Organize and Analyze Your Data
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain why it’s important to collect, organize, and analyze data.
- Describe the core capabilities and benefits of a customer data platform.
That’s a Lot of Data
The world collects an incredible amount of data every day. Marketers see their own data growing fast with each customer interaction, and many are looking for ways to manage it. But more than simply managing it, marketers need to do something with the data. Here’s how.
Let’s recap three important themes from the video: collecting, unifying, and verifying the data.
Collect the Data
First you need to collect and house the data, otherwise it’s just disorganized information. Fortunately, that is one hurdle most marketers have overcome. In fact, they’re pretty good at it. They collect data through apps, websites, user profile preferences, and CRM systems, to name a few.
The issue is the data isn’t in one place. It’s scattered among these different tools. Imagine having three brains you needed to sync together to make decisions. Marketers don’t get the complete picture because the systems aren’t talking to each other. These traditional systems don’t work together to make connections and link the data to provide the complete picture.
Marketers need a way to take information and convert it into actions or messages that mean something to the customer.
Bring It All Together
When marketers unify their data in one place, they can identify the who, what, when, where, why, and how of their customers. It’s all about the customer and understanding them better. When marketers truly know their customers, they can promote the right product to the right customer at the right time and in the right way.
Unifying the data provides a complete picture of the customer and creates a single source of truth for each customer.
Make Sure It’s Accurate
What if the data isn’t accurate or it’s attributed to the wrong customer? Then all that effort collecting and unifying data is for nothing. Even with systems and checkpoints in place, data can be inaccurate. Here are two common data pitfalls.
- There are too many data points. Data is coming in from every direction, and it can be difficult to track and digest.
- There are still data silos. And information is stored in systems that don’t communicate with one another.
When this happens, it is ultimately a disservice to the customer. Marketers aren’t getting a complete picture, or, even worse, they’re getting an incorrect picture of the customer.
What Are You Going to Do with It?
The data is complete and accurate, and you have it in one place. The question remains. What are you going to do with all that information? How will you put it to work for you and your customers? After all, data isn’t much use if it can’t be put into action. It’s time to tie it all together and use the data to strengthen customer relationships.
Customer Data Platform—Put Data to Work
Welcome to the place that harnesses the power of data: the customer data platform (CDP). The CDP is an integrated system that simplifies and connects all the data that businesses gather and uncover about their customers. It’s the marketer’s brain. Let’s learn more about the CDP.
With the CDP, marketers employ a single system that helps them deliver truly human interactions with their customers. It’s kinda like they’re friends with their customers. Marketers can develop one-on-one customer relationships that are mutually beneficial and build loyalty. In many ways, CDPs can be thought of as CRM 5.0, designed for the needs of today’s marketer. Here’s what CDPs can do.
Acquire data: Ingest customer-level data from many sources
The ability to acquire data from many different systems and sources is core to the promise of CDP. Data unification is the fundamental challenge the CDP solves for, and it all starts here.
Process data: Clean and dedupe the data
To get to a single view of the customer, the data needs to be cleaned and deduplicated. This means matching identities for customers who have multiple identities within a company’s various data systems (different emails, nicknames, loyalty rewards numbers, and so on). This is crucial for making a CDP’s promise come to life.
Store: Persistent data storage
Marketers need to store and access customer data over longer periods of time. This allows them to understand how their relationship with a customer has evolved over time and also uncover trends in the data they’ve collected. It lets them build a true data asset that can be a focal point of their data-driven marketing strategy.
Analytics and decisions: Predict and personalize
Perhaps the biggest promise of the CDP is its ability to provide deep insights and even AI-fueled predictions about your customers. Once a CDP is up and running, the goal of many marketers is to use it to understand their customers, and use that understanding to build more durable relationships.
A System of Engagement and Insights
Marketers want a system to help them drive real-time personalization across channels (website, mobile, in-store, and so forth) and personalization of offers and content. And data is needed to drive personalization and marketing engagement. By having a CDP to help you organize that data, you can be one step closer to the one-to-one relationship your customers want.