In a context where marketing departments must manage a multitude of customer data scattered across different tools (CRM, ERP, emailing platforms, e-commerce, social networks, etc.), the issue of data centralisation and exploitation becomes crucial.
The Customer Data Platform (CDP) addresses this need by unifying data, making it actionable, and offering marketing teams a single, 360° view of the customer. But concretely, how does this translate into daily operations?
👉 If you wish to first understand in detail what a CDP is and how it works, I invite you to consult our article on the presentation of the concept of Customer Data Platform (CDP)
We offer you 10 concrete use cases that illustrate how a CDP like Smartprofile, combining web analytics, marketing automation and artificial intelligence, can transform the way a company pilots its marketing actions and improves its performance.
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Get a 360° view of the customer
A CDP aggregates all data from different touchpoints (purchases, web browsing, CRM interactions, marketing campaigns, customer support).
This remains the primary goal of a Customer Data Platform: to break down silos and provide a complete view of all available data on your contacts, whether they are customers or prospects. The main difficulty of this unification lies in the multiplicity of data sources as well as formats. Thus, for the same information, data can be present in different places within the information system and in several forms.
👉 Data consolidation allows for a unified customer view that brings together the complete history of the customer relationship throughout their journey and regardless of their point of contact.
Within a marketing or sales department, a manager will be able to see at a glance that a customer has bought a product in-store, visited the online shop 3 times in the month, and opened the last 2 newsletters.
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Improve data quality through RNVP
One of the main criticisms levelled at marketing databases is the maintenance of their quality over time. Too often, contact information is erroneous, duplicated, or poorly formatted. This consequently leads to suboptimal, or even no, use of the databases by marketing and sales teams. Beyond the financial loss from poor database exploitation, many companies suffer direct consequences on the quality of their outgoing communications and their costs.
Indeed, even though a large proportion of customer and prospect communications are digital, many companies still use the postal channel to manage all or part of their outgoing communications (sending catalogues, brochures, etc.). In this case, a poorly managed database has direct consequences on costs (duplicates, undeliverable mail, etc.).
👉 Thanks to RNVP (Restructuring, Normalisation, Postal Validation) integrated into the main market Customer Data Platforms, such as the French solution Smartprofile, postal data is automatically cleaned and normalised to ensure the maximum deliverability of postal communications.
Beyond communication, companies are using CDPs and their recovery capabilities to make their catalogue mailings and deliveries more reliable..
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Create dynamic and scalable segments
This is one of the major current challenges for marketers: understanding who makes up their contact base (customer or prospect) and establishing a segmentation that is truly relevant. Rather than working with «old-fashioned» segmentation defined by fixed segments (e.g., “customers who have purchased at least once”), a CDP allows for the creation of dynamic segments that evolve in real-time according to behaviour.
The contribution of AI in recent years has allowed for a deeper analysis of a customer base, enabling a «Data Driven» segmentation based on data. If these topics interest you, Discover our series of articles on Clustering which allows you to establish intelligent segments based on your data.
The strength of CDPs lies in their ability to leverage all of a customer's interactions to provide relevant segments. For example, a segment can be constructed as: “Hot prospects” can be built and fuelled in real-time as soon as they have visited the “all-inclusive holidays” page three times and downloaded a brochure. The segment can then be activated by sending an email to promote the destination or offer contact with a travel agent.
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Deploying custom scores
As with segmentation, the possibilities offered by a CDP for creating scores go far beyond a classic 0-10 rating. A CDP like Smartprofile can integrate algorithms that assign scores according to different criteria (engagement, propensity, churn risk, cross-sell potential).
Advanced scoring allows you to assign a more refined and relevant value to your contacts, thus isolating contacts according to the objectives set by the company: in the case of a mature business, customer retention will be one of the main challenges, with the need to calculate a score for at-risk customers (churn). In other cases, an appetite score for a particular product or service may prove relevant to help sales teams optimise their sales funnel and shorten sales cycles.
For many companies with a customer service department, a loyalty score can be a good idea for understanding which contacts are «worth keeping» and therefore on whom investing in customer relationships would be relevant. Thus, a score combining the frequency of premium payments, the use of the online customer area, and responsiveness to email campaigns will allow for targeting the most profitable customers.
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Automate marketing campaigns
Collecting customer data across the entire journey, unifying and reprocessing this data within a single database offers numerous advantages. But a Customer Data Platform truly fulfils its potential when, after all the work of collection, unification, reprocessing, and segmentation is done, the data is activated to generate truly relevant cross-channel marketing campaigns.
Thanks to the integration of a marketing automation module, the CDP will be able to trigger actions automatically according to advanced business rules. Customer knowledge and segmentation enabled by CDPs will, within the framework of a tailor-made CDP like Smartprofile, be able to deploy triggers corresponding to business rules derived from a customer journey modelling.
Depending on customer profiles and their journeys, cross-channel sequences will be used to engage prospects or customers across all journeys and via the most suitable channel (for the contact or context).
