Category: Marketing

Christmas can be the toughest or happiest time of the year for marketeers. The time when sales boost or not showing your marketing’s strengths or weaknesess.

In this blog we are not going to tell you how to become a millionaire nor are we going to explain how to easily become a Christmas hero, our sole purpose is to explain how using data you can drive a proper Christmas marketing strategy.

Data-driven marketing

Base your strategy on data and not intuition. Make sure your KPIs are SMART, can be mapped correctly with the tools you have, and make sure you are not missing key customer data.

At Christmas in particular knowing your customers would be fundamental to drive one-to-one marketing strategies, basic data is fine, but if you have a lot more available use it:

You can track your customer across all your online channels. This will help you to map their Customer Journey. If you already have a tagging tool such as FLYDE’s, then you may be interested to know that you can unify this data with offline data (from physical shops or offline marketing campaigns), and in turn with socio-demographic data, thus obtaining a 360-degree view of your customer.

First-Party Data Strategy

This data is known as first-party data, and you should start using it, firstly, because of the loss of third-party cookies, and secondly, because of the amount of data and possibilities you are missing out on.

Of those data sources we discussed, the spectrum is even greater. Not only is it essential to collect data from all sources, but going one step further in the data you collect can make a fundamental change to your strategy.

By collecting attitudinal and behavioural data, such as the number of times a customer looks at a product before buying it, or their interest in the themes of your offline and online campaigns, or whether they buy for themselves or as a gift (depending on the variability of sizes they are looking for). You will be able to enrich this customer database in order to generate campaigns and strategies that are not based on intuition but on data, thus avoiding failures or recriminations to the marketing team.

Platform to obtain Actionable Insights from first-party data

All this data must come together to bring value to your company, without this unification the data lacks the real value it can achieve. To do this, there is a type of platform that surpasses CRM because it not only allows you to store basic data but also allows you to store large volumes of data or Big Data, and to act on them within the platform itself with Artificial Intelligence processes. This Platform is a Customer Data Platform.

All this will allow your company to have all this structured data, to segment, personalise and predict with countless variables. As we have previously explained, 360º customer profiles open up these new possibilities.

Customer data platform for Christmas

And back to the initial question, how can I save my Christmas campaign with this CDP stuff? You can’t, a CDP doesn’t do magic, nor does Big Data or Artificial Intelligence despite what it seems lately with the boom of this technology.

A CDP or Customer Data Platform is not going to do marketing for you, what it will do is become the fundamental support for your company. Because as we have been seeing for a few years now, the customer must be at the centre of every company, and without a CDP this is not really possible.

So a marketing team that has all the data at its fingertips will be a marketing team that will no longer ask itself why this campaign didn’t work and the previous one did? With data you will get certainty.

You will be able to make predictions about the type of campaign that will work at any given time of the year based on how each campaign has affected your customers. So if I want to launch a campaign at Christmas, I will be able to compare by type of campaign and by date, with those previously carried out, to see the expected performance based on the data; a calculation that increases exponentially its accuracy and simplicity if you have a predictive model like the ones FLYDE has available.

Later, once you have launched the campaign in your CDP, you will be able to track your KPIs and compare them to see where the success or failure has been, where there has been a change with respect to the previous one, what to improve and what to maintain. As we have said throughout the article, a CDP is not going to do marketing for you, but it can help you stop making mistakes and start relying on data.

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 maximize 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.

2022 has been a key year for Customer Data Platforms. According to data provided by Deloitte, high growth brands are leading this change, with 61% moving to a first-party data strategy, while just 41% of low-growth brands are doing so.

The prohibition of third-party cookies and the obligation to use own data or customers who demand increasingly personalized experiences are some of the reasons that have driven this growth, which is expected to continue in 2023. 

But what else can we expect? Here are 4 trends that will shape CDPs in 2023: 

1. Increased adoption of CDPs by companies

Omnichannel strategies

The arrival of COVID-19, the new ways of buying (ROPO, Showrooming), or the constant raise of online buying, are some of the causes of the increased need of companies to develop omnichannel strategies, in order to unify their channels and their customer data through the whole brand.

Customers demand a better customer experience

Communication and generalized customer treatment is a thing of the past. Customer experience has positioned itself as a key factor for customers to stay with a brand or abandon it to the point where 86% of consumers would be willing to pay more if it meant a better and more personalized customer experience.

