Category: Customer Data

Acquiring a new customer is 5 to 7 times more expensive than keeping one, we all know this, but why are companies still unable to retain their customers?

The CLV or Customer Lifetime Value, is the value that your customers have for your company, and it is one of the most important calculations for a company.

In this article we will unravel the importance of using a CDP today, in order to optimize your company’s CLV, thus boosting your revenues, and achieving longer lasting relationships with your customers.

What is CLV?

The Customer Lifetime Value is a formula that determines the cost/benefit that a customer can bring to your company. With it, you can determine the appropriate expenditure to invest in marketing/advertising to reach or attract this customer. Without this metric it is impossible to draw logical marketing strategies since you would be constantly carrying out undervalued campaigns or, even worse, overvalued, that is, paying more for obtaining new customers than what they will bring you in the long term.

In order to obtain a concrete but dynamic data from your CLV, it is necessary to obtain a large amount of data and a proper treatment of it. Due to the end of Third-Party Cookies, this data must be obtained directly from your customers: the First-Party Data. Once you start collecting data from your customers, it will be necessary to store, organize and analyze it in an efficient way in order to obtain an accurate CLV. The right tool for this is an Intelligent CDP, which will allow you to do all this and more.

Strategies to improve your CLV with a CDP

How can a CDP help me improve my Customer Lifetime Value? Below we will explain some of the key strategies for a marketing team with an Intelligent CDP at their disposal. With these strategies your company will be able to make a difference with your competitors in terms of CLV.

1. Strengthen your relationship with your customers

Traditional marketing is no longer useful, the market demands strategies focused and oriented to the customer “Customer-Centric“. To really put the customer at the center, and thus strengthen your brand’s relationship with them, it is essential to know them.

Having a real-time picture of your customers, with all the data you can get unified, allows you to know them like never before. In addition to, as it is in real time you will be able to observe the effect of each of your campaigns on each customer, to know which campaigns attract them more or distance them from your brand.

2. Hypersegment your customers

With this 360-degree view of the consumer, you will be able to perform much more concrete and dynamic segmentation than you had ever imagined.

For example: you can generate market segments based on the moment in which customers are in relation to your company, added to other variables such as age, their product preferences, or their estimated average income. This way you will group your customers according to their interest in receiving this month’s newsletter, or in the case of doing more than one newsletter, you will know which one to send to each group of customers.

3. Personalize their experience

Having this 360 picture we will be able to personalize the experiences, something fundamental nowadays. There are too many companies in the market offering a similar product to yours, and therefore, the customer needs you to provide a different experience with your company. Thus, personalization becomes crucial for that customer to decide to buy your product/service instead of that of your competitor.

For example: if two customers do not want the same thing from your company, one buying a product online and the other in the physical store, do not send discounts for your e-commerce to the one who wants to go to the store. Simply show him/her the new products and offer him/her a discount in the physical store through email marketing, so that he/she gets what he/she wants from your brand.

4. Optimize your marketing strategies

Marketing strategies are determined by the CLV, and therefore a detailed and accurate analysis of the CLV will allow your company to optimize these strategies. This way your marketing strategies will have an efficient budget that will boost your ROI since the tendency will always be to receive revenues above the costs of the campaign.

In addition, a CDP will help you to optimize these campaigns, avoiding unnecessary expenses or even losing customers due to invasive or excessive advertising. With campaigns measured to the millimeter as a CDP allows you to know the effect of the campaign on each customer, thus being able to predict the result with the help of AI/ML, and knowing the expenditure that you should or can make.

WHY FLYDE?

Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.

Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.

Demand Forecasting has always been a crucial technique for companies in order to predict future situations, helping on inventory and production issues and to set up prices. The problem with demand forecasting has always been the same: you would never be able to have a certain answer, as you are predicting future scenarios.

However, current advances in technology and the progression of AI, have enabled companies to raise the percentage of this forecast to unprecedented numbers (over 90%). Although this is an important improvement, the greatest change isn’t the raise of the percentage that comes from the possibility to analyze much more factors than before but on the possibility to know the exact percentage of preciseness of that forecast, making companies able to know the exact possibility of a forecast to be correct and knowing how much to depend on it.

How has technology improved predictions so much?

Traditionally forecasting was done manually by companies, just by taking a clever guess over the historial sales, this wasn’t a forecast, but a guess. Nowadays the data obtained by companies is much larger, and this data can be stored and used in thousands of different ways obtaining companies great actionable insights.

