it might be that you are able to or you want to be able to undertake some RFM modeling—so, recency, frequency, monetary value. So you can understand what cohorts and segments of your customers offer you the most value over time. And then off the back of being able to do that type of segmentation, you can then stream that data into different platforms to activate it. So not only can you use a CDP for reporting, you can also use it for activation, which is really, really important. So once you’ve understood the behaviors and the purchasing patterns of your customers over time, you might then understand you have a lapsing segment, you might have a new customer segment, you might have a high value or high order value segment. You can then treat those customers differently. And that can be across the website, which I know, obviously, your team is most interested in. Also synchronizing, or even some of these platforms have marketing automation built in as well. So you can use that in marketing automation campaigns and you can synchronize those segments as well to add audiences to. So it just gives you a lot of power to understand your customers, reports on them, on aggregate, and with everything in mind. And then activate and begin to give that more personalized experience.
Mike Weir: I suppose what’s really interesting there is the idea that it gets you so close to how your customers behave and go on your website. So you could start to build segments based on the intent of the customer. So for example, if someone’s on an e-commerce website and they look at delivery information and they’re interacting with it, it’s very likely that they’re going to go on to purchase that product or at least consider purchasing it compared to someone who might have just come from, let’s say, a Paid Social advert who’s very new to it. So you could start to build out these intent-based segments and these value-based segments. And you know, off the back of that, you can start to personalize your marketing communications and also personalize the website itself and there’s a number of cool features you can use to do that. You can also build out segments and behaviors that perhaps aren’t the things you want people to be doing on the website or could suggest hesitancy, and you can start to dynamically change the website to sort of optimize towards that. So there’s tonnes and tonnes of opportunity for experimentation, not just on the website, but throughout all of the different areas of the marketing communications, including email, SMS, even things like paid social advertising. So yeah, it’s a super exciting opportunity for our clients.
Aaron Dicks: Definitely.
