Knowing your customers has always been a gold standard for eCommerce marketers. But truly understanding your customers can mean several things. From understanding habits, to building effective relationships and personalising communication across channels – effectively engaging customers is ultimately the metric by which all marketers are measured.
With so much variation in methodology and strategy, the sector has lacked a universal way of quantifying customer engagement. But what should this look like?
A new industry standard for measuring customer engagement and experience, titled the CUPID Score, has recently been launched to benchmark the key challenges for eCommerce marketers across Europe. The free assessment contains a score out of 100 followed by a breakdown of results across five key areas:
‘Convenience’ – communicating with customers at the optimum time – ‘Understanding’, ‘Personalisation’, ‘Intimacy’ and ‘Data’.
When looking at the average scores so far, there are two key challenges illustrated: customer intimacy and convenience.
Since its launch, the assessment has been taken over 500 times, with the average score sitting at 38.57 out of 100. Customer intimacy (34.83) and convenience (37.73) received the lowest average scores, with customer understanding (41.71) and data (39.74) receiving the highest. Middle of the road was personalisation, at 39.4 out of 100.
But what do these results all mean for the eCommerce world? Quite simply, they accentuate a far greater need for marketers to be able to understand and measure customer engagement. The average score is sitting way below the middle mark, with not one category reaching 50. This suggests that marketers still don’t have the necessary tools in order to excel in these areas.
CUPID’s arrow: using a CDP for precision execution
One way marketers can transform how they measure and enhance customer engagement is through embracing Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). A CDP is a centralised platform that enables businesses to deliver personalised and relevant experiences to their customers, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
CDPs act as a central source of truth and empower eCommerce marketers with analytics, optimisation tools and marketing intelligence. This provides a single customer view, through unified individual profiles, and better retention strategies, including targeted email campaigns and loyalty programs. CDPs do this by gathering customer data across all touchpoints and corners of the business — website activity, emails, social media, and even dated legacy systems like CRMs — into one platform.
CDPs also help to avoid the misuse of data by having GDPR-compliant preference centre options — controlling data consent, how it is used by the company and who has access to it — and first-party data collection via the platform.
Finally, CDPs make this data actionable by merging it into individual customer profiles which are structured into audience segments based on behaviour and preferences. This can then be accessed by departments across the business to create a more holistic and collaborative strategy.
A trusted revenue partner
Placing yourself as a trusted revenue partner for your CEO is the North Star for marketers. But the CUPID Score results show that a significant number aren’t taking on the tools available to do so. Without having access to a hub of unified data, it becomes increasingly hard to measure marketing’s ROI precisely and effectively.
It’s commonplace for marketers to spend vast amounts of time trying to prove the success of campaigns, communication outreach and predict a range of factors such as customer loyalty, churn and conversion. Through utilising a CDP, this data can be readily accessible in one place. Not only this, but through the use of AI-based guidance and predictive analysis alongside human intelligence, marketers can understand what is working, what isn’t and how their approach can be better.
This all contributes to measuring customer engagement in line with the CUPID standard and proving ROI, allowing you to scale operations accordingly, effectively use budgets, and show your CEO the value of marketing activity. In a nutshell, adopting CDPs will ultimately increase customer engagement, and their integration should be a priority for all marketers in 2023. It’s time to give the eCommerce world a CUPID makeover.
