The BlueVenn 2020.4 update has landed, with new Adtech and VOC integrations, enhanced reporting and improved user management controls.

Our final update of 2020 gives BlueVenn customers the chance to benefit from an exciting range of new features and improvements. Those with our new Google integration tool will be able to use our technology to better target Google Ads, whilst the new Confirmit integration has made managing surveys and survey data easier. Other improvements will enable our customers to report on, display, protect and manage their stored data more efficiently. Here are some of the 2020.4 highlights to be aware of.

Traditionally, the lion’s share of online ad spend has ended up in the pockets of two of the biggest marketing services in the world, Google and Facebook. Google Display ads, which are targeted according to web content, theme and client preferences, and Facebook ads, targeted through location, demographic and profile information, have always had above-average marketing clout, since the two services boast such a colossal reach between them.

BlueVenn has been selected by Natural Habitat Adventures, the specialist provider of high quality, sustainable nature adventures and conservation travel partner of the World Wildlife Fund. The travel group will use BlueVenn’s CDP to unify online and offline customer data, plus its analytics to gain a deeper understanding of customers, and its marketing automation tools to create personalized experiences across many channels.

Companies which collate and analyze customer data, both online and offline, have grown 16% in the last year and are more than twice as likely to significantly exceed business goals and see a strong return on investment (32% versus 14%), according to a global survey of 235 organizations with annual revenues of at least $50m.

Customer analytics have the potential to promote business profitability by surfacing insights which enable correct business decisions to be made, increasing customer revenue or reducing inefficiencies in the marketing, sales and customer service teams. Meaningful and accurate customer insights must be based on trustworthy, reliable customer data, yet most companies today are dealing with data that is incomplete, inconsistent, inaccurate, inaccessible or fragmented, resulting in business and marketing decisions being made that fail to yield the desired results.

In the best case scenario, a data science team or specific business users will spend precious time cleaning up the mess. In the worst case scenario, time is not spent cleaning the data and faulty data becomes the foundation for poor decisions. It’s not a pleasant choice!

BlueVenn, the award-winning Customer Data Platform vendor, today announced that Foxtons, London’s leading estate agency, has selected BlueVenn’s Customer Data Platform and Omnichannel Marketing Hub solution to improve its customer insights and ability to hyper-personalize the customer experience.

We’re so proud to announce that BlueVenn has won the Grand Prize and the Amazon Web Services "Get Started" Program Award at The Estée Lauder Companies’ Virtual Hackathon 2020! The Hackathon is part of Tech Day of Pink, an arm of The Estée Lauder Companies’ Breast Cancer Campaign, which calls on the global technology community to support lifesaving breast cancer research.

This year's ELC Hackathon included 821 participants, from 18 countries, submitting 92 entries, and was run as a virtual event taking place between September 24 and October 8. The event brought together technology enthusiasts, professionals and students, with the common aim of creating a piece of new or adapted technology with the potential to advance the fight against breast cancer. 

In the past 15 years, the customer journey has become a multi-platform, multi-device bonanza, with data flooding in from laptops, desktops, mobiles, tablets, TVs and smart wearable devices. Thanks to a number of tracking methods – cookies first and foremost among these – marketers have learned to follow their customers throughout the journey and tailor their offering to match their interests and preferences. But in the past 7 years, customers have started to realize that they’re sharing this data for very little return, and that it’s travelling further and faster than they could have ever imagined. All of a sudden, data privacy and protection have become very real public concerns.

The CDP Institute (CDPI) is basically THE body providing key resources for organizations that are researching Customer Data Platforms. As a vendor-neutral organization, its main aim is to act as an authority on customer data management and distribute materials or news that will help marketers to make the best use of their data. Every year the CDPI member survey is sent out in an effort to better understand the CDP buyers’ needs around customer data management.

For those that want to read the full CDP Institute Member Survey 2020 report, you can access it here, or for a summary of the key findings from the report, alongside commentary from Anthony Botibol (BlueVenn's VP of Marketing and CDP Institute Advisory Board member), read on:

In 2016, a new form of technology, christened the Customer Data Platform, started to gain a lot of attention in the marketing world for its ability to connect disparate data sources, such as a brand's CRM, email, marketing automation and eCommerce platforms, and do away with data silo issues. Essentially, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) will centralize all customer data, unify that data into a Single Customer View, and then enable you to push it to whatever execution or analysis tool needs it.

Over the years, marketers have bought, replaced and re-bought countless technologies with the aim of delivering 1-to-1 customer experiences. The different marketing platforms each help to store customer data, deliver insights to the business, and transfer the information to the marketing, sales and customer services teams, to aid their ability to deliver optimal customer experiences that drive more revenue.

The problem with acquiring new technologies, however, is that each new platform you add to your technology stack will create these silos of data, but also create silos of insights and a siloed way of executing a message or experience to the customer. When you consider that there are over 8,000+ marketing technologies to choose from (social media, content management, mobile, advertising etc), and that a marketing team may use as many as 40 tools to manage customer data, over time we've created a mass of silos everywhere.