Can customer journey analytics improve conversions?

customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics can tell us some of what we need to know about the routes customers take, but does it help us to improve conversions?

 

What is customer journey analytics?

Customer journey analytics is the science of analysing customer behaviour data across multiple touchpoints, and over time, to measure the impact of customer journeys on business outcomes.

Companies use customer journey analytics because it is an effective way to improve customer experience, increase customer lifetime value, and improve customer loyalty.

Let’s start then with what we mean by the ‘journey’.

This can be used to describe a myriad of different routes from just travelling around inside a brand’s website, to trekking between websites and mobile applications, to flipping between online and offline channels, or to contacting a call centre.

Indirect channels like TV and press may also play a part, and, least trackable of all, conversations actually take place between people.

So, let’s dispense with one myth, that customer journeys are always trackable, as some of them are not at all, and others only partially. For instance, only a tiny proportion of retailers attempt to collect emails or other contact details from customers in their stores, and, when they do, many refuse. Some retailers use ‘beacon’ technology to understand if the customer is a repeat visitor or new; however, matching this back to the customer has raised some privacy concerns.

The extent to which we can join together the stages in the journey is entirely dependent on the evidence by way of personal identifiers that the visitor leaves behind at each stage, and how they can be linked.

For instance:

Email marketing identifies which customers have opened and/or clicked from each campaign. Direct mail provides the details of who has been sent a catalogue, however not if they received it, or even browsed it.

Call centre tracking identifies the number you are calling from.

Website analytics captures the cookie ID of website visitors, how they got to the site, and whether that was through search, direct visit or referral from another online channel like social or paid digital.

Tracking is one thing, but then linking events together is another. To do so one needs to form associations between personal identifiers. A cookie ID becomes much more valuable when linked to an email or a mobile number. An email is more valuable when it is associated with a postal name and address, and so on.

All customer journey analytics relies on being able to link stages in the journey using identifiers that can be matched up. The most obvious case where external links don’t exist are unidentified browsers, where one browsing visit can be linked to another, but not to anything that is going on in the offline world, or in other websites.

We must accept that customer journey analysis can only deliver a partial truth, but this is not to deny that a great deal of value can still be obtained from it.

 

Visualising customer journeys using analytics

We can depict these customer journeys using what is known as a Sankey diagram, named after Captain Matthew Sankey.

sankey customer journey chart
Sankey customer journey diagram

 

 

Alternatively, with a numerical version of a Sankey diagram, like the one below, we can start to understand what the probability is of customers moving onto another stage in the journey, or making a purchase.

numerical version of a Sankey diagram
Numerical version of a Sankey diagram

To understand this chart, start with a channel on the left and read across to find the probability of moving from that point to the next channel (column), or to making a purchase (described as conversion), or to nothing further being trackable on the customer journey (described as null).

 

Improving conversion rates

So, what can be done with the information in a chart like this?

  1. It brings a sense of reality. If you know that the probability of moving from social media to a sale on your website is five per thousand, you will take a more sober view of media owners’ claims.
  2. It provides a really useful comparative understanding of the impact of different channels. In this example the chances of purchasing after receiving and opening a series of four emails (described as campaigns) is 6%, whilst after four direct entries it’s 5%.
  3. It explains the benefit to be gained from multiple experiences in the same channel. The chances of purchasing after a fourth consecutive search is 2.4 times greater than a conversion following a single search.
  4. It shows where the interactions between channels are more likely to happen. For instance, the chances of moving from receiving a fourth email campaign to undertaking a direct search are 12%, compared to 5% after receiving just one.
  5. It also shows us which are the better channels from which to start the journey. In this case starting with an email campaign opening is best.

These are just examples of some of the uses of visualising a customer journey, and you will want not just one but multiple views. For instance, new customers will have very different journeys to returning ones, and so will people from different countries, or those buying expensive merchandise compared to those buying something cheaper.