One of the most obvious examples for converting a prospect who suddenly stops in their tracks is the abandoned basket. The items in the basket and the abandonment information will be collected by the CDP (via a Web Analytics module, for example) and an email will be automatically sent to those who abandoned it to encourage them to complete their purchase. This email can be personalised based on the customer's profile, the product not purchased, etc.
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Personalising the real-time experience
In an omni-channel context where your prospects expect truly relevant offers and communications from you, it is necessary to have live data to refine your knowledge of your contacts at the precise moment and provide you with the maximum amount of information about their context. The processing of live data from your customers' journeys is the key to a truly personalised and engaging experience.
By leveraging data from online behaviours (website or app browsing, clicks, campaign reactions), CDPs are becoming more effective. However, for this to work, it’s necessary to integrate this data in real-time with a web analytics module natively integrated with your CDP. Very few CDPs offer this kind of functionality; in France, for example, there is only one solution that integrates a true web analytics solution to enable the display of personalised content on a website or in an email campaign in real-time: Smartprofile.
In the services sector, this type of feature could be relevant for a prospect who regularly consults pages related to cybersecurity. They would see adapted content on the website and receive a personalised newsletter on this topic.
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Optimise marketing pressure
Too much communication kills communication… Overexposure to marketing messages harms the customer experience. A CDP allows for control of marketing pressure by integrating frequency and prioritisation rules based on the type of communication or customer profile.
The added value of a CDP is its ability to centralise all activations across all channels, thereby controlling the number of communications received by contacts. Because a VIP customer can become disengaged due to an excessive volume of communications, it is important to maintain a clear overview and automate the implementation of a threshold to know when to «interrupt» non-essential communications.
An approach can also consist not in suspending communication but rather in mixing the type of interaction. Thus A customer who has already received two promotional emails this week does not receive a third, but instead receives editorial content or a customer testimonial to vary the approach.
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Improve campaign management
To activate campaigns and effectively manage sales pressure, these are the promises of your Customer Data Platform. But once your campaigns are launched, part of their success will lie in your ability to adjust and «fine-tune» them. Was the message right, was the target well-thought-out beforehand, is the cadence of my sequence relevant?
With a CDP, marketing departments have a consolidated and cross-functional view of their performance across all outbound campaigns for a contact or a segment. The ability to perform A/B testing, modify targeting, and adjust in real-time remains a central element for optimising the performance of your campaigns. But there is no optimisation without reporting and insights on your campaigns. A CDP like Smartprofile offers dozens of reports allowing you to track the real-time performance of all your interactions.
So you will be able to, why not Analyse the revenue generated by segment, identify the most successful channel for each prospect type and calculate the real-time lifetime value.
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Strengthen GDPR compliance and digital sovereignty
With the significant increase in data within your ecosystem, the governance of your marketing data is becoming a real challenge. In parallel, French and European laws, directives, and standards require better tracking of customer data, but also, and above all, the consent of each of your contacts regarding the processing of their data.
Even if one's first thought is consent related to campaigns, consent management goes far beyond simple logging of opt-ins and opt-outs in a database.
CDPs enable you to manage compliance, in addition to data, by allowing you to track and trace interactions, secure data, and also very finely manage all of your contacts' consents and preferences.
It is important to centralise consents but also to feed them back to the different tools in the ecosystem that manage interactions with them. A customer. Therefore, if a customer withdraws their consent to receive newsletters, this information must be transferred back to the CMS tool that manages consent at the back-office level of an internet application.
With a CDP like Smartprofile, developed in France, companies benefit from sovereign and GDPR-compliant hosting.
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Enriching data with AI
A modern CDP doesn't just aggregate data; it intelligently analyses it via machine learning algorithms. And that is indeed one of the added values of such a solution: to increase the information you have about your contacts.
Once the data has been collected, it is transformed into information, and it is at this point that the data takes on its full meaning, when it becomes actionable insight. However, in many cases, the data is insufficient or incomplete to allow for action, which is why enriching data through AI algorithms can offer real added value.
A company may not have information on the date of birth or sex of its contacts. This is because forms often only ask for a first name, a surname and an email address. However, this information, which allows a contact to be classified according to their age or gender, can be a real asset in messages sent to contacts.
AI algorithms allow tracing a score for the age and sex of contacts based on their first name, which will be a real advantage for the company's future campaigns.
Conclusion
The Customer Data Platform is much more than a data consolidation tool: it's a strategic lever that transforms data into a performance driver.
CDPs are now the best allies for marketing departments to address their challenges in terms of acquiring new customers, developing Life Time Value, or retention. It is notably thanks to integrated solutions that associate CDP, marketing automation, and web analytics that companies will be able, among other things, to:
- obtain a reliable 360° view of customers
- launch more relevant campaigns
- personalise learning paths
- while remaining compliant with GDPR and guaranteeing digital sovereignty
The issue of data sovereignty remains a point too often overlooked, and it is important to consider your data governance and your CDP's ability to support you in complying with the requirements of GDPR and Data Privacy. In this context, the choice of a European solution or, even better, one made in France, such as Smartprofile seems wiser than ever!
👉 To learn more about the definition and role of a Customer Data Platform, read our pillar article on the Customer Data Platform