The unification of huge sizes of information brought up a new problem: people where unable to read it and create insights from it in an efficient way. So Artificial Intelligence was created with the ability to read that information and simplify it for those teams. The use of AI over data enables precise predictions, and also the preciseness of those predictions. This preciseness would depend on the amount of data and the quality of it. For a company to become Data-driven it is crucial to be able to store and use wisely every single piece of data available.

Why is Demand Forecasting so useful?

1. Inventory and production efficiency boost

Stock issues have always been a problem for retail companies, as we have seen before demand forecasting has been done for many years, but in an unaccurate way. From now on, this could change radically as AI is enabling automated forecasting, which would help solving stock problems. With AI companies would be able to predict the amount of sells for each product to control their inventory and production as ever imagined, boosting their efficiency and saving large amounts of capital.

2. Setting up prices

Setting up prices has always been a complicated task for companies as it is not only a matter of trying to balance your numbers, it is fundamental to understand the demand of a product in order to set up prices, depending on the channel’s and product’s demand. This could be done with a demand forecast driven by data and AI.

Demand forecasting is another one of FLYDE’s possibilities

This solutions seem quite far away for medium companies as most of them tend to not be Data-Driven as big multinationals are. But there has been a radical change in the market, the entrance of FLYDE the Intelligent CDP easy-to-use, makes this technology approachable by any company (sector or size), and, most important, each team could have the control over the action driven by this platform.

FLYDE gives the possibility to companies to unify all of their customers data to exploit it in thousands of different ways. One of them is the Demand Forecasting which could be done through channels, products, product categories, or even by earnings. This different categories also give the possibility to be mixed within them to make as we have seen before the most precise forecast of the demand possible.

WHY FLYDE?

Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.

Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.

Summer is here! A really nice season for people, but a tough one for many companies that are willing to maintain the loyalty of their customers during a few months of changes in habits.

In this blog we will explain the possibilities that any company has access to in 2022, at a technological level, to know their customers in depth and thus achieve unimaginable levels of Customer Engagement and Experience, even during the summer months.

Know your customer

It is becoming increasingly important to know your customer, as this is the key factor that will distinguish you from your competitors. In today’s world, companies have available huge amounts of customer data: tastes, preferences, socio-demographic data, everything the company needs to improve its realtionship with customers.

But all this data needs to be actioned. There is no point in having access to huge amounts of customer data if your company is not able to use it. In this way, you will get a 360-degree view of each customer, which will allow you to offer them a unique experience compared to your competitors.

Get ahead of the game!

If you are able to unify all this data, with the use of technological tools such as a CDP, you will be able to put this data to good use. With these actionable insights obtained, your company would be ahead of your customer’s movements.

By taking the data on your customer’s behaviour over the last few years in summer, added to the data on the last purchases of this customer, and the level of engagement they have at this specific moment with your brand; you will be able to anticipate with an extremely high percentage of accuracy, the behaviour that this customer will have in summer.

So you can see if in July they tend to disconnect from certain social networks like Linkedin, and start to focus on others like Instagram, which will make you intuit that they are on holiday and therefore the emails you send them will remain unread, thus losing your engagement, as your emails will start going into the spam folder.

Personalise your campaigns

This brings us to the fundamental point that every company knows nowadays, but they don’t take it to the limit they could with the right tools: hyperpersonalisation. In 2022 we are all aware that our customers demand personalised attention, the problem is that when it comes to locating each customer and their tastes, companies are not being able to meet expectations.

Campaigns must be targeted to each specific customer, according to their needs. It is no longer enough to know your average customer, or your Buyer Persona. Today’s Customer knowledge requires depth, requires having several Buyer Personas located and understood among your customers, and updated in real time.

If the customer is more assiduous to buy your product in holiday periods (you know because you have matched the holiday dates of the territory in which they live, with their purchases in your multiple channels), you should offer your product at the beginning of those holidays, and as we are creatures of habits and tend to take holidays on the same dates every year you can send them a reminder to buy, or a discount on a product that interests them (based on their last purchases), in their first days of holiday.

WHY FLYDE?

Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.

Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.

A key moment for all retail companies is the markets expansion either with physical shops or with marketing campaigns in new areas. This is the moment when the company must decide between all the expansion possibilities it has, it is often difficult to know what to base this decision on.

At FLYDE we recommend you to avoid taking these important decisions based on intuition or convenience, but rather driving your decisions on your data, thus optimising the results.