Most organisations struggle to understand their impact on customer experience, and the value which can be generated from enhancing it, due to several reasons:

  • The number of customer touchpoints and the volume of data produced by multiple channels and devices has exploded in recent years. Having this in one place becomes a challenge.
  • Data silos lead to problems of data mismatches, missing and bad data and, time to transform and aggregate the data.
  • Shortage of skills and resources to analyse and make sense of the data, as it often requires skilled data scientists and analysts who are conversant with programming languages like Python, R or SQL.
  • Inability to attain rapid customer insights, and execute triggered activity across multiple channels, can have negative consequences if you’re not aware of each customer’s experience with your company across channels.

Now, your customers expect every interaction with your organisation to reflect the context of their entire experience regardless of which touchpoint they use next. So how do you meet these expectations?

 

Overcoming these obstacles and making journey-driven decisions for each customer at scale

You are probably now in need of an explanation of how you can start to understand your customer journeys, visualise the data, and make use of it?

We recommend first introducing, if you don’t already have one, a customer data platform into which the data describing different parts of the journey can be ingested, and linked together wherever identifiers can be matched. A typical customer data platform will take in data from your email service provider, your website, your transactional or ecommerce systems, paid digital and possibly your call centre and your retail outlets. Your objective will be to ingest as many parts of the customer journey as possible.

The customer data platform will then undertake what is known as identity resolution to join as much data to individuals as is possible.

(Incidentally the customer data platform will have multiple other uses than customer journey analytics, although this remains a key element of what it can deliver).

With this in place, you have the potential to build a table of all the visible and linkable events that precede each transaction. As long as these are date-stamped, technology can then provide you with the journey charts that you will require to help plan your direct marketing.

Most companies lack the comprehensive, up-to-date journey data needed to optimise each interaction, so they are forced to run experiments on single channels, such as email or website, without understanding their wider impact. By having a single view, real-time data visualisation and the ability to trigger activity based on events, you can see how customers respond to each improvement as your customers experience them.

We have developed this capability inside the UniFida customer data platform, so that for any time period, and any segment of customers, the production of this kind of analysis is automated.

Considering investing in a customer data platform? Contact us to get started with one of our complimentary CDP services.

 


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


Taking customer centricity to the next level with a CDP

people walking across zebra crossing

Can’t see the customer for the data?

Now, more than ever, businesses know the importance of looking after existing customers in order to retain them and increase their value.

The key to this is having complete and up-to date customer data that accurately depicts how your customers behave – both offline and online.

Equipped with a clear understanding of their needs and preferences, your marketing department will be more effective at increasing customer loyalty and sales. And just as importantly, your service teams will be able to provide more insightful, helpful and impressive experiences.

Of course, this all depends on how accurately your data is depicting your customers.

 

Customers in pieces

When it comes to capturing customer data, quantity isn’t the problem. Customers generate huge volumes of it as they engage via websites, apps, email, call centres and retail branches.

The real issue is where it is kept – often in divisional or channel siloes that few businesses can integrate.

This fragmented approach prevents businesses from getting a clear picture of their customers and a true understanding of their preferences and needs.

And it is compounded by the fact that customers are frustratingly random. They might buy online using their office address and mobile number, for example, yet their loyalty membership may be linked to their home address and personal email.

 

It’s like you don’t know me

A fractured data picture leads to decisions that are based on only a partial understanding of customers. Inevitably, it results in experiences that leave customers feeling unrecognised, unvalued – and yes, unloved.

The sense that ‘the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing’ can be all too evident during personal service encounters. When a customer talks to your service teams, they expect you to know the totality of their relationship, not just the last time you spoke.

A fractured data picture leads to decisions that are based on only a partial understanding of customers. Inevitably, it results in experiences that leave customers feeling unrecognised, unvalued – and yes, unloved.

The fact that your data is siloed is of no interest to them, but if you genuinely want to build customer loyalty and value, it should be critically important to you.

