Customer data platforms (CDPs) have become a must for many organizations by helping them organize, manage, and make sense of their customer data. But, to actually see value from that data, marketers still need to activate it across channels.
This means that marketing automation platforms are the other essential piece of delivering exceptional customer experiences that drive revenue and retention.
These platforms have been around for decades as standalone solutions. However, many CDPs have started to incorporate automation capabilities — whether by building them in-house or by acquiring other companies. This enables teams to unify their data and activate it by building and automating campaigns using just one solution.
In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits of this unified approach with real-life examples from companies that use Insider — our enterprise CDP and omnichannel automation solution.
If you’d like a detailed look at Insider, visit our website or try the platform yourself.
Customer data platforms: Set a solid foundation for effective marketing campaigns
CDPs are software solutions designed to aggregate customer data from various sources into a single database. The data sources can be both online and offline — like analytics tools, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, APIs, and PoS devices.
For example, our enterprise CDP can ingest data from any online and offline source. We have pre-built connectors for 100+ tools across 20+ categories, so teams can easily integrate the CDP with the rest of their marketing technology stack.
Today, CDPs are a must for many data-driven marketers because they solve the massive challenge of data silos. Instead of having to jump between and integrate different solutions, CDPs enable marketers to have all relevant campaign data in one convenient place.
CDPs use this data to create 360-degree customer views. These views contain everything you know about each customer — including their names, demographics, locations, phone numbers, purchases, website interactions, and much more.
If you’re working with a platform that offers AI-powered predictions, you’ll also get valuable predictive characteristics, such as likelihood to purchase, likelihood to engage on a specific channel, discount affinity, potential spending, and more.
Learn more: Everything you need to know about predictive marketing.
In short, CDPs give you the foundation for running data-driven, personalized, and high-converting marketing campaigns. Most of them also come with segmentation and analytics capabilities that help you target the right customers and analyze your results.
Marketing automation: Put your data into action
Marketing automation is a broad term that encompasses tools and techniques used to automate workflows and streamline processes. You can find automation capabilities in most marketing and sales solutions — from simple email marketing tools to CRMs, content management systems (CMSs), and omnichannel platforms.
However, for an automation strategy (or any other marketing strategy) to produce the desired results, it needs to be based on reliable data. For instance, if you’re building an automated marketing campaign aimed at driving purchases, you’ll need to base it on:
- Customers’ needs, interests, and previous purchases.
- Their preferences in terms of channels and contact times.
- The results from previous similar campaigns.
- And other data points.
As we said, CDPs excel at putting that information together in one place. This makes it possible to build automated campaigns based on the full understanding you have of each customer, without missing key information.
Here are three quick examples of companies that used data-driven automation to achieve important business goals:
- Remix: This large retail company built a three-step automated email campaign aimed at educating new leads and nurturing them to make their first purchase. These guided data-driven journeys led to a 104% increase in first purchases compared to the previous quarter.
- Picniq: This travel brand used automated WhatsApp messages and journeys to recover lost revenue from browser abandoners and generate more return customers. These campaigns helped Picniq achieve an 80% open rate and 5x ROI from their WhatsApp efforts.
- Slazenger: This sportswear brand was looking to solve key challenges like reducing cart abandonments and enticing shoppers to return back to the site. To do that, they built automated and personalized journeys across web push, email, and SMS. The result was a 49x ROI in eight weeks and 40% recovered revenue in a single campaign.
Put simply, marketing automation platforms can use the unified data that CDPs hold to deliver relevant content, messages, and product recommendations at all stages of the customer journey.
5 key benefits of using a CDP with marketing automation capabilities
Traditional Data and Analytics CDPs were primarily built to aggregate customer data, resolve omnichannel identities, and pass that data to other platforms for activation. In short, they mostly focused on use cases like data management and consolidation, without offering activation channels or marketing automation tools.
As we said earlier, newer Campaign (or Activation) CDPs change that by adding automation and personalization tools as part of their offering. In the sections below, we’ll explore five essential benefits of this consolidated approach for digital marketing teams.
Note: For a more detailed explanation of the differences between these CDP types, check our guide to the best customer data platforms on the market.
