Here is the fourth article about the features of a CDP, to discover together how the heart of the Contactlab Marketing Cloud is a data management platform. Now, it’s time to talk about Advanced Segmentation.

You have collected your contact details in real-time from all your sources, and automatically integrated them into individual profiles. You’ve collated and organized them, are keeping them up to date, and you are elaborating and enriching the data to foresee future behavior. Now let’s start looking at segmenting your contacts for marketing activities.

Choose who talk to and what to tell them

Once upon a time there were mailing lists… an indistinct set of email addresses. The greatest dream of a marketing manager was to be able to get the email addresses of their customers and prospects, mainly to send generic messages at any time of the day. Undifferentiated communications, fast and immediate, which had the advantage of reaching very large audiences while limiting costs. And still today, it is a valid marketing lever, both alone and included in a mix of activities, which is aimed at reaching the market… above all, relying on, for example, new channels such as the web and social media.

But your contacts are not all the same. For sure they are all valuable, but they do not have the same characteristics, or the same needs, or even recognize your brand in the same way. To get straight to their hearts, you have to raise engagement to a personal level and talk to each one individually.

You decide who to address and how. Choose the filters you prefer to apply to any data set, and in just a few clicks, tell them exactly what they want to hear. The more you narrow down the segment, or the more you refine it, the more effective your activities will be. In this way, customer satisfaction increases and with it, the perception of your brand’s interest, competence and reliability.

Starting from the profiles you have created, segmentation helps you optimize the individual communication activities, leading to a higher ROI and perhaps, in the quickest possible way.

Obviously, such an approach – one-to-one – is not always required. The situation, timing, methods and requirements of every occasion determine its real need. But when your goal is the customer, their care and engagement in the first person, the choice must fall on advanced segmentation.

Advanced Segmentation

Many analysts say that a positive customer experience has become the real competitive advantage, and that this human factor is the variable brands should always keep under control.

Segmentation tools provide valid support to live tailored experiences. But they must be ready for use, intuitive, simple, immediate and:

• Deliver results in real-time.
• Do not need any technical ability.
• Be integrated with the customer base that is being worked on.
• Allow immediate use of the data, including by external systems.

In this way, it is possible to start from the characteristics and needs of each contact, then combine them with the aims of your brand to build customer plans or journeys, which in turn become lasting and profitable relationships for both.

When it comes to campaign audiences, the options that are typically open to a marketeer include:

Basic segmentation: Mainly focused on socio-demographic variables such as age, country, level of education, sex and date of birth, or on data relating to a newsletter subscription, the frequency of deliveries and similar. This information is easily available through, for example, profiling forms or preference choices, typically given in exchange for a gift or a discount to the customer.

Behavioral segmentation: Comes from the actions carried out, or not, by customers and the brand. You need to listen, pick up the signals, constantly monitor the points of contact and make sure you don’t miss anything. Attention can be paid to email openings and clicks, site navigation, store presence … to discover new needs and define strategies.

Predictive segmentation: By applying algorithms and KPIs, you arrive at information that helps you understand the value of customers to your brand. Knowing if a customer is at risk of churn, or if they will continue to be a top spender, is particularly useful in, for example, remarketing campaigns. You can identify clusters to whom to target timely actions, including automatic ones.

As you move from basic to predictive segmentation:

• The level of content customization, timing and channel choice significantly increase in importance.
• The opportunities to create effective experiences or journeys increase.
• The satisfaction of your customers explodes, opening the doors to new business opportunities.

Segmentation does not only mean creating a target

Many brands insist that refined segmentation tools are also useful for exploring their contact base. Before you even create communication segments, you can take advantage of what you have – data, technology and industry knowledge – to discover your customers. By adopting new filters to the results, combining existing segments or temporally correlating events, you can obtain valuable information incredibly quickly – to decide upon the activities to be undertaken and positively influence the future of your business.

The opportunities offered by micro-segmentation can be endless. Let’s think about distribution policies, for example. Apparently, they have little to do with customers but, understanding where major purchases take place, which products are the most sought after and when interest in your brand is at its maximum, allows you to organize distribution in a more accurate and informed way, in the points of sale and on various channels. And this is just one example.

Obviously, the segmentation tools are not magic. For results to be valid, the data that you query must be correct, up to date and of high quality, whatever the objective.