 

I want a complete picture, and I want it now

The ability to get a single customer view, and in real-time, is what’s preventing many businesses from becoming truly customer focused.

The problem is traditional processes and systems can’t keep pace with the volume of data being generated by today’s customers. This results in large amounts of customer data being overlooked and unused.

Even if data can be accessed, extracting insights takes so long that any commercial value is lost –particularly in dynamic, fast-moving markets. Thankfully hope is on the horizon, in the form of a new breed of technology platform.

 

With CDP’s everything is clear

The emergence of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) is giving service organisations the opportunity to see their customers as they really are – often for the first time.

Hosted in the cloud, a CDP integrates customer data from multiple online and offline sources, often in real time, to create a true single customer view.

This complete picture is available in dashboard format on the desktop of each user. It puts the awesome power of customer data in the hands of the people who need it most – your marketing and service professionals.

Equipped with true insights, your people can deliver personalised experiences that maximise opportunities and mitigate risks in the context of a customer’s entire relationship with your organisation.

The hottest topic in the world of data-driven marketing, Customer Data Platforms are being widely adopted as much for their ability to improve customer satisfaction as their capacity to boost sales.

 

Take customer centricity to the next level

Being customer focused requires more than good intentions. It demands a technology I want a complete picture, solution that lets your organisation recognise each customer individually and enables your and I want it now people to deliver highly personalised customer experiences. That solution – the Customer Data Platform – has arrived.

This guest article was written by Tony Rambaut, Co-founder of our partner UniFida Australia. Originally published in the FOCUS Quarterly March 2021 magazine by CSIA.

 

Are you considering a customer data platform? Find out how developing use cases can help you understand what your business needs from CDP technology.


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


3 benefits of using personalisation in eCommerce

benefits of using personalisation in eCommerce

Personalisation in retail is nothing new. Retailers and brands have been treating their customers as individuals well before the advent of online shopping, and for good reason. Personalisation works. Personalisation helps stores anticipate their customers’ needs, save them time, and provide offers that resonate with them. In fact, research from Fresh Relevance shows that almost half of shoppers (41%) would drop a retailer who sends irrelevant offers and one in four actively want to be sent offers and recommendations based on previous purchases.

 

But what exactly is eCommerce personalisation?

Ecommerce personalisation is when eCommerce stores deliver personalised and relevant experiences throughout their website and across email, through dynamic content and product recommendations based on shopper data, such as location and past purchases.

Fresh Relevance partners with UniFida to deepen the level of personalisation based on the UniFida Customer Data Platform. UniFida provides identity resolution to build a single view of a customer and deeper insight and targeting such as customer value, dormancy, or responsive to price reductions.

This provides real-time behaviour and insight combined with the power to act on it and enable cross-channel personalisation.

Read on to learn about three key benefits of personalisation in eCommerce.

 

1. Personalisation increases conversions

In today’s crowded digital landscape, competition is fierce and keeping shoppers’ attention is becoming increasingly vital. Personalisation helps eCommerce stores create seamless, tailored experiences that reduce bounce rate and friction and ultimately boost conversions.

The average Fresh Relevance client doing web personalisation sees an 8% increase in sales. What’s more, research from Epsilon shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalised experiences. In fact, 74% of consumers actively feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalised.

Here are some conversion-boosting personalisation tactics for eCommerce.

Geotargeting

A shopper’s physical location has a big influence on their interests and needs when engaging with an eCommerce store. So, it makes sense to treat customers differently based on where they are located and use geotargeting tactics to ensure that they see offers most relevant to their current context.

Try adding details of the shopper’s nearest store for click and collect options on the cart page. Or display weather-based dynamic banners on your website and in emails to showcase appropriate products.

Product recommendations based on personification

Every shopper has different tastes and preferences. So eCommerce stores should take note and treat each visitor to their site accordingly to ensure they resonate with everyone.