Obtaining relevant insights from Customer Data

Personalization and digital transformation also means receiving much larger amounts of data from our customers. Therefore, it becomes necessary to have a system that stores, organizes and processes data properly.

2. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) concept takes hold and is divided into subcategories.

While it is true that there are markets such as the U.S. where this type of platform is already well established, there are others where CDPs are just beginning to gain momentum.

At the moment, according to the CDP Institute’s Member Survey 2022, more than 60% of clients understand that the main functionalities of this type of platform are unified views of clients and the loading of data from different sources.

The year 2023 is expected to serve as a turning point and leave behind doubts about what these platforms are, what they do and how they can help a company. In the same way, it is estimated that a greater expansion of the knowledge of these platforms and their benefits will help the implementation in companies to understand how they can fit them into their MarTech strategies.

It is also expected that vendors will begin to differentiate into subcategories (pure data, analytics and campaigns) to help customers quickly identify capabilities and benefits.

3. Increased concern for data privacy

41% of consumers globally say their trust in digital service providers’ ability to keep personal data secure has decreased. By storing data in a Platform regulated under the strict GDPR protection will ensure a much safer environment for Customer’s Data.

We know how important it is to protect your customers’ data. That’s why at FLYDE we comply with legal and data protection obligations. You can find out how here.

4. Easy to use CDP platforms

The complexity of analyzing large amounts of data from different sources and processing them has made most of the CDP platforms on the market very technical. While it is true that there are companies with large IT teams, we can also find others in which the burden of these actions falls on teams with little technical knowledge that make it very difficult to use these tools properly.

Some suppliers are opting to facilitate some of the tools that make up their platforms, although there is still a long way to go as these changes require time and investment. However, it is still important: CDP platforms are becoming more and more transversal to all company departments. Sharing unified profiles, sharing data, cross-referencing and processing them in real time or generating strategies from them are just some of the common processes that we can find in any company on a daily basis.

For this reason, marketing and sales professionals, among other departments, are looking for greater autonomy when generating campaigns, cross-referencing data, etc., and thus avoiding funnels and waiting times.

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 maximize 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 Customer Data Platform is a global platform so many departments from many sectors can benefit from it. In fact every single department of the company Customer-Related will end up making the most of it.

As many different departments would use it, it is crucial for it to be accessible. This is why an easy-to-use CDP is vital for a company to be able to become Customer-Centric. Start taking control of your Data.

Customer-Centric Data-Driven Companies

Becoming Customer-Centric is a priority for companies, as U.S. companies lose $136.8 billion per year due to avoidable consumer switching. The current competition for market share has become more fierce than ever before, and the need to become omni-channel, forced companies who were willing to become Customer-Centric to be Data-Driven, in order to understand such amounts of Customers Data.

This is where Customer Data Platforms fit into place. A Customer Data Platform is a Platform where you store and unify all of your customers data (1st, 2nd, and 3rd Party Data), and with the use of AI/ML obtain actionable insights, from your customer’s 360 profile.

We would next see the different benefits a CDP would provide to the different departments of a company:

Marketing Teams

• 360 Profile: unifying customer data in one platform and in real time, enables a complete customer profile, that can be afterward compared with the rest of customers/potential customers to obtain insights.
• Hyper Segmentation: the unification of basic, behavioral, attitudinal, and socio-demographic data would enable a level of segmentation never seen before. Segmenting by buying habits for example (ROPO, Showrooming, etc.).
• Personalization: with the 360 profiling of customers your company could start personalizing campaigns according to each customers needs (Personalized newsletters, emails, content in Social Media depending on your customers segment presence, etc.).
• Predictive models on the efficiency of each campaign on each customer: a CDP will help your company on predicting tendencies with AI/ML. One thing your marketing team could do is by adding up your past campaigns to your 360 customers profile, predict the future campaigns efficiency, by types of campaigns and by customers likes.
• Buyer Personas in real time: having your customer data unified and constantly renewing would enable a constant buyer persona of each product, or a picture of the personal characteristics of the preferred customer for each product.
• Omni-channel Customer Journeys: each channel of communication works different, but customers demand a full unified experience from brands. You would be able to track the customer journey through channels to activate a personalized omni-channel experience
• Forget about Third-Party Cookies: a tagging functionality in a CDP would help you track each individual customer through your website and add this information to their 360 profile.
• Geomarketing: unifying 3rd Party-Data (Socio-demographic) allow the 360 profile to be much more detailed. With this you would be able to see the differences between neighborhoods, seeking for the one that matches the most with your buyer persona, ML algorithms would help you on this task, in order to show you the best neighborhoods to sell each product.
• Dynamic Scoring: model that gives a rating from 1 to 10 of each individual’s customer engagement in real time, to see how campaigns are affecting them or the point they are at with your company in terms of engagement.
• Orchestrate campaigns: get the insights from your customers and afterword the CDP would enable you to orchestrate campaigns by sending this audiences, segments or profiles on to your different tools (email marketing, Social Media, advertising group, etc.).

