As a top British daily news brand, our customer reaches 1 in 5 UK adults every day and 70% of the population each month. In 2019 it launched a tablet and smartphone app that allows users to enjoy content from the UK or Scottish editions of its daily periodicals, along with exclusive daily radio broadcasts, podcasts and videos from leading journalists. This draws 34,000 weekly users, with an impressive dwell time of 47 minutes per day.

As an enterprise organization, do you know what your customers want? What they really want? Ask a corner shop owner and they can likely tell you everything about each individual customer’s behavior, needs and desires. They will be able to make recommendations based on that customer’s buying habits and family, and confidently cater to their needs or wants. Of course, smaller businesses benefit from an emotional, invested customer relationship, but how can you create this corner shop customer experience at scale for millions or tens of millions of individual customers?

At Christmas time retailers will find they have an absolute deluge of customer data coming in. Names, email addresses, postal codes, product preferences, purchase and card details, real-time behavioral insights, delivery preferences – that’s a lot of stuff to store and process. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up in a festive jumble with money being wasted all over the shop at a time of year when profit really counts.

Throw away your old metrics! Start thinking about intention, progression and aversion

Social media, mobile devices and more accessible broadband have changed consumers’ buying habits and flipped the customer journey completely on its head. Twenty-five years ago a marketer could send a campaign and measure responses and conversions in a chronological pattern, but now customers have a plethora of platforms to choose between and can meander any which way they choose, so it’s very hard to shepherd them along a defined path.

However, marketers are still clinging to old, linear campaign metrics (sends, opens, clicks and transactions), which do not accurately measure the journey of the modern, platform-roaming consumer. The truth is that this linear mind-set is highly ineffective when it comes to measuring the success or failure of a non-linear customer journey.

BlueVenn considers delivering operational excellence through continuous improvement to be a core value. For that reason, we keep an ear to the ground to make sure we understand the common problems our customers are running up against and the functions they’d find it useful to have. Our updates are not made simply for the sake of it, they’re there to make users’ lives easier and to help them maximize their profits. BlueVenn Engage is our module designed to activate data from the Customer Data Platform, to help users to analyze and segment their customer data for perfectly targeted campaigns across every channel – and it just got better. Here’s how.

BRISTOL, England and TOURS, France, (November, 2019) 

BlueVenn, creator of a leading, award-winning Customer Data Platform (CDP), has signed an agreement with Avanci, France's most experienced multi-channel database marketing agency, to deliver its end-to-end CDP and multi-channel marketing hub to French speaking organizations in France, Switzerland and Belgium.

Under the terms of the partnership, Avanci will provide a full sales, implementation and support package to deliver BlueVenn's highly-regarded CDP technology in the agreed countries. The partnership is the first of its kind in France, with organizations set to benefit from Avanci's extensive expertise in database marketing, alongside BlueVenn's technology that provides B2C and B2B brands with a better understanding of their customers and the ability to deliver highly targeted, personalized and compliant marketing campaigns.

The Holy Grail. Originally a title given to the cup used by Christ at the last supper, which has been much sought after but never found, this term has come to represent something extremely difficult – perhaps impossible – to find or get. For many years, marketers around the globe have been attempting to realize their own Holy Grail of ‘real-time, cross-channel marketing’, yet many have failed in this quest. Now, a marketing tool has emerged that promises to make this dream a reality: the Customer Data Platform.

Data privacy is a hot topic these days, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcing stricter guidelines for the use of personal data for EU citizens and the forthcoming California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) offering stringent powers to consumers who feel that their personal data has been misused.

These data management regulations, and similar laws in countries like Australia, Japan and Brazil, are starting to put pressure on organizations to establish systems and processes that demonstrate the responsible use of customer data.

Although it faces some competition from the Scott Brinker Supergraphic, Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising’ is arguably the most awaited martech and adtech market visualization of the year. While the Supergraphic is one dimensional and doesn’t really say a lot about a product’s journey, the Hype Cycle plots the reality versus the myth of every technology wave.

Gartner is able, through its global presence and position of authority, to accurately measure the technology talking points of the moment (CDP, DMP, machine learning, etc.) and provide estimated timelines for these innovations to reach the stage where customers will start to see their maximum value. Similarly, the Hype Cycle will alert the market to anything that has hyped too far and predict its obseletion, i.e. that it will cease to be talked about and developed, before it reaches maturity.

Over the past three years, there has been a lot of confusion about what a Customer Data Platforms (CDP) can and can't do, and subsequently what benefits a CDP can bring to a company. Here are the 5 most frequently asked questions about Customer Data Platforms:

1. Can I use our home grown solution to create CDP-like benefits?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) will typically be controlled and used solely by the marketing team, so the information stored will be customer-related (contact information, customer activities/behaviors and transactions). Its raison d’être is to create a Single Customer View (SCV) by normalizing the customer data collected from marketing and operational systems across the business, and drawing together all known information about the customer into one ‘Golden Record’. During the Single Customer View creation process the CDP will cleanse the data, correct incorrect or inconsistent formatting, and merge duplicate entries. The data is also persistent, which means that it is retained indefinitely (unless required to be removed by law), including every change or process, which is then timestamped for 100% traceability.