#1 Simplified martech stack
Martech bloat is among the biggest challenges facing marketers today. Between point solutions (e.g., email marketing platforms, push notification tools, messaging channels solutions, and so on), CDPs, CRMs, CMSs, and analytics platforms, teams often spend hours of their week just managing software.
Plus, they must also keep track of pricing plans and renewals, which makes the process even more time-consuming.Using a CDP with built-in marketing automation capabilities and activation channels lets you avoid that issue. For example, Insider offers an enterprise CDP in combination with a marketing automation solution for 12+ channels like web, mobile app, email, push notifications, SMS, social media ads, and more.
As a result, teams can unify their martech stack, which increases productivity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Many of our customers highlight that as the biggest benefit of working with our enterprise marketing platform.
#2 No more data silos
Data silos are a big problem for organizations using fragmented marketing stacks.
Each solution holds important data about users’ interactions, needs, and preferences and when that information isn’t unified, marketers end up working based off an incomplete picture of the customer journey. This results in campaigns that aren’t relevant to customers and produce low engagement, conversion rates, and revenue.
Traditional CDPs were built to solve this exact problem. By bringing together all that data in one place and creating 360-degree customer profiles, CDPs break down data silos to ensure you have a foundation of reliable data for your campaigns.
Modern Campaign CDPs take things further by also incorporating the channels and automation tools you need to put that data into action. This means you don’t need to send your data to third-party solutions in order to activate it.
As we said, with a platform like Insider, you can unify your data and run campaigns across 12+ channels. That way, all important data, like customer interactions, previous purchases, conversion rates, drop-offs, and much more, is in one place.
For example, NA-KD is one of the companies that experienced the benefits of this approach to marketing. Due to a fragmented tech stack, this fashion brand couldn’t utilize their customer data to its full potential. Insider enabled NA-KD’s marketing team to aggregate customer information and activate it across channels like email, web push, app push, and SMS.
This led to the creation of truly personalized campaigns and cross-channel experiences that resulted in a 25% increase in customer lifetime value (CLTV) and 72x ROI in just 12 months.
For more details, you can check out the full NA-KD case study on our site.
#3 Faster campaign creation
Slow campaign creation is another big downside of fragmented martech stacks.
Having to navigate multiple solutions, organize data flows, and rely on IT teams typically makes launching campaigns much more difficult than it needs to be. Using a CDP with marketing automation capabilities and no-code templates solves that issue.
For example, Spotlight Retail Group (SRG) is an international corporation that wanted to launch campaigns to provide unique experiences across a diverse customer base.
However, that proved difficult as their data and martech stack were fragmented. Campaign creation was heavily reliant on IT teams, so SRG had to spend a lengthy 30 days from ideation to launch.
Insider solved that problem by:
- Unifying their data and creating accurate, unified customer profiles.
- Giving SRG the tools to activate that data and automate campaigns across channels. For example, SRG’s automated website and web push product recommendations led to a 37x ROI.
- Providing real-time data and insights into campaign performance, which allowed SRG’s team to make necessary changes on the spot.
This, combined with the ability to launch campaigns without needing tech support, enabled SRG to achieve an 80% reduction in campaign launch times. For their complete story, check out the SRG case study on our site.
#4 Precise customer targeting
Customer targeting is the process of focusing on a specific group of customers to engage them with relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations. It lets you personalize your campaigns, connect with your customer base with greater precision, and maximize your marketing efforts.
Put simply, targeting the right customers is essential for any marketing campaign. However, that can be impossible to do if your customer data is scattered across multiple tools and platforms.
Again, modern Campaign CDPs make customer targeting much simpler since all the information you need is in one place. They also continuously collect new data as customers interact with your brand across your website, mobile app, emails, and messaging channels.
This means you can create automated campaigns aimed at the right audiences and optimize them over time based on customers’ evolving needs, interests, and preferences.
For example, if you have an eCommerce store, you can build automated flows that trigger messages (e.g., push notifications, emails, and so on) after users add an item to their wishlist without purchasing. This is a great way to get people back to your site or app and recover potentially lost revenue.