The benefits from advanced segmentation

• Design differentiated and tailored campaigns.
• Improve the customer experience.
• Create engagement, trust and loyalty.
• Establish lasting individual relationships.
• Discover your customer base.
• Make more informed business decisions.
• …

All of this while being fully compliant with GDPR.

And now?

Contact us. Contactlab can provide you with the best experts. Experts who understand how to use the tools you are looking for, to address your contacts with activities designed just for them, in the most targeted and valuable way you have ever considered.

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Discover the CDP series!

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Welcome to the third article in the CDP series. Here, the focus is Data Enrichment, which is important because:

• It is one of the fundamental characteristics of a CDP platform.
• Any data loses its value if it is not used, updated, or even worse, abandoned.
• You can discover new information about contacts that is invisible at first sight, but becomes apparent as the result of elaborations, increasing knowledge and enhancing relationships.

Data Enrichment

There are several definitions of what Data Enrichment means exactly. But the factor they all have in common, and that we like to highlight, is attention to the quality of data.

The collection and integration of all the data to create unified profiles is extremely important. But its constant enrichment is just as crucial. The profile of each customer must be unique and dynamic to ensure maximum quality.

Enrichment can be carried out in two ways:

1. The update: Capture any new information arriving through the customer contact channels and integrate it in the profile, so that the most recent data is always available.
2. The elaboration: Make use of tools that provide access to a new intelligence. Tools that are capable of processing customer data to know them better, predict their potential and anticipate their behavior.

The update

Every day, customers perform various actions. Wherever they are and whatever they do, they leave fingerprints: The web pages they visit, the apps they use, the shops they buy from, the purchases they make… A huge amount of data that translates into valuable information about them and their behavior. Information that you daren’t miss, which you have to seize to create that individual and personalized dialogue with the customer… The attention that everyone wants from brands during their journeys. Attention that should start even before they realize the need for a product or service.

You need to equip yourself with the tools that are always ready and alert on all customer contact channels, and that collect all new data in real-time, as it is generated. And to overcome potential obsolescence, you need to keep the data as clean and up-to-date as possible.

The elaboration

To transform raw data into tangible insights, it is no longer enough to collect and use it as it is collected. We need to get inside it, associate it with each other, and find out if it can tell you something new about your customers. Thanks to the application of algorithms and predictive models to the data you have, you get information that is otherwise not immediately available. You can automatically create clusters that enrich the profile of each contact, and indicate current and potential future behavior. You can even go further and identify audience look-alikes, to target similar groups – but this will be the subject of another article.

Email Intelligence & Customer Engagement

Email Engagement Clusters monitor the success of your email campaigns and identify how interested your contacts are to follow you on this channel. You can get a precise picture of the audiences’ behavior following your communications, and arrive at the data related to each individual customer. You can, for example, then put activities aimed at improving the performance of your deliveries into practice, and help your customers move in the direction you want.

Attribution Model. There are two ways to measure the impact of communications on a customer’s purchasing behavior. The first, called direct attribution, mostly applies to the world of e-commerce. It helps you understand which purchases derive from links in sent messages, thanks to tracking. In this regard, there are also guidelines to follow when creating successful emails. A second, indirect attribution, employs an easy-to-apply but more sophisticated model, that enables you to know, in a defined time frame, if someone has had the opportunity to open the email, close it and proceed at a later time to purchase, on your site or in your store. In this way, you can access additional data about each customer and provide valuable information for setting up individual and personalized marketing strategies, building automated journeys to support them – with the aim of increasing in your brand and business, as a result.

Customer Purchase Insights

Recency Frequency Monetary (RFM) measures the current value of a customer, starting from online and in-store purchases. You can recognize behavioral patterns of purchases, by considering:

• Recency: When the last purchase was made.
• Frequency: How often the customer buys.
• Monetary: How much the customer has spent so far.

In this way you can, for example, identify customers at risk of churn and, as a result, tailor the appropriate retention strategies. You can also determine which customers may buy more, be influenced by upsell activities, or be the most loyal – the Top Customers, who need very special care.

Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) automatically and autonomously identifies unique clusters that are defined on the basis of different information, and not just limited to purchasing activity. For example, they can take into account personal data or even the mix of products purchased. Thanks to neural networks, it is then possible to translate the identified clusters into personas. As a result, you may find that some of your customers have very well defined common characteristics, and start from here to plan and manage an effective marketing strategy.