Sales Teams

• Personalized Contact: contacting via email or phone with customers or potential customers is really tough but it would definitely be easier if your sales team had a 360 Profile (with the unification of 1st 2nd and 3rd party data) to have all of the information from your customer (behavioral, attitudinal, basic, etc.) while you do phone sales.

Logistic Operators

• Demand forecast models: being able to predict the demand with efficiency rates over a 95% would avoid stock outs.

Directors

• Full reports easy to read: in the same platform and with all of the data and insights obtained before you would be able to extract reports, graphs, and summaries of how your company is performing in terms of customer experience.
• Demand forecast models: know a year before the total demand your company would have in order to organize properly financially.

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.

It seems obvious that an economic downturn is coming. How does this affect on Marketing strategies, and what can those marketing teams do to minimize the damages of an economic downturn?

In this article we would explain how through the correct use of Customer Data you could optimize your resources in order to minimize damages of an economic downturn.

Current Situation

After the global pandemic, the war and at the high inflation rates that western countries are facing, it seems quite obvious that we are facing an economic contraction. We are quite experienced with this type of situation after 2008, but our current possibilities to face it are different from those we had in 2008.

Today, we have new solutions that could help our company be one of those companies that suffer the least out of the recession. The adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data helps every department of companies to develop data-driven strategies, really useful especially in time where your company would need to gain efficiency against your competitors. The problem comes for those companies that aren’t yet implementing this type of solutions, as their techniques are becoming obsoletes.

In this article we will focus on the main problems and possible solutions that a Marketing team could be facing in this situation.

How does an economic downturn affect marketing teams?

Budget Cuts

When economic contractions start, companies tend to lower down each department’s budget, but as seen always, marketing budget tends to be the most affected one. When the marketing budget is noticeably cut your strategies would surely suffer, and what is more important, your customers tend to realize this, which would end resulting on loosing customers.

Lack of purchasing power from customers

Economic recessions affect on every single member of the society and your customers would not escape from it. Your customers won’t be able to continue spending as before and they would start choosing more wisely where to spend their money. Competence would start becoming more fierce as the demand would decrease, so your ability to overcome your competitors must be better than ever.

Higher prices for resources

Inflation, and specially in the current situation, raises up the prices paid by your company to produce goods or services. So margins become much smaller, and marketing gets much more complicated, offers and discounts need to be measured to the nearest, and prices can’t raise up for a weaker experience as customers would notice and leave your company for your competitors.

Loosing Customers

It’s the moment where you lose customers and it’s 7 times more expensive to gain a new customer than to retain one. As we have seen in the points described before, loosing customers is a typical thing in economic downturns, this can suppose a complete breakdown to a company as loosing customers is the most expensive matter for a company.

The need for companies to retain customers and gain unhappy customers from their competitors goes through boosting your marketing efficiency, and your customer experience, in order to lead the market in an uncertain moment.

How can marketing teams face economic downturns?

Know where to cut off by knowing your customers

Cuts in budget are going to happen, the crucial point resides in knowing where to make those cuts so that customers don’t realize it. With the use of an Intelligent CDP you would be able to track your customers journey to know where and what they expect from your company. With this analysis done you would be able to cut off just the thing you where doing and that affected the least to your customers.

Stock management with demand forecast to optimize resources

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence bring unlimited opportunities for companies. Your company could start to know and understand your customer to the extent of being able to forecast your customer’s next movement. In this way with the historical data and Machine Learning, you would be able to have predictions of demand up to a 95% or above preciseness on the demand of each product, and each customer.