To convert visitors into customers, try displaying ‘people like you buy’ product recommendations. This type of recommendation looks at the shopper’s past browse or purchase history and compares it with other shoppers who have viewed those products, using a machine learning algorithm to recommend the most likely eventual purchases. It appeals to the shopper’s desire to follow the wisdom of the crowd, putting their purchase decision into the capable hands of their shopping predecessors.

Shoppers can also have different preferences when it comes to price. A tool like Fresh Relevance’s Price Affinity Predictor uses AI to predict the price level that will appeal to each new website visitor, helping you recommend the most relevantly priced products and keep visitors on your website.

Triggered emails

Triggered emails are an effective way to deliver personalised, real-time content to shoppers at the moment they are most likely to convert.

Two types of triggered emails to add to your email marketing toolkit are cart and browse abandonment emails. These messages are triggered when a shopper abandons a browsing session or their shopping basket without making a purchase. The average Fresh Relevance client doing both cart and browse abandonment emails sees a sales uplift of 16%.

Other types of triggered emails proven to boost conversions include price drop and back in stock alerts.

 

2. Personalisation improves customer loyalty

Consumers have come to expect a personalised experience from retailers and brands, and are more likely to return to stores that fulfil this expectation. According to Salesforce, 70% of consumers say a company’s understanding of their personal needs influences their loyalty.

With a wealth of browse and past purchase data available at the average eCommerce store’s fingertips, it has never been more possible to foster customer loyalty through personalisation.

Here are some eCommerce personalisation tactics that improve customer loyalty.

Product recommendations based on behavioural data

Ecommerce stores can start their loyalty campaigns straight after a customer has made a purchase, with post-purchase emails containing product recommendations that complement the item they’ve just bought.

Making recommendations based on the customer’s frequently browsed and purchased product categories is another effective way to foster loyalty and resonate with existing customers. Including these types of recommendations in your email newsletters helps bring customers back to your website, and displaying them on the homepage encourages customers to keep browsing and make a purchase.

Welcome back popover

Ecommerce stores can help customers pick up where they left off when they return to the website by including a popover to remind visitors of their last viewed product. Customers will appreciate the gesture, as they do not have to waste time finding the product they searched for last time.

Replenishment emails

For customers who have purchased perishable products that will need replacing, such as medicine or cosmetics, triggered replenishment emails serve as a useful reminder that the time to reorder is approaching. This type of triggered email helps boost customer loyalty and increases the likelihood of repeat purchases.

 

3. Personalisation encourages customer advocacy

Personalised experiences lead to happy customers, and happy customers often feel compelled to recommend brands and retailers they love to their network. A study by Forrester found that 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalised service or experience.

Beyond customers becoming advocates without any prompting thanks to a fantastic, personalised experience, eCommerce stores can use personalised post-purchase campaigns to encourage customer advocacy.

Try adding user-generated content (UGC) to your post-purchase emails to give customers inspiration on how to use or wear their new product, and let them know how to share their own UGC by telling them which social media channel to use and the relevant hashtag.

Post-purchase emails are also an effective way to gather reviews and ratings. Frequent buyers are an ideal source for positive reviews and ratings, so be sure to encourage them to share their experience by sending review requests.

 

Final thoughts

The eCommerce space is becoming increasingly competitive, and shoppers can switch to another brand at the click of a button. To convert and retain today’s consumers, providing personalised experiences isn’t a nice-to-have, it is essential.

A real-time personalisation and optimisation platform like Fresh Relevance helps digital marketers and eCommerce professionals drive revenue and customer loyalty. Combined with UniFida this enables identity resolution, single customer view and enhanced insights to enable cross-channel personalisation.

Download Fresh Relevance’s free eBook to learn more about building personalised experiences for your customers with Fresh Relevance.

This guest post was written by Fresh Relevance, a personalisation and optimisation platform for digital marketers.