Unify all your data

To make the most out of this data, you must be able to collect it, store it in a safe place, and structure it so it can be useful later. All this is possible with the use of an Intelligent CDP. Your data, and the data you have from your multiple sources (RR.SS., CRM, Excels, etc.), you can unify it in FLYDE, and add all the socio-demographic and market data, to obtain a much broader picture of your customers.

This 3rd party data that you can add with the use of an Intelligent CDP, will enrich your data in a very remarkable way. The addition of external data to the company, such as the average income level in a neighbourhood, or the type of homes that predominate in it (first homes, second homes, etc.), will allow your company to have an enriched picture of your customers.

Obtain a 360º view of your customers

With this wide range of data unified in one platform, you will be able to obtain hyper-detailed profiles of your customers in order to segment them later. So, if in your database you have Jhon, who lives in Queens, the customer profile you have will show you the sum of characteristics of this specific neighbourhood so that you can then segment those customers to find patterns of behaviour among them.

If you have a fast food chain, and John is your regular customer, you will be able to compare him with the rest of your regular customers, and find similarities. Once you have found the similarities between regular customers (income, type of housing, shopping hours), you can generate an audience with this customer profile, and then target campaigns to this type of customers.

Geomarketing

Whith the use of FLYDE, apart from the 360º vision you have of your consumers, you can also find different forecasting models, thanks to Machine Learning, which will allow your company to boost profits.

One of these tools is Geomarketing, a tool that will allow your company to relate your customer to their geographical area, and obtain all the necessary information for future marketing campaigns. Thus, all the aforementioned data can be visualised and collated on a map of the market in which your company operates, and FLYDE Brain (FLYDE’s ML tool) will provide you with exhaustive data processing.

Continuing with the example of the fast food chain, when the time comes for your company to expand (open a new restaurant), you will be able to compare your current customers with the characteristics of potential customers in areas with similarities, and FLYDE Brain will recommend you to expand into the most suitable area for your business, according to your potential customers location.

WHY FLYDE?

Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.

Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.

CDP or Customer Data Platform market is growing exponentially. Once you have understood the utility of a CDP you may start to think on implementing a CDP in your company. However, how would you be able to know which CDP best suits your company? To solve this question we have developed a list with the main aspects that will help you make this important decision.

1. Do I need a CDP in my company?

Modern companies, no matter their size or sector, generate a massive quantity of data, both from its online and offline customers and channels. The problem of the majority of the companies is that they don’t use this data properly and, therefore, a complete or partial lack of knowledge of their customers and their behaviours.

A CDP helps companies unlock the full value of their customers in a very simple way: by unifying, collating and analysing all of their data from a single platform, enabling a complete understanding of their customers.

It is therefore an essential tool for any company that generates a large volume of data, is not getting the most out of it and needs to have a solid and complete customer database.

2. Is my data safe in a CDP?

The majority of the CDP offer a large list of guarantees, in terms of data-protection. However, they tend tto limit their data protection to the legislation of the region where it is settled, so it is always better to choose a CDP that comes from a territory with strong legislation in this area.

The United States, and especially Europe, have the most advanced legislation in terms of data protection, so it is always preferable to opt for a CDP from a company that comes from these territories bearing in mind that, in addition, if the CDP is European, it will guarantee compliance with the most advanced and secure data protection regulation on the market.

Not only that, at FLYDE we also offer you full internal control over data governance so that you can define which users have permission to which data, among other features.

3. Which functionalities should I look at in a CDP?

Every CDP should have the minimum requirement covered. However there are many functionalities that may vary in between the different CDPs.

Firstly, it is essential that the CDP fits with the expectations of your business. That is, thanks to the platform and its functionalities, meeting the objectives of the different areas is simple and can be done in a coordinated way between departments. For this, there are two fundamental points: analyse the tools available (more info about FLYDE Apps) and the ease of use of the platform. To make sure that the platform is what you are looking for, we recommend you to make a DEMO, this way you will ensure that anyone in your team can use it and you will see the platform in operation with real data.

Other functionalities that would make a big change in between the different CDPs is the use of Artificial Intelligence in the platform. The AI is the future when crossed over with huge quantities of Data and it would suppose a radical change to your customer comprehension.

Finally, other important features to look for in a CDP are those that are aligned to your business and objectives.

