5 Ways to optimize omnichannel marketing with a CDP

Customers nowadays interact with brands using diverse mediums. An omnichannel marketing approach helps businesses map out the increasingly complex customer journey. Omnichannel marketing with a customer data platform (CDP) is a way to understand how the consumer’s varying modes of brand interaction intertwine and form the customer’s overall experience. Learn how you can integrate a CDP into your campaign to create more accurate customer profiles.

What is omnichannel marketing?

The modern customer uses multiple channels when browsing or shopping for their favorite brands. The channels include social media, email, apps, and more. It also includes offline methods like in-store visits and transactions.

An omnichannel marketing strategy seeks to bring the data from these varying sources together to truly understand customer behavior and create more effective sales funnels. Why is this important? If the data from each of these sources stay siloed, it creates disjointed data that can lead to negative customer experiences.

Why omnichannel marketing matters

Let’s say Jane interacts with her favorite brand, ABC Cosmetics, using a variety of channels. She’s an email subscriber. She also follows the company on various social media outlets, not to mention she shops using the company’s mobile app. One day, Jane makes a purchase through the mobile app. However, since the data sets aren’t integrated, the system fails to pick up on this. Several days later, Jane receives an email providing a coupon code for the same item she purchased just days earlier. Naturally, Jane is angry (bad customer experience) because she purchased the product at full price. 

Had the data sets been unified, the email system would have detected Jane’s purchase via the app. Instead of sending her a coupon code for the same product, it could have sent her a coupon for a related product, creating the prospect for an upsell.

What is a customer data platform, and why is it key to omnichannel success?

A customer data platform collects information from varying data sources and integrates them into a single dashboard and analytics table where they can be analyzed side-by-side. CDPs come with a suite of tools and features, such as:

• Data reporting in real time
• Automatic conversion of data from Excel sheet to graph, or vice versa
• Data filtering
• Continuously updated security to prevent data breaches
• One-click data summary report maker

You already have a data warehouse. Why not leverage and build around it? With Lytics, you don’t have to maintain two databases. You can ensure security and privacy through a modular approach, a reverse ETL capacity, and delivery of business-specific personalization.

The Lytics next-generation composable CDP consists of the following products:

• Lytics Conductor builds omnichannel customer profiles (C360) that unify and aggregate all customer touchpoints from everywhere—and in a private and security data warehouse.
• Leveraging composability into CDP accelerates speed through discovery. With Lytics Cloud Connect you can find those customers in a segmented process with direct queries.
• The Lytics Decision Engine provides real-time customer tracking intelligence for actionable insights, including providing product recommendations—with real-time personalization and customer scoring.

For Lytics customers, this means unified, enriched, and actionable data to inform the right campaigns, deliver the right messages, and reach the right customers across any channel or device of choice.

Download Customer Data Platforms 101: A Marketer’s Guide for a detailed analysis of a CDP and how it benefits businesses across all industries. 

How to maximize omnichannel marketing with a CDP

The following are best practices for using a CDP to maximize your omnichannel marketing and streamlining the otherwise time and labor-intensive process.

1. Only unify relevant data

Just because a CDP can unify data doesn’t mean you should indiscriminately pile all data together. Identify the data that’s relevant to your campaign and filter out the rest. When creating a sales funnel, for example, behavioral data, such as social media use and browsing habits, may be more relevant than identity data, which includes information like age, gender, and phone number. The more data you filter, the more precise analytics you get in return. 

2. Identify high-value channels

Not all channels are created equal. Your CDP will identify where customers spend most of their time when interacting with your brand. They may be active on five channels but spend 80% of the time on one of these outlets. This is where you want to invest your time and money.

3. Prioritize first-party data

If you use both first-party and third-party data, keep them separate when plugging the data into your CDP to analyze real-time metrics. The former should be your primary go-to data, while third-party data should be treated as supplementary and more generalized information. Use first-party data to map out the customer journey and create personalized campaigns.

4. A/B test whenever possible

Marketing success largely comes down to trial and error. Perform A/B testing at every opportunity to identify what your customers respond best to. Areas you can conduct split-testing include:

• Email subject lines 
• Calls to action and anchor texts
• Landing page layouts
• Promotional offers

With a CDP, analyze the results side-by-side. This will help you fine-tune your messaging and create more conversion-optimized sales funnels and customer journeys. 

5. Take advantage of the automation features

Why does a CDP matter? For starters, it saves you time by automating much of the process. Milk the automation features to cut back on manual processes and cut down on time spent on menial tasks. Once you have a CDP set up, make it a priority to identify the automation tools and determine how to integrate them into your daily analytics.