The COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on the customer mindset. Consumers have lost jobs, savings and trust, and their shopping priorities have shifted in just three short months.
Marketers have had to get creative to find more opportunities to deliver engaging, credible, personalized experiences across the customer lifecycle to hang on to sales during the crisis, as well as to set up for success on the other side. And that often means investing in technology to speed up digital transformations.
Invest in a CDP to more quickly analyze and use customer data
One study found that 53% of organizations that excel at customer experience have said they are currently investing in a customer data platform (CDP) to centralize and organize analytics and decision-making processes across their connected channels. Even before the pandemic, CDPs had been gaining popularity in the data management sphere because of their ability to provide users with a unified view of their customers, and continuously and automatically update as new data becomes available. And the evidence is clear: better customer data means better customer segmentation, better marketing campaigns, and a greater return on investment.
If you're one of these companies ready to invest in a CDP, you know that the market is crowded and that there are a lot of customer data platforms to choose from (and many vendors claiming to offer a CDP that actually don't). So how do you go about choosing which one is right for your organization?
Clearly define your business requirements
On a basic level, CDPs function by pulling data from multiple sources, cleaning it, and organizing it in a way that makes it easily accessible and digestible by marketers to use to gain the insights needed to create successful marketing campaigns. But what else might your organization need? Depending upon the capabilities of each CDP platform, they may also have functions like advanced reporting features or predictive capabilities.
Define your requirements with a well-chosen selection of clearly defined use cases. These should include a mix of simple projects that will be your initial applications and advanced projects that will require more sophisticated capabilities. Even if you won’t get to the advanced projects right away, it’s important to make sure your system can handle them when that time comes.
Today, your requirements should include features and capabilities for:
- Identity resolution, which allows you to see how customers interact with your brand across marketing, sales and customer experience channels with a unified, 360-degree view of the customer.
- Customer segmentation, which allows you to create customized queries to analyze and create smarter customer segments, accelerate data discovery, and enable better 1:1 marketing.
- Cross-channel campaign management, which helps you Increase your marketing efficiency by enabling cross-channel marketing campaigns that blend together email, direct mail, digital, SMS, and more in one individual journey.
- Reporting and analytics, given that your CDP should be able to serve as the system of record for your organization, showing a true representation of all marketing and company results.
- System integration, which, through system connectors and APIs, ensures data from every system in your technology stack can be easily imported and managed from a single, centralized location.
- Direct mail marketing support, which allows you to build complex, segmented, direct mail marketing campaigns leveraging your full multichannel relational database, so that you can easily integrate direct mail with other high-performing channels.
QuickPivot checks all these boxes, with a quick implementation to boot
As you explore the options for meeting those requirements and assess different CDP vendors, you’ll find that the QuickPivot CDP checks all the boxes. In addition to providing all of the critical CDP features and capabilities outlined above (and more), QuickPivot's speed to implementation is another item that sets it apart from the rest of the pack.
Speed to implementation is important. As retailers start bouncing back from Spring closures and quarantine, marketers will need the best available customer data segmentation and analysis capabilities immediately in order to make the right choices for their products and businesses in the coming months, especially with holiday planning not far off. We can get you up and running with your new CDP in weeks and provide valuable insights within days.
The QuickPivot system is built with API integrations so that connections with your marketing tech stack can be made quickly and seamlessly. And our experienced team can help you migrate your campaigns and programs ensuring that they continue to perform while eliminating downtime and headaches.
In the market for a CDP? Reach out to us today to learn how QuickPivot’s customer data platform and services team can set you down the right path to not only survive this crisis but to thrive.