For example, if you have a loyalty programme, you will probably be interested in having a Dynamic Scoring. If you have an eCommerce with online and offline customers, a Single Customer View with a 360-degree view of the customer, or if you work taking into account KPIs by geographic area, a Geomarketing tool.

4. Could I integrate the different apps my company uses in the CDP?

As we have mentioned previously, a key feature of CDP’s is the ability to unify your company’s data in a single platform. A Customer Data Platform enables your company to integrate every single app used in order to unify all of your data. From Social Media to CSV files, through Shopify or the CRM your company is using, a CDP allows you to integrate all of these data sources to look at and analyse all of that data on a single platform.

Is it fundamental when choosing a CDP to look at the number of integrations available? Definitely not as long as the CDP provider offers to integrate your existing applications even if they are not in their current portfolio of integrations.

5. How much does a CDP cost?

We know that price when choosing a CDP, as well as in any other platform, is crucial. There is a huge range of prices in the CDP market depending on different characteristics that define each company.

One of the most important is the need for the support of a technical team or Data Scientist. This will make the CDP more expensive, as the more complex the CDP is to use, the higher the costs of its implementation and subsequent use will be.

The price is also influenced by whether you have technical services, the amount of functionalities you hire or the use of data, among other factors. Due to all these variable factors there is no fixed price range. Our recommendation is that you contact us and discover all the possibilities through a demo or a free trial.

Why FLYDE?

Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.

Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.

Have you ever stopped to think about how much data your company has access to? Transactional, demographic, behavioral data… Anonymous data such as impressions, data on customer purchases or cancellations, etc. In short, huge amounts of very valuable information. 

The main problem is to use them properly, as confirmed by the study conducted by Rethink Data, which shows that 68% of the data generated by companies is not used. This is due to their storage in silos, the fact that they are treated in isolation and with tools that are independent of each other, which makes it difficult to create correlations between them, favors the loss of information and involves a much more costly and complex process for your company. 

In an ideal situation, therefore, all this data would be collected, stored and processed on a single platform. This is where CDPs come into play. Here’s what they are and what benefits they can offer your company.

What is a CDP

According to the CDP Institute, a CDP or Customer Data Platform is “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that can be accessed by other systems“.

In other words, an ecosystem in which customer data is collected from different sources and unified into a single database. The data is cleansed, enriched and transformed into a complete customer profile that can then be used to generate audiences and/or made available to other systems in order to create more personalized campaigns and strategies with data updated in real time. 

To understand it in a simpler way, here is an example: Imagine that your company is going to launch a campaign and needs to know its customers well. With your CDP you would collect the information available at all points of contact (own data, social networks or email, among others), clean and unify that data and create an easily understandable 360 profile. And not only that. Once the profiles have been created, you could segment them by audiences to work with those that are most suitable to your objectives and export them to other platforms, such as Facebook Ads or Mailchimp. All in a fast, automated and easy way.

What benefits can a CDP bring to your company

1. They offer a unique view of the customer

This type of platforms are designed to collect data from different sources, unify them and offer a concrete and very complete profile of the customer. Much more than any other tool.

2. Better customer experience

Users are using more and more channels and devices. We have also become more demanding, demanding unified experiences across all channels. Having all the information available on the same platform allows us to know the customer and their behavior in depth. This makes it much easier to design personalized strategies that build customer loyalty, and to change and improve them according to the actions they take.

3. Democratize data

Customer data plays a role in all areas of a company: from marketing to customer service, to IT, and so on. Therefore, its use and exchange becomes indispensable when it comes to driving a business forward. With a CDP, all information is updated and available to all departments of the company, avoiding dependencies, data loss and streamlining processes between areas.

4. Allows to be more competitive and to be more responsive

Knowing the customer in depth is key to create strategies and campaigns without blind spots, which are a success. With a CDP you get this and you can also react to changes in the market since the data is collected in real time. Your information will always be up to date. 

5. Greater agility and efficiency

As we mentioned before, one of the biggest problems in data processing is the use of different independent tools, which in turn causes a great fragmentation of data that makes it very difficult to work with them. A CDP solves this problem since it centralizes all these data in the same place, the changes in them are available and can be used later in those tools that are necessary, whatever the area, minimizing duplications and saving time. 

With FLYDE you get this and much more

FLYDE allows you to know in detail the customer, predict behaviors and analyze data in real time in an agile way, without bottlenecks and thanks to a system based on AI. In addition, any user can use it without any technical knowledge.