Are customer data platforms affordable?

To determine if customer data platforms are affordable, will depend on who you are and who you are talking to. But if you are a typical large US enterprise then a reasonable cost for a CDP could be around $1m per annum.

Not many UK companies would be happy to pay that much, even if it did only amount to a few pence per customer.

We are concerned that there is a perception that CDPs are like private jets, the preserve of the very rich. In reality, CDPs come in many shapes and forms and to some extent this affects what they cost.

How much does a customer data platform cost?

We would like to feel that our cloud-based customer data platform is both functionally very rich, and at the same time extremely affordable. For instance, if you have 100,000 customers, would paying 27p per customer per annum be too much?

But more importantly than the cost, CDPs, if deployed well are a great investment. For instance, if your average margin on goods you sold was £20, then you would only have to sell one extra item for one in every 75 of your 100,000 customers to pay for your CDP.

Our clients have given us feedback on their returns from investing in our CDP, and they are seeing an increased contribution of between x4 and x8 the cost.
customer reviews on customer data platform affordability

We offer a free business evaluation service where we help you identify the use cases for a CDP, and then quantify the results.

Would you like to arrange a chat with us about this? Just email us and we can arrange a Zoom meeting.

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.

Where do you go to get answers to your most pressing marketing questions?

Being tasked with finding answers to marketing questions to support your marketing decisions and advance your campaigns is no easy feat.

We are thinking of questions like:

– where are my most valuable customers coming from?
– what’s the best next offer I can make to each of them?
– how can I identify those dormant customers that are most likely to be reactivated?
– how much should I budget to spend in each of my online and offline channels?

In days of old you would most probably have fired questions like these at your advertising agency, and they would have responded using a smattering of science combined with a lot of judgement.

In today’s evidence-based world there are few one-stop solutions that can properly answer questions like these because to do so requires the right combination of marketing savvy, data, and data science.

However, there is something without which none of these questions can be answered, and that is the single customer view, where all data about your interactions with your customers are held.

For example, just taking the four questions we started with, you will at least need to know:

– how each customer was recruited?
– what their propensities are to buy from each of your main product categories?
– what sorts of customers are self-reactivating?
– all the online and offline events that preceded each of your customer orders?

So, what can we conclude so far?

That your single customer view needs to be skilfully designed to hold both the ‘raw’ facts such as details of a transaction, or a website visit, and also the ‘derived’ facts like a propensity to behave in a certain way.

But the single customer view is only part of the solution.

Our view is that the go-to resource you need is a combination of a customer data platform (the tool that builds the single customer view), with marketers to specify what it is expected to do, and data scientists to transform its raw data into sophisticated engineered predictions concerning your customers’ behaviour.

This is also the basis on which we have built our company. An understanding that marketeers need that right combination of people, technology, and data science to support their marketing actions and decisions.

If this is what you are looking for, then please email is at [email protected] and we will arrange a Zoom with our founder Julian Berry who will be delighted to discuss how we can 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.

3 problems that can arise when allocating marketing budget according to campaign ROI

What could possibly go wrong when allocating marketing budget according to campaign ROI? Well, depending on exactly how you do that, quite a lot actually!

 

Here are just three examples

  1. If you approve any campaign expected to provide an ROI > X you may be approving campaigns for which there may be alternatives that yield better X+++ returns. These may be different types of campaign with the same objective, or for instance the same campaign but just run at a different time of year.
  2. It’s well known that all channels can suffer from over-use or saturation, at which point their ROI will start to drop. Just think of the irritation caused by a TV advert repeating too often. But if you cannot tell what the cumulative ROI of all your campaigns in a channel is, how are you going to be able to measure this effect, and know when to reduce spend in one channel or increase it in another?
  3. Campaigns don’t just happen in isolation; they happen within the context of all the other campaigns that are happening at the same time, each of which may have an impact on a potential customer. Hence you spend on DRTV will impact your returns from direct mail or door-drops. Understanding the impact of your main channels on other channels can become critical.

So, how do you resolve these issues and get to the point where allocating your marketing budget takes account of them?

We have developed a process, and related technology, that is designed to help you get to this point. The way it works in detail varies with each client, because no two clients share the same marketing campaign mix, but the outcome will be that you have a marketing budget that should get you the best possible return.

Contact us for more information and a no-obligation chat.

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.