So you’ve identified the right CDP for you and you’re committed to personalization…
Now what?
Once you have the technology, how do you use it to drive business results? How do you go from where you are today to true 1:1 personalization?
The answers lie in data unification, segmentation, behavioral scoring, AI, maching learning, and a long-term commitment to personalized marketing. Here are the five steps our clients take on their journeys to incredible ROI through personalization as outlined in our free personalization guide:
1. Unify your data.
Before you can start personalizing your marketing, you need quality, unified data, and you need it in real time. Because how can you personalize to Chad’s needs if you don’t know what Chad likes, how he behaves, what he buys, and what he’s frustrated by? How can you help Lin find content he likes if you don’t know what content he likes? How can you keep Lucy from churning if you don’t know what makes her tick?
It only makes sense that before you start personalizing, you need data.
And not just data: the right data.
Data that tells you more than what gender or age group a person is in, but also what offers they respond to, what content they have an affinity for, what purchases they’ve made. Data, in other words, that can help you help them.
And so the first step toward personalization is identifying that data you have, digging it out of whatever silos it currently lives in, and getting it into your CDP. It’s cleaning that data up so that different formats can feed into a unified profile. It’s making decisions about things like naming conventions and whether you’ll use Alaska or AK, Hawaii or HI.
Before you start doing anything else, make sure you’ve got the right data flowing into the system. Data itself isn’t the point (your business goals are), but is the foundation on which you’ll build toward those business goals.
2. Launch your first campaign, powered by behavioral scores and predictive models.
Use your CDP’s behavioral scoring to identify customers based on their behavior and target them for appropriate campaigns.
(And if you don’t have behavioral scoring? Your CDP is not set up for personalization and you should get out now. See the full guide to find out why it matters.)
If your goal is customer engagement, use behavioral scores to identify people whose engagement is waning and target them with special offers or content designed to bring them back.
If your goal is finding new customers that look like your best customers, use the scores and a data model to identify your best customers and create lookalike audiences in Facebook.
And if you’re focused on reducing shopping cart abandonment or churn? Predictive insights can identify the tactics, ads, offers, and strategies most likely to result in a purchase or bring back a customer once they’ve already walked away.
There are so many ways you can use behavioral data and predictive models to drive real business results. And once you have your data unified, that’s the time to start brainstorming. Start with your end goals in mind and work backward from there. Then use your CDP to power the campaigns that help you reach your goals.
3. Segment customers to drive results.
Use your CDP’s segmentation tools to target campaigns at the customers most likely to engage with them. If you choose the right CDP, you should be able to segment based on customer behavior, interests, demographic data, location, activity, etc.
Want to target users who’ve purchased sneakers from you in the past or send ads to anonymous visitors who look like your best customers? With the right CDP, it should be quick and easy. Looking for users in a specific geographic area to market an event to? No problem. Want to send an email to customers who used to purchase monthly and have dropped off? Your CDP should be well-equipped for the task.
And with a tool like Lytics, you can both add segments and subtract them. This means you can target your best customers—adding them to your list—and then pull out the sub-segment of those customers who’ve already purchased the product you’re showcasing. This means wasting less budget and time on customers who’ve already done the thing you want them to do, and it means not annoying—or even losing—your best customers over ads that aren’t relevant.
And with 42% of customers saying un-personalized content is annoying and 66% of those saying it would stop them from making a purchase? Being able to segment and sub-segment in a smart way is table stakes.
4. Leverage machine learning and AI for 1:1 personalization at scale.
Here’s an important truth about personalization: Marketers can only build so many segments before the number of segments and sub-segments becomes far too complex to manage—especially when you’re dealing with millions of customers.
This is where machine learning and AI come in.
AI sees patterns that humans simply don’t see and can’t define even with segmentation. It knows which customers are likely to buy, what experiences will get them to buy, and which products they’re probably interested in. It knows which customers are likely to disengage—and the best message and channel to try and re-engage them.
Choose a CDP with a tool like Lytics Orchestrate and you can identify more complex customer journeys and use AI to predict and power personalized experiences that move a customer toward your business goals.
5. Grow your results long-term.
The more data your CDP collects, the better its insights and predictions will become. The more your team uses it, the more you’ll see what works best and be able to implement better and better orchestrated campaigns (and see better and better results).
With a CDP like Lytics, most customers see results in 45 to 60 days. But that doesn’t mean true 1:1 personalization happens overnight. A good CDP should get better with time as more data filters in and your team learns how to best utilize it both for existing campaigns and in new applications that come up as your business and customers grow and shift.
Starting your own personalization journey?
Grab a free copy of our personalization guide, or reach out to our team anytime. We’d love to give you a demo, answer your questions, or just talk about how Lytics can support true 1:1 personalization at scale, even for businesses with millions of customers.
