These past few weeks have given Customer Data Platforms a lot of press in the marketing technology world following the announcements from the three big marketing clouds that they will be adding CDP-like components to their “integrated” cloud solutions.

The first announcement came on March 25th with the U-turn from Salesforce, having previously debunked the CDP as "a passing FAD" in 2018. Although it's great that Salesforce now recognizes the importance of unifying customer data, the article focuses more on the existing activation and execution tools that it has acquired over the years. 

Poor quality data is the result of numerous errors that can progressively ruin the success of your marketing campaigns. In fact, according to IDG, poor data quality is one of the modern marketer’s biggest concerns, with 66% of those polled declaring data quality and accuracy as a “top priority”. 

Inaccurate names, addresses and contact details, along with duplicate records and decayed information, will distort your view of a customer, resulting in poor campaign results and inaccurate insights. Worse still, it creates a bad experience for your customers whereby they either miss out on a specific offer, are targeted wrongly or receive the same message multiple times.

When calculated correctly, Customer Lifetime Value is possibly the most commercially valuable insight at the disposal of the marketing team. However, if calculated wrongly it can be a fast-track way to wreck marketing effectiveness and destroy a business!

An accurate view of Lifetime Value can be used as a primary measurement to predict an individual's potential value to the business and to track the success or failure at each step of the customer's journey in obtaining that potential value.

A question that I’ve started to get asked a lot recently is whether Master Data Management (MDM) and a Customer Data Platform (CDP) are interchangeable. More specifically, if you have a Master Data Management system in the business, can it be used to deliver the same results as a Customer Data Platform? And if not, then why is a CDP different to an MDM solution?

To answer this you really need to think about the fact that MDM is a discipline and a set of processes to transform organization-wide data. However, a CDP is a packaged software product with a specific purpose to deliver a single view of the customer from multiple data sources that marketing can use for improved personalization of marketing campaigns.

The chance to see into the future and know how much a customer is going to spend with you is an opportunity that no business would ever turn down. Unfortunately, without any time-traveling DeLoreans, crystal balls (or an incredible discovery by a quantum physicist) this isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

The closest thing that we have to a crystal ball in marketing is predictive analytics – a technique that is much older than you might think, with origins that go back as far as the 1940s. 

Bristol, (UK) and Raleigh, NC (US) - Jan. 17, 2019

Park Group plc, the UK’s leading provider of prepaid gift cards, multi-retailer gift vouchers and digital rewards services, has selected the BlueVenn Marketing Hub to enhance its multi-channel marketing and real-time personalization capabilities.

• Park Group will use the advanced analytics and marketing automation capabilities of BlueVenn for targeted, multi-channel marketing.
  
  
• The platform will enable cross channel personalization by integrating email, mobile, direct mail and SMS marketing channels.

In a really interesting new research piece in November from Gartner called ‘Distilling Marketer Adoption, Views and Misperceptions of Customer Data Platforms’ it showed the results from a survey to 504 marketers, whereby 51% of respondents claimed that their CDP was their CRM system.

As the report states, “this misperception of a CDP as a CRM solution reflects a lack of appreciation for the advantages that many CDPs have over heritage CRM applications. These include scale, profile unification, segmentation and connection to marketing systems.”

As anyone familiar with Scott Brinker’s annual Marketing Technology Landscape ‘supergraphic’ will know, it can be challenging to keep up with new technologies – particularly with the proliferation of buzzwords, acronyms, and with many vendors in different categories claiming to have similar functionality.

In 2014 ‘Big Data’ was a buzzword that caught the marketing world, but has faded away to nothing more than an ambiguous term that really only defines the storage of lots of structured and unstructured data.

Last week a customer told me "you can’t serve a customer you don’t understand, and you can’t understand a customer without knowing their behavior". Now there is nothing controversial about this statement and I think that most marketing professionals would agree. But although these principles are central for marketers to provide a personalized and omnichannel customer experience, it doesn’t mean they are necessarily doing everything they can to adhere to them.

Most marketers would agree that creating targeted campaigns based on clean, deduplicated customer data is a highly effective way of improving your marketing efforts. But when you ask the average marketer what their biggest problems are, you can be sure that a lack of clean, useable data will be nearly always be at the top of their list.