Predictive Customer Foresights

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) predicts the future purchase behavior of your customers and the likelihood of churn, based on online and in-store transaction data. You can anticipate what your income will be, find out how many customers will still be with you in 6 month’s time, what their spending level will be next year, if your current top spenders will remain so in the future, and much more. All this allows you to interpret each one’s change of status and differentiate contact plans accordingly, providing customized paths that match their behavior.

It is clear that it is a real challenge to enrich the data by elaboration. And it is even clearer that the result of the various elaborations depends on the quality of the starting point – that is, on how much data is collected, collated and up-to-date. If the information used is incorrect, incomplete or obsolete, every effort to get to know your customer better to anticipate and foresee the future, becomes pointless.

The benefits from profile enrichment

Enrichment means above all, the addition of quality. Some of the immediately achievable benefits include:

• Always up-to-date profiles.
• Availability of processed information that is not visible at first sight.
• Greater customization of customer relations.
• Better segmentation and effective audience creation.
• Automated, targeted and multi-channel journeys.
• The best overall customer experience.
• Discovery of new possible business areas.
• Identification of possible churn problems on which to intervene.

In other words, Data Enrichment means transforming data into a true value and making it a strategic lever, while always remaining in compliance with GDPR legislation.

And now?

Contact us and discover the commitment that Contactlab makes in providing the best tools and expertise, in order to discover and learn more about your contacts – and allow you to elevate your efforts from just Customer Engagement to Engagement Intelligence… enabling you to carry out marketing activities and much, much more, which are highly targeted, individually personalized and increasingly aware.

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Discover the CDP series!

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If the heart of the Marketing Cloud is a Customer Data Platform (CDP), the heart of a CDP is the data. And when it comes to customer engagement projects, the data in question is customer data, in all its forms:

• Simple or elaborate.
• Narrative or predictive.
• Demographic or behavioral.
• Contextual.
• …

Data enables knowledge. Getting to know customers more deeply – by linking information with the context in which it is given – allows brands to implement personalized and effective marketing strategies, both in terms of customer relations and business… and much, much more.

Data collection & profile unification

Here is the second article in the series dedicated to CDP, in which we take a look at the first aspect that characterizes a customer data platform solution: The creation of a single profile for each contact… one which integrates all the information about individual customers in a single point, and then makes it available in real-time to all the company systems that require it.

Data collection & profile unification can be summarized in three fundamental features:

1. Simple and quick data collection from multiple independent sources.
2. The organization of data in the optimum way, and according to the needs of marketeers.
3. The management of anonymous – navigation – events for a limited period.

Once the unique profile is created – a 360° customer profile – we must then add two other essential factors: Updates and enrichment, and the availability to activate as part of planned automations. We will see them in action in the following sections.

The integration of data sources

The way in which data is collected, organized and integrated has changed, for reasons of efficiency, time and cost.

We are moving:

• From an ad hoc integration of each data source and application, with profiles and events spread throughout the ecosystem, to:
• A real-time integration through APIs and plug-ins into a single profile.

Let’s try, for example, to put ourselves in the shoes of a company that needs to build automated journeys, where the path that each contact will take depends on their characteristics, behavior and actions, or lack of them… or on the activities that the brand will undertake.

Let’s imagine this brand has more than one system that manages customer data, and everyone involved works by caring only for their own areas of interest. Invoicing, dispatch and shipment, e-commerce, transactions in-store… not to mention, for example, personal data and consents, call center activities, newsletters and various forms, marketing communication campaigns and so on.

We can immediately see that each of these systems uses and stores valuable customer information. Details that are essential to the success of journeys. Only constant and continuous sharing with other systems allows a complete knowledge of all data.

And sometimes, even sharing is not enough. Technology is needed that is capable of managing:

• The sharing of data distributed in separate, apparently independent silos.
• This huge amount of data, organizing it to result in a single identity for each customer.

Once a key for matching individual customers has been identified, the multiple profiles of a single contact that are present in various systems – as if they were different people – are brought together in a single point, then enriched and reused in real-time, by the systems themselves.

Let’s follow the steps by going back to the three features of Data Collection & Profile Unification.

Organize the data

Decide the data format, its structure and aggregation.

• We identify the properties that make up a customer’s profile.
• We draw up the list of enabled events to assign to the customer.
• We customize the rules and priorities with which to aggregate multiple profiles, to bring them back to a single integrated one.
• We define the logical containers with which to organize the data.
• We enable data sources to write and/or read data.

