Holiday shopping is here and if your business strategy isn’t based on the consumer profile insights of your Cloud Data Platform (CDP) you might find yourself with nothing but coal.
Now–more than in years prior– if you want to maximize your holiday sales your brand must deliver a personalized and tailored shopping experience in-store and online.
According to IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBV) “2022 shopping budgets are up 8% over 2021.” IBV’s annual global holiday shopping report also predicts that consumers “will be shopping earlier than in years past.”
During this holiday shopping wave, what will set you apart will be the customer experience you can deliver at each and every touchpoint. For 2022, “online sales…expected to reign supreme…with Adobe predicting 2.5% growth in online sales November 1-December 31.”
Latest insight from Forbes and IBM postulate that a brand’s ability to provide customer-centric experiences and being able to customize your consumers shopping journey from start to finish will be the defining factor among retailers online.
If these predictions are correct, nothing will be more important than your CDP set up. To ensure your marketing, ecommerce teams and analytics teams are maximizing value from your CDP, we’ve created a checklist of the key features and insights your CDP should be delivering so that you remain customer-driven this holiday season.
The only way you can guarantee that you are delivering the most personalized marketing material and messaging is if you have a complete profile of your customer. Your CDP should serve as the central hub of consumer information for your business. With a CDP, various applications across channels that collect first-party customer data are now unified and centralized so your team is working with every datapoint available. If your CDP is not providing your marketing department with a single, coherent, complete view of each customer you are not maximizing the CDP’s database of first-party consumer profiles. Your CDP should serve as the foundation that influences all personalized marketing campaigns this holiday season.
With your CDP, your marketing team should be able to easily target key audiences for more personalized marketing campaigns. Since your CDP should have a full customer view, you can trust that your marketing team is building campaigns that will target and reach the right consumers. Your CDP allows marketing to access and segment data based on different demographics. Your CDP software should provide all the information your team needs to have targeted and hyper-personalized campaigns.
Simultaneously, just like CDP’s make it possible to segment, CDP’s also allow for your marketing team to suppress audiences. Your CDP should allow your marketing team to exclude certain audiences from any campaigns - suppressing audiences ensures that you are not pushing ads or email campaigns to consumers that don’t want to hear from you.
This holiday season a proper CDP will allow your business to track the journey of your customers. From one touchpoint to another, your CDP allows for your marketing team to have a complete understanding of everything from a customer’s browsing habits to their shopping habits. Your CDP gives you the inside look at how customers interact with your business and products.
Don’t let your business lose sales during the holidays because you are out-of-stock. CDP’s should also inform your sales department or buying team with demand forecasting so during the holiday season you don’t have too much or too little of your products. A CDP stores the historical data of items purchased which you can use to forecast future inventory needs. Your CDP can help key departments in sales, buying, and warehouse ensure that you have the right amount of stock based on the buying behavior of your consumers in years prior.
Finally, you’re maximizing your CDP when other departments are also leveraging the platform. While a CDP serves as the data backbone for your marketing initiatives, smart businesses also ensure that the CDP is tracking and influencing your other departments. This holiday season nothing will matter more than the experience you are able to provide at every touchpoint. This means that across departments everyone has access to a consumer’s experience and interaction with your brand.
Whether it’s an open ticket with your help desk, a pending return for an online order, or purchase history, your CDP should house the data throughout all these departments and more. Ritual Cosmetics worked with us to leverage their CDP on Google Cloud and now with their loyalty program have some of the most devoted customers because at each point of interaction, every department is able to access key profile details that turn a simple exchange into a personal connection.
If you are unsure whether you’re maximizing the use of your CDP, if you need a more custom-built CDP, or just aren’t sure if your CDP is set up correctly or is missing any vital elements, do something about it.
Even if it might be too late to maximize on your CDP this season, get a jump start on your strategy for next year’s holiday season and learn more about how we develop CDP’s that turn your business into data-driven enterprises.
Crystalloids helps companies improve their customer experiences and build marketing technology. Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands, Crystalloids builds crystal-clear solutions that turn customer data into information and knowledge into wisdom. As a leading Google Cloud Partner, Crystalloids combines experience in software development, data science, and marketing, making them one of a kind IT company. Using the Agile approach, Crystalloids ensures that use cases show immediate value to their clients and make their job focus more on decision making and less on programming.