Create a Customer Data Platform Strategy

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe what you need for customer data platform success.
• Explain why it’s important to create different audience segments.
• Identify next steps after creating a CDP strategy.

Combine Your Ingredients

With your preparation taken care of, we can begin baking. Let’s dig into the steps to create your CDP strategy.

Create a CDP Strategy

1. Combine your ingredients.
2. Segment your profiles.
3. Personalize the customer experience.
4. Serve up success.

For both bakers and marketers, combining ingredients is the first step toward a successful finished product. Check out this quick video to learn more about this essential step. 

Here are a few important tips to make sure combining your ingredients goes smoothly. 

Remember Your Key Ingredient  

All ingredients are important. However, you need your key ingredient to hold everything together. In baking, this ingredient is water. For marketers, your key data ingredient is the unique identifier, such as an email address, that keeps all the pieces together. 

Two Ways to Mix

When you begin to mix your data ingredients in your CDP, you can do this in two ways: via data streams or flat file imports. If you choose the import option, you need to map them—or mix them with—a unique identifier. This unique identifier gives you the basis for executing any variations you choose. 

Over time, you want to add more data to your strategy. You can add this data by automating the process, using tools that import them into your CDP, or you can do it manually, adding new data based on what you learn from customer feedback. 

Seek Out Help

Depending on how much you want to customize your campaigns, you may want to tap other experts from across your organization to ensure that your data recipe remains accurate. This can be someone who has more technical data experience, like someone from your IT team. 

Segment Your Profiles into Audiences

Now you’re ready to create your audiences. To begin, take all the data ingredients you've combined and begin to segment them into smaller batches you can use to target specific audiences.

So remember, before you start creating segments, consider the following. 

• What type of customer you’re serving.
• What it is that they like.
• What products or services they've enjoyed in the past.

Showcase Your End Product

Let’s get ready to share your audience segments with your customers. 

When you create audience segments within your CDP, you also need to share that segment to a channel where your audience can view and consume it. To supercharge your CDP delivery, keep these things in mind. 

• You need to showcase a message to your audiences, wherever they are, meaning: email, mobile, social, and so on.
• To effectively reach audiences anywhere, your CDP must be able to deliver your segments across an entire ecosystem of networks.
• All the channels you want to market through must connect to your CDP to create a system of engagement.
• Your system is where customers can consume the end product, whether that be a marketing message or an offer.

Ultimately, remember that your CDP success and the consumption of your end product is only powerful if you display it where your customers can consume it. 

Personalize the Customer Experience

Now for the final step: Add end-user personal preferences to enhance each of your segments. 

Let’s look at a quick example to understand how applying personal preferences allows you to create better customer experiences.  

The Challenge

A retail brand wants to use its email service provider (ESP) to deliver personalized emails to its entire audience base promoting an upcoming sales period. 

The Solution 

Use metadata to personalize messages. Metadata is data that describes other data—like what types of product categories each individual has purchased from a business historically. Marketers use metadata to tailor their message specifically for a single person, but in a scalable way. 

As you can see, it’s important for marketers to plan out their recipes for CDP success and add all the ingredients that enhance every message. This ensures that those data points are unified and connected to their customer profiles.

Serve Up Success

OK, you’ve done all your planning and followed the recipe. Now all that’s left to do is sit back and let your customers consume the finished product. That said, all good marketers are constantly on the lookout for improvements. Let’s check out this quick video to learn more about what to do after sharing your final product. 

As a marketer, it’s important to understand that CDP success is never over because customer preferences are always changing. This means that you need to be analytical, which means you need to do the following. 

• Look at what’s performing well within everything you’re doing.
• Use new data to enhance your segments further.
• Perform tests to understand what channels and messages are working.

Remember that variety is the spice of life in both the baking and marketing worlds. Be on the lookout for how to keep things fresh and fine-tune your skills.