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed. Our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


CDPs provide efficiencies as well as effectiveness

We have been looking at an interesting report called ‘The State of CDPs, Q3 2020’ by Treasure Data and Advertiser Perceptions. The research is based on 101 respondents working for larger US companies, and reveals that CDPs provide efficiencies as well as effectiveness, however, to realise both takes time.

The CDP use cases for marketing effectiveness are generally well known, and this slide does not provide any real surprises:

top benefit of using CDP to manage customer data

What was more striking though were the improved efficiencies experienced by companies using a CDP.

significant impact where CDPs provide efficiencies

These efficiencies improve as companies have more time to get used to having a CDP.

To get full value from a CDP a company needs to adapt its marketing processes around it, and this takes time. To take a common example, there may have been one team dealing with owned outbound channels such as emails and direct mail, and another with paid digital advertising such as display, programmatic, SEM etc. and, another team managing the website content, optimisation and of course the data. In order to deliver the optimal messaging, customer experience and drive business value, all of these channels need to be merged to deliver a unified customer experience.

One area that does not change with CDP tenure is the freeing up of IT resources. This is because once the feeds into a CDP have been organised, and the CDP configured, IT should be able to take a step back and let the marketers take over. This all happens in the early stages of introducing a CDP.

CDP technology is an enabler allowing marketers to do things differently, and this change process will inevitably take time. This delay factor needs to be built into the calendarisation of benefits when developing the business case for a CDP.

This is a major component which is often overlooked by businesses when considering marketing or advertising technology such as a customer data platform, the people who operate and optimise it. Do they have relevant skills and experience to maximise the investment? Have you allocated time and budget to ensure a consistent coaching and development programme is in place?

Hence the considerable increase in satisfaction with CDPs seen amongst companies with more than two years’ worth of experience of using them.

satisfaction with CDP

If you are at the early stage of considering whether they should introduce a CDP, and would like help establishing the use cases for one, and quantifying the benefits, we would be only too pleased to offer support, without any charge. We have worked on many CDP business casing exercises and can help fast-track you through the process. We also provide in-depth training and support and hold your hand at every step to help deliver your goals.


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


Do you really know whether your company should install a customer data platform?

data from a customer data platform

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are taking the marketing world by storm – the Customer Data Platform Institute projects that marketers will spend $1.3 billion on them in 2020.

But the important question for your company is whether you would really benefit from having one?

So, what do CDPs really do? At a very high level they:
– ingest all available sources of online and offline customer data and build a deduplicated single customer view
– provide the capability to profile and segment customers
– enable personalised and consistent communications to take place across all channels by connecting your marketing technology
– support you in visualising customer performance

Do you really know whether your company should install a customer data platform? We have devised a simple 10-point questionnaire to help you understand whether your company could benefit from a CDP. It won’t be telling you whether should definitely should have one, as you will need a business case for that, but it will tell you whether CDPs are worth investigating.

QUESTIONNAIRE

If you want to start to find out more about what a CDP could do for your company then please order our free e-book CLICK


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


Why we’re reselling Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities

Why are we now reselling Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities alongside UniFida’s customer data platform?

fresh relevance

One of the key uses of a customer data platform is to ensure that decisions made about how and what to communicate with each individual customer across any channel are based on one consistent single customer view.

UniFida’s customer data platform provides the single customer view, combining both online and offline data, and we have partnered with Fresh Relevance to use their personalisation capabilities for website and email personalisation.

So, what does this mean in practice?

Let us provide some quite simplistic examples (we are sure that you will be capable of creating some much better ones):

One of your dormant customers, Mr Smith, is browsing your website and we recognise him from his cookie ID, or because he provides an email address; Fresh Relevance has already been provided by UniFida with detailed information about Mr Smith’s past purchases, and can use that to remind him that he often prefers category ABC. And it does this in combination with a valuable offer should he decide to reactivate himself after not ordering for so many months.

