Different customer data platforms have sprung up. Which ones will help you discover customer personas from the data you have.
Creating customer personas can be an essential part of any eCommerce business because they define your valuable audiences yet are cheaper to engage. By understanding your customers’ needs and wants, you can create a product or service that meets their needs and increases sales. You will use a persona to craft customer experiences. But what is the best way to create customer personas? Use a Customer Data Platform (CDP) because the software can give you much meaning. This article will discuss the benefits of using a CDP for customer persona creation and the type of CDPs available.
Marketers seek these data-driven customer personas because they need even better personalization in their interactions with their customers. Reputable consultants BCG reports that 40% of consumers are more likely to spend more than they had planned when experiences are highly personalized to them.
Types of Customer Data Platforms
Different marketing teams attack the problems that will most accelerate their business objectives. Asas a result, there are three different types of customer data platforms, each with its strengths that have emerged.
Engagement CDP
Engagement CDPs suggest specific, personalized marketing or sales actions to deliver to each customer across different channels. You will often hear about an omnichannel marketing strategy where a CDP operates. Many brands want to tailor customer engagements from customized emails, notifications, or other messages and recommended products or multimedia content. Advertisers will often include direct mail as a converting channel.
The sky’s the limit for possibilities for marketing and sales activities adapted for each person. Engagements may still consume the actionable customer insights of analytical CDPs, but the focus again is on the individualized customer journey maps and many channels to carry it out.
Orchestration CDP
As if all that weren’t enough, some CDPs can even perform the role of a delivery system. Sometimes Delivery CDPs or Orchestration CDP focuses on activating a content distribution system. Instead of relying on an external system to put the suggested customer interactions into practice, they can send emails, app notifications, messages on websites, implement advertising campaigns on websites and search engines.
Again, the array of possibilities is almost unlimited as to what these types of CDPs could theoretically deliver if connected to the right system as intended.
Analytical and AI CDP
Some CDPs who can analyze data will, in general, be able to store data and create a customer database, too. They also include other data analysis tools, of course, but not all of them are CDPs if they can’t create a unified, 360° view of the customer because they don’t include customer data from other channels. This point is often confusing for smaller businesses that use new email automation tools as a CDP.
The Analytical AI, Customer Data Platform architecture, can segment customers into groups or for each individual giving you deeper knowledge into the buyer you were never able to get before. Create a customer journey map to follow the consumer’s route before and after buying- and get hard hints on what the customer will pay more for. Perform revenue attribution to match each sale to the specific marketing campaign to get that inside performance. Some of these Analytical and AI CDPs can use machine learning to apply predictive modeling and predict how customers will behave next based on past behavior.
Analytical and AI CDPs help you understand your customer and segment them for optimized value. In software, personas work differently than customer segments. It gives you another degree to group customer segments and look at groups. Personas are an excellent way to unify your marketing efforts across different segments. AI also allows you to cut down on segmenting potential customers and evaluating valuable target audiences.
How to get Personas from Data
Practical uses of personas insights can result in great efficiencies and growth opportunities. Improve search engine optimization with keyword suggestions on why they buy from you. Because your audiences think in different terms and prefer using different devices, you may need personas to help categorize optimal keywords.
Marketers want to increase conversion rates by offering personalized product recommendations tailored to each individual’s taste preferences, needs, and budget. So, where do you get the data for the analysis? CDPs can connect 1rst party data, which is information you get directly from customers through forms and surveys. 2nd party data is from where you share data with a partner or adjacent group that can augment your understanding with demographic characteristics tied to the customer profile. Finally, you can pull leverage 3rd party data to get more insights into the customers. Marketers can easily collect over a hundred attributes on a single customer profile.
With AI clustering, when marketers have many attributes to describe the customers, they can evaluate which attributes are important or impactful. The attributes themselves may not make sense when you put them together, but they can be correct. Your data scientist may have to help.