Collect the data

Decide the most appropriate way to collect data, depending on the systems that have to interface with each other. We can leverage:

• A rich set of APIs to collect demographic data and events, from every type of application and/or technology.
• Client ad hoc developments, thanks to a range of SDKs covering the most common programming languages for servers, mobile environments and the web.
• JavaScript to use directly in a website.
• Third party focused plug-ins to facilitate integration and reduce costs.

Reconcile the data

In addition to managing data associated with recognized customers, we also save anonymous events while waiting the customer to be recognized. We then associate them with the correct profile through a process called automatic reconciliation, when the customer identifies themselves through, for example, registering or signing in.

The benefits of automatic integration

Any action performed by a contact generates data. Every interaction they have with brands, translates into a growing and distributed mosaic of information. The Marketing Cloud allows you to transform all that data into knowledge, thanks to:

• A single customer view with profiles updated in real-time.
• Data available in one place that is immediately actionable.
• Reduced data processing time and increased speed in retrieving information.
• Reduced integration and management costs.
• Reconciliation of anonymous events at a later stage.
• Compliance with legislation such as GDPR.

Resulting in personalized customer engagement activities with a significant and very positive business impact.

And now?

Contact us to discover the combination of a Customer Data Platform and Professional Services that are capable of supporting you throughout the adoption process. Offer your company the opportunity to have something extra and very special!

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Discover the CDP series!

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A new series, just for you

Today, we’ll start with a series of articles that will reveal the heart ❤ of the Marketing Cloud: The Customer Data Platform by Contactlab. A comprehensive set of features that provides all the tools you need to get to know your customers, discover their behavior and communicate with them through tailor-made activities – all while guaranteeing compliance with GDPR legislation.

A platform that results in Contactlab being among the main vendors in Gartner‘s first CDP market guide, and to be the only Italian company recognized by the CDP Institute.

Why a CDP?

A single, 360° view of every customer is the dream of all brands. A single point of unique, individual and integrated profiles, where you can find the whole story – the past, the present and why not? the future – ready to apply immediately.

• Demographic data.
• Transactional data related to online and in-store purchases.
• Website browsing history.
• Event data such as clicks, downloads, abandoned carts and similar.
• Data on support requests.
• Predictive behavioral data.
• …

We hear a lot about it… Data and data management – the basis of customer data – is the foundation of successful marketing activities.

By knowing your client in depth, you can build and implement marketing strategies that are personalized, automated and differentiated for each individual customer.

That is why we need a Customer Data Platform… A solution that can:

1. COLLECT DATA and UNIFY PROFILES… Collect data that is distributed on different systems and contact channels, then integrate them in unique, individual profiles, updated in real-time and readily accessible.

2. ENRICH DATA… Enrich profiles with new information that results from elaborating upon actions and habits, predicting future behavior, thanks to algorithms and Machine Learning techniques.

3. Provide ADVANCED SEGMENTATION… Query all data quickly, without technical skills, to identify dynamic targets and create segments, including historical behavioral data and future forecasts.

4. Be ACTIVE… Always make the data available to all the company systems that require it, to optimize the customer journey and make unforgettable experiences live.

Immediate benefits from using a CDP

The benefits derived from the adoption of a CDP are many, different and varied. Not only to those who deal with marketing, but also those who have to make decisions based on data, deploy such technologies, or work with a brand’s IT. But above all, it is your customers who can make the most of the opportunities, and live the experiences that are purpose-built for them.

• Personalization of the relationships between brands and customers: The most appropriate content, at the most opportune moment, on the preferred channels.
• Automatic Customer Journeys: Flows that take shape according to the actions taken, following individual paths.
• Consistency on all channels: A widespread presence, which always meets the expectations of increasingly demanding customers who are used to moving between a variety of contact channels, both online and offline, during the same purchasing process.
• Data quality: Unique integration keys to avoid unnecessary duplication, activating new marketing initiatives and making strategic decisions at all company levels, in an ever more conscious way.
• Resources optimization: Availability of information in real-time, reduction of data collection and management costs, simplicity of integration.
• Data uniformity: Integrated in unique, individual data profiles that are distributed and managed by different company systems as if they were information silos – remote from each other both physically and for the roles that they perform.

And now?

Call us now and discover just what the platform can do for your company.

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Discover the CDP series!

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