Another customer Mrs Cook has filled her basket on several occasions but never gone as far as making a purchase online. UniFida knows that Mrs Cook is in reality a good customer who normally orders by phone. The website, powered by Fresh Relevance, then offers Mrs Cook the opportunity to chat to an agent, and to turn her basket into an order having discussed her potential purchase with one of your agents, who understands when chatting to her what she has liked to purchase in the past.

In a third case you decide to reward previously loyal customers who have not so far ordered this season. UniFida knows how much Mr Jones usually spends at this time of year, so Fresh Relevance can personalise an email that gives Mr Jones a discount based on his previous season’s spend. In this way the loyalty bonus is only offered to customers who have not ordered, and not wasted on those who have done already.

In reality there are thousands of different ways in which Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities can work with a customer data platform like UniFida. The only limitation could be your fertile imagination’s capacity to come up with much smarter ideas.

What we like to do is to put these tools in your hands, so that you can experiment and find out what really works best for your customers. One thing we do know is that personalisation, when truly relevant to an individual customer, works wonders for your sales.

If you would like to talk more about personalisation and how to implement it for your business, please get in touch!

 


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


Will there be an avalanche of consumer demand after lockdown?

It’s most likely that there will be a massive surge in many areas of the economy after lockdown, including consumer demand. So now is the golden moment for companies to prepare for this.

We know first-hand that many companies are putting infrastructure development projects on hold at present, when logic suggests that they should be doing the opposite. So when the bounce-back happens they are fully capable of taking advantage of it.

Often the reason for delay is cash flow, as this is also a time of unprecedented financial stress for many companies.

So if you are thinking about getting your technology for marketing upgraded to be ready for when consumer demand picks up after lockdown, we can make an offer that could help substantially.

If your interest is in getting hold of a fully serviced cloud-based customer data platform (CDP) at a moderate price, then we can offer you a substantial license holiday of at least three months if you can place an order in April or May. The free period will continue until the lockdown is over so it could be extended.

A CDP is capable of supporting B2C marketing in many different areas including:

– customer message personalisation that is based on a complete view of online and offline customer activity
– multi touch order attribution that tells you how in combination all your online and offline channels are performing
– customer value and customer retention dashboards so that you can confidently calculate how much you can afford to spend on recruitment
– dormant customer reactivation based on propensity models that tell you who is most likely to respond
– one click campaign results reporting to give you up to date news on how your different contact strategies are actually performing
– automated outbound campaigns responding to online and offline triggers

We can also help you with making a decision about whether or not to invest by helping you build the business case for a CDP at no charge, even if you do not proceed to purchase one from us when the work is done.

The last two business cases we developed for B to C companies showed a return on UniFida technology of between four and eight times the cost.

Please do take a look at how our clients have benefited by using UniFida, and also email us with a time that would work for you for an initial call to see how we could help.

 


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


How a customer data platform uses data for decision making

The maxim ‘knowledge is power’ has held good for many years but that power also can be democratised when knowledge is shared. Shared knowledge obtained from data, leads to a common understanding of how a business is working, and from this a more effective, faster and smoother decision making process. No more meetings starting with that obstructive statement ‘I don’t recognise the numbers’.

 

So, how does a CDP use data to enhance, accelerate, and democratise decision making?

Several reasons combine to contribute to the result:

1. A CDP will build peoples’ identities using data coming from many different sources.
This means that individuals may be matched on their postal address, their email, their mobile, their cookie ID and more. The identifier, we call it the permanent URN or PURN, for an individual will be fixed in the system and any new data that matches to it added to the customer record. From this we achieve a finite, and at any moment in time, fixed number of known individuals in the system. We can no longer disagree over customer volumes or the data that is attached to them.

2. All the data that arrives goes into a shared data schema.
This means that the data definitions are constant as well as the values within them. A customer data platform can have only one set of values for gender or marital status for instance.

