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In the technological era, businesses now thrive on collecting and utilizing customer data. One of the ways how this can be done is by building customer data platforms. These platforms collect data of customers’ behavior from various sources and analyze the data to enhance the businesses’ understanding of their customers. It allows companies to develop better relationships with new customers and maintain strong relationships with their existing customers. Ultimately, these platforms aid businesses in expanding their customer base and exponentially increase their revenue. This article will go over six benefits of having a customer data platform for businesses.
1) Development of Unified Customer Profiles
Suppose you launch a marketing campaign using mass media, social media, and direct marketing. These channels will reach various audiences, resulting in different sales generated through each medium. Suppose your business doesn’t have a platform for customer data. In that case, you will have to analyze data coming in from each medium manually. However, assume your business does have the mentioned platform. If that is the case, it will function as a hub for customer data and allow you to identify commonalities amongst customers across marketing mediums. A customer data platform will enable you to build unified customer profiles. These customer profiles will compile the data from multiple platforms and show you the impact of your overall marketing campaign and the audience you reached from each marketing medium. A customer data platform (CDP) can generate profiles of customers from each medium to show commonalities and differences in the audiences reached from multiple platforms. It will enable you to develop more targeted marketing campaigns to get more significant audiences and generate higher revenues in the future.
2) Tailored Experiences for Customers
One of the biggest utilities provided by CDPs is that it allows you to generate customer profiles. You can identify a particular target market that forms the most significant portion of your customer base based on these customer profiles. Once you have identified the market segment, you can use the information from CDP to provide tailored marketing and retail experiences to the identified target market. Marketing campaigns for this customer base will be different from general marketing. They will contain targeted messaging rather than generic messaging.
Moreover, search engine optimization (SEO) tools alongside other data sources can ensure that the specific messages reach the intended audience. This specialized marketing and messaging makes the customer feel special and rewarded for their loyalty. Businesses can take this further to provide tailored experiences for these customers at retail touchpoints. Whether the customer goes to a physical retail touchpoint or an online one, they will receive special attention. It will aim to augment their buying experience and further augment their loyalty to the product or services you are offering.
3) Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Having a customer data platform means using the data to improve customers’ satisfaction with the product or services you are offering. Unified customer profiles give detailed insights into customers’ behaviors and buying patterns. Using this to develop personalized marketing and retail experiences significantly increases customers’ satisfaction. While the product or services your business offers remain the same, the targeted marketing coupled with customized experiences at retail touchpoints affects how the customer reaches your products or services. This increases customers’ satisfaction as they enjoy the messaging or marketing more and the retail experience resulting in greater brand loyalty and enhanced customer satisfaction.
4) Predict your Customers
The customers’ needs and wants are constantly changing; hence businesses must utilize CDPs to track their habits and patterns. By continuously monitoring data, companies can identify any upcoming trends. This data on trends gives insight into whether current customers will be retained and how the new customers might behave. Simply put, you will be able to predict whether the existing or new customers will opt for your services/products or not.
5) Inform Business Development
Customer data platforms also have an excellent application in spurring new business development for both products and services. Development is a vital part of ensuring the business keeps progressing. With the low-attention span of modern-day customers, there are products aplenty, and customer switching is also widespread. It is mainly due to inefficient product or service development based on anecdotal data. Research has shown that businesses that utilize data-driven approaches are more likely to develop products or services adopted readily by customers. Subsequently, data-driven approaches can help the marketing and advertising strategies ensure that the new product or service is marketed well and reaches the right customer.
6) Evaluate Performance of New Products/Services
While businesses have their traditional data collection systems to evaluate the performance of their products and services, CDPs can be used in this regard. CDP can assess new business offerings’ performance and align with existing customers’ behavior. Analyzing your customers’ behavior can identify why your business may not be functioning well and can identify ways through which it can. In addition, CDPs can be developed to accommodate big data in its input sources. It is specifically to monitor customers’ behavior to assess if other businesses are doing better and why. Companies can use CDP to monitor the performance of a new product and ascertain whether it has any influence on customer trends. They can also use the said trends to identify the right time to launch the product or service.
Final Thoughts
Several studies and business experts have already identified customer data platforms to be essential for businesses in the future. CDPs give unprecedented insights to companies, even leading to unified customer profiles to expand their customer base and revenue. Furthermore, CDP data can develop target messaging and give customers a tailored marketing and retail experience. It ultimately leads to an increased customer satisfaction rate. Additionally, businesses can use CDP analytics to predict the future behavior of their customers to existing or new business offerings.
Hope you enjoyed the article and understand why a customer data platform is essential for the betterment and growth of any business or service. Happy Reading.
