BlueVenn, the award-winning Customer Data Platform and Omnichannel Marketing Hub vendor, has been chosen by Voluntary Service Overseas, a not-for-profit organisation and the world's leading development charity fighting poverty through volunteers, to help the organization achieve its mission through a better understanding of its database and improved targeting of supporters to maximize revenue and donations.

By the CDP Institute’s RealCDP definition, a true Customer Data Platform must be able to ingest data from any source, capture the full detail of that data and retain it indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints), create a unified profile of an identified individual (that is, a Single Customer View or SCV), and share that profile with any system that needs it. This sounds like a marketer’s dream – but doesn’t guarantee that marketers will be able to access and leverage that data to gain insights, enrich the customer profile, and meet regulatory obligations. For that, an added user interface is needed.

A use case is a statement of what a marketer wants to get out of a project, system or platform. Whether they work for a single or multi-brand retailer, if the business operates on at least two channels, marketers are going to face these use cases as the Top 5 requirements for a Customer Data Platform (CDP):

A core focus for the 2020.1 release of BlueVenn Engage centers on the official release of a new, embedded email editor and email marketing engine. This new email marketing module enables BlueVenn users to design, personalize and execute email campaigns and triggered messages directly from BlueVenn, thus removing the need to work in multiple platforms.

For our multi-brand and multi-national clients, we’ve also enabled new channel security features in BlueVenn Engage that ensure marketing teams working with multiple brands can manage the various data caches and campaigns and keep them separate within one system.

Finally, we’ve made some enhancements to the real-time engine for triggered campaigns, along with a host of other performance updates.

When it comes to data protection, a storm has long been brewing. First came worries about Alexa eavesdropping in people’s homes and recording conversations (in November 2018 a New Hampshire judge ruled that audio captured in the home of a murder victim could be used as evidence in court). Then the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal broke, with data harvested off people’s Facebook accounts being used to drive political advertising, potentially affecting the U.S. election result. Consumers’ growing concern has led to harsh new data protection regulations – GDPR came into force in Europe on 25th May 2018, then the California Consumer Privacy Act became effective in the state on 1st January 2020.

There’s a lot of hype these days about omnichannel marketing and the importance of crafting a consistent customer experience across every platform. The fact is, though, that all channels are NOT equal when it comes to customer engagement. According to industry analysts Gartner, an Adobe 2018 Consumer Email Survey found that 50% of consumers named email marketing as their preferred brand communications platform, compared with a maximum of 20% who said they preferred any other channel.

Every marketer wants to be doing real-time, cross-channel personalized marketing, but achieving this goal has traditionally been difficult with marketing automation platforms. Now it’s finally possible!

Confused about Customer Data Platforms and how they can benefit your marketing strategies and campaigns? Well, you’re not alone! A new Winterberry Group report holds the answers you need. It clarifies what should be regarded as the core capabilities of a CDP, which capabilities are ‘nice to have’, and what strengths are exhibited by various categories of the technology. It also gives an overview of the market and where it’s headed. Learn more about what defines a CDP in the extract below, or download the full report here.

Customer journeys don’t come down to a single touch point. Customers control how they interact with you and may engage a number of times before a purchase. Single touch attribution doesn’t account for the full scope of the customer journey and attribute revenue appropriately. Multi touch attribution, when used effectively, allows the marketer to turn insights into profitable changes to the customer journey.

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.