3. The CDP does not dispose of data unless required to do so under GDPR or because it has no conceivable value.
When a CDP is being set up historic customer data is loaded into the system, and from that point on data will be augmented. This data usually includes details of on-line activity, when it can be matched, as well as transactions undertaken, and contacts made through any channel both inwards and outwards.

4. A good CDP will check the data feeds as they arrive for consistency of their layout and content.
Feeds that do not conform are rejected before they go into the customer data platform. In some cases, such as when we are dealing with names and addresses, they may need to be improved using matches to external verification files like PAF.

5. A smart CDP will go far beyond just recording the input data.
It will start to build what we call engineered data. This is data derived from the raw data that comes in to the CDP. It may be a calculation of lifetime value in the first year since acquisition, or the result of applying a customer segmentation or a propensity model. Engineered data fields are then updated each time new data arrives for an individual. It is often the case that charts and reports are built from the engineered data rather than from the raw data. For instance, to answer a question like what is our customer retention rate we need to have an engineered data field that marks whether a customer who purchased in period A also goes on to purchase in period B, the periods being linked to when the individual first appeared as a customer.

6. The CDP will allow access to all users in a company who want to see that single common view of the customer.
This may be by way of dashboards or on-line reports, or because they have the tools to extract data directly from the system. The dashboards may be tailored to each individual user or be common to a department or a whole organisation. But whatever charts or tables they contain they will all be derived from the same common but constantly updated CDP. This means that they cannot disagree because both the data they are drawn from is common, and the definitions that they use are shared.

 

And what types of understanding can be obtained from the CDP?

Having developed a shared, consistent, and complete customer data source, the CDP can be put to support a multitude of uses. What follows is a description of some of the more common ones, but in reality, there is no limit on the kinds of outputs that can be achieved, particularly when the CDP is aligned with a clever data visualisation tool like Tableau.

1. Supporting AI.
Underneath all the hype about AI is the need for good data to support it. If an AI tool is to learn from a flow of data being fed into it, that flow needs to be unchanging in its composition, and accurate to the point of perfection. A CDP is perfectly designed for this role.

2. Tracking the overall customer picture.
Managers looking after customer acquisition and retention will have an almost unlimited number of questions they need to have answered. Some of the most typical are:

  • What volumes of customers are we recruiting through which channel?
  • Do the different channels and media sources provide customers with different characteristics and different longer-term values?
  • How do the different social media channels contribute to my customer volumes?
  • From which geographies am I recruiting my customers?
  • What is my level of second orders and year on year customer retention?
  • What behavioural segments do my customers fall into, and what do they look like when profiled by demographics and lifestyle?
  • Have the characteristics of my customers altered over time?
  • Are there some customer groups that provide such low value that they are not worth the cost of recruitment?

3. Tracking the product picture.
Every business knows the high-level numbers on product sales but beneath this high-level view are many interesting questions, for example:

  • Are different types of customer changing the mix of products they buy?
  • Do different channels lead to different products being purchased, and to different product values being chosen?
  • What is our best recruitment product?
  • How loyal are customers that are first attracted to different products?
  • Given that we know the first product purchased by a customer, can we predict what a customer is most likely to buy next?
  • If we deduct the cost of marketing and cost of goods, how profitable are our different products?
  • Can we build a time series model to predict overall sales of my products based on a combination of customer information, and marketing history, combined with external factors?