With this detail of forecast you would be able to reduce to minimums losses or surpluses of stock, saving huge amounts of money for the company.

Offers and discounts depending on each individual situation

Attitudinal segmentation, know which customers are looking for offers and which ones are not in order to prioritize discounts and maintain those customers. By tracking your customers attitudinal and behavioral contacts with your company, you would be able to know if they are looking for discounts or not, in this way you would optimize your marketing strategies, and use your budget more wisely.

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.

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.

Obtaining good results from marketing campaigns is becoming increasingly difficult due to the hyper-saturation of advertising and messages that customers receive. Therefore, your company must be able to differenciate and offer unique experiences, both to your current and your potential customers.

FLYDE offers you the possibility of improving your campaigns in a very simple way with its hyper-segmentation and personalisation tools, with which you can give each customer what they want and when they want.

Unify all your data to get a 360° view of your customers

Obtaining a 360-degree view of your customer is vital nowadays in order to be able to draw up an effective strategy. To know your customer completely, it is essential to be able to unify all the data to which you have access and join it to the socio-demographic data of the market in question.

In this way, you will obtain an extremely detailed profile of each one of your customers on the same platform.

Hyper-segmentation is the key

Once you have a detailed picture of your customers, you can start to hyper-segment according to the characteristics you want. Thus, you can segment by the type of contact your customers have with your brand, by their preferences when it comes to buying your products or by the vital characteristics of those customers (income level, number of people they live with, etc.), among many other options.

This form of segmentation will allow your company to understand hyper-specific details, what each customer wants and how each marketing campaign you carry out affects them.

Define specific audiences

Once you have done this hyper segmentation, you can generate audiences of those characteristics or segmentations that you find most interesting or combine several. With them, you will be able to create highly targeted email marketing or telemarketing campaigns, as well as refining your social media segmentation or your offers through your sales channels.

All this process, moreover, will be accompanied by the constant support of Artificial Intelligence, which will offer you details that the human eye cannot perceive. Thanks to its data processing capabilities, it will help you, among other things, to predict behaviour based on the habits of your customers so that you can act in advance of possible changes in the market.

Create campaigns based on the preferences and lifestyles of your customers.

These campaigns must be personalised because that is what customers demand in 2022. To achieve a real personalisation of your campaigns you must cover three fundamental aspects, which you must unify in a platform such as FLYDE:

1. 360 Knowledge of your customers (What they want, how often they want it and how they want it).
2. Knowledge on how your previous campaigns have affected customers and potential customers.
3. Generate different types of content, respecting your brand, but targeting each type of customer.

Max and John do not want the same thing and, therefore, it does not make sense to offer them the same product. If John is a regular customer (he buys every month in your physical shop) and, having the data from all your channels unified, you realise that before buying in shop he visits your website to see what’s new, the product you offer him on the Home page of your website must match his likes and shopping habits.

How do I make my campaigns stand out to my customers and not bore them?

Email marketing continues to be one of the most widely used actions today. As much as an 87% of marketing teams use this type of strategy to promote products and content. These campaigns can be based on sending newsletters or reminders to recover abandoned carts, as well as many other examples depending on the sector or the company’s preferences.

Even so, the average email open rate is quite low, at around 20.80%. In other words, 79 out of 100 emails are never read. Why does this happen? The problem that many companies face is the lack of adequate tools that allow them to know the customer fully. Therefore, as we have seen throughout this post, personalising and segmenting properly becomes a very complicated task that is also essential if we are looking to stand out from our competitors and reach our customers by offering them quality content that interests them.

However, with FLYDE this process becomes quick and easy. In just a few clicks, you can segment your customers on our platform and get a very detailed view of each one of them to find out what type of content they prefer and, above all, how often they want it.

With FLYDE, by applying the Dynamic Scoring, you will be able (taking into account multiple factors) to segment your customers by the likelihood of their interest on your newsletter. This way, if a customer does not want to receive your newsletter, he will not receive it, so he will not get tired of your brand, and you will not lose him definitively. On the other hand, if a customer is loyal and passionate about your brand, you can send them a greater number of emails, thus increasing their chances of buying and their engagement with your brand.

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.