4. Next up, understanding the impact of marketing.
A strong case can be made for the assertion that without a reliable CDP the value of marketing will always be an unknown. For instance, if you cannot attribute sales that come in via the internet to prior marketing communications how can you justify the cost of those communications? Or if the longer-term value of customers cannot be measured how can you justify the cost of recruiting them beyond the value of their initial purchase? Some of the many uses of the CDP for marketing have been detailed above under customer and product understanding, but there is an additional layer which comes from being able to link marketing activity in its many guises to an outcome in terms of customer value. Some examples are:

  • Linking expenditure on social media to actual customers recruited and the value they subsequently generate. Very few companies spending fortunes on social media take the trouble to do this, but with the right digital analytics combined with the CDP this can be quite straightforward.
  • Examining campaign results not just from the overall value obtained, but also investigating what types of customers they attracted, and what different longer term values they brought with them.
  • Providing the data to help understand a complex sales funnel where prospects drop out at different stages; in these cases, there is a need not only to understand the impact of the different processes on drop-out levels, but also what types of prospects are better at surviving the overall funnel process.
  • If there is a customer retention problem, then this can be evaluated in terms of lost revenue, and from that budgets provided for retention activities that can then be tracked, using control groups held in the CDP, to find out which provide the best ROI.
  • When a marketing budget is complex and spread over many different activities then there is a need to untangle the impact of the different marketing activities and prioritise the way budget is allocated to optimise results. This requires building an understanding of the relationship between spend in a channel and the usually diminishing results achieved as spend is increased. This is often called a saturation curve. For this kind of analytical activity the underlying data is found in the CDP, although the subsequent analysis is done outside it with different tool-sets.

 

To wrap it up

It would be presumptuous to claim that a CDP can solve all marketing problems, but without doubt it can ensure that knowledge is shared, and the data required for intelligent decision making made readily available. A CDP can be perhaps viewed as the necessary foundation stone for all successful marketing organisations.

 

Contact us if you’d like to know how we can help your organisation.


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


Has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database?

So has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database? ‘Personal data’ is defined in GDPR as ‘any information relating to a person who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that person’.

So each of us can be seen as ‘bristling’ with multiple potential identifiers, any or all of which may be stored by organisations using our personal data. And to add another layer of complexity, most of the commonly used identifiers, like email addresses or mobile phone numbers, may change on a regular basis.

All of us, as data subjects, can ask any organisation holding their data,for their personal data to be deleted, or transferred, or not to be used for marketing communications, or for profiling, or sold to anyone else etc. etc.

We may also change our minds about how our data can be used, and most probably forget what we have requested in the first place, because it’s not at all important to us.

So, for example, using our name and address as our ID, we request that organisation X does not profile our data, whilst using our email we ask to have our data deleted, and via our mobile phone number then expect to have our recent order traced.

GDPR tacitly assumes that persons about whom personal data is held can each be recognised uniquely, across all the identifiers they care to use, and as they change identifiers over time; and that from this basis rational interpretations can be made of their instructions.

This is evidently a delusion.

As vendors of a technology to build single customer views we know how difficult the identity problem is. The normal ‘shrinkage’ when we deduplicate a customer base across just say a couple of identifiers is around 20-25%; the more the types of identifier the greater the chance of duplicate records.

The technology we have developed to try to solve the problem is called UniFida, and it approaches the question of personal identifiers in a rather different way. It assumes, correctly, that all our common identifiers like email addresses, mobile numbers, cookie IDs etc. will change over time, and that individuals may have multiple versions of them.

So, it stores a history, for each individual, of all the identifiers it has been able to link. When an identifier arrives at UniFida as part of an on-line or off-line data feed, it searches the entire library of identifiers to see if it can get a match. In this way, it brings as much information about an individual together as is possible.

Has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database? To find out a little more about UniFida please contact us. It may make complying with GDPR a little bit more possible.


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.


Tottenham Hotspur sign a sixth player!

Tottenham Hotspur sign a sixth player! If Trippier, Alli, N’Jie, Alderweireld, and Wimmer were not enough, last week they signed up for a UniFida trial.

Our real-time single customer view can’t be expected to score goals, but it can keep every individual fan in focus, and provide access to what turns them on.

Tottenham chose to trial UniFida because it’s:

  • Very affordable
  • Updated in near real time
  • Combines web browsing data with ticketing and merchandising
  • Provides continuously updated performance dashboards

To find out more and how UniFida could help you please contact us.


UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.