Why your cloud data warehouse is the key to unified customer identities

You and other stakeholders in your company have a priority to build your customer data pipeline to improve your bottom line and boost the flow of revenue.

Without a firm sense of who your customer base is, however, you have no idea what potential sales could be for your goods or services. You also don’t have much insight into what kinds of new products, options, or add-ons your target audience is most interested in now. This can hamper future the development of your lines.

As you expand your brand in the marketplace, you’ll want to pay close attention to the data that you’re capturing.

But if the data you’re gathering on customers isn’t organized very well or if it is siloed in different systems (such as sales working from one database and the help desk having their own information), you’ll find it challenging to gain insight into customer behavior and motivations.

Perhaps you are using separate systems to gather data in different branch offices in various cities or states. You can count on some customers logging into your site (maybe some of the time, at least). But there will be other times when these same individuals use different devices such as a phone or laptop to connect, and they do not signal who they are.

It’s time to get serious about consolidating the information about these visitors and making better use of it.

With this in mind, read on for information about why your cloud data warehouse (and a customer data platform) will be crucial for unified customer identities.

Working toward a unified customer view

Marketers want to achieve a customer 360 view to better understand shoppers’ intentions and what they’re most interested in today. This involves processing information from a variety of sources, from social media posts to email inquiries to phone calls to your sales department.

You should recognize that the ongoing collection of fresh data is more valuable than simply looking at older data. Customers’ tastes and motivations change over time. You’ll want to see what’s on their minds now and how they are interacting with your brand today, and not just what they cared about in the past.

Logging their behavioral data and applying machine learning and data science to understand their intentions means you can target each customer more precisely and effectively.

Marketing smarter in a world without third-party cookies

Businesses must contend with the advent of consumers taking more control over their personal data as browsers move beyond third-party cookies.

Lytics specializes in helping businesses generate unified marketing profiles, categorizing consumers into behavioral and intent-based segments according to their current behavior online. With this approach, people are assigned an encrypted ID in exchange for their email address. Then advertisers can place ads, bidding for customer attention without while their identities stay private.

Data sources include clicks on ads, email interactions, and web page experiences customized for individual shoppers. To that end, Lytics  helps preserve shoppers’ privacy while giving companies better tools to engage with customers more effectively.

Sorting out multiple interactions—is it one customer or many?

People are accustomed to going online with whatever device is the most convenient for them at the moment. They might use voice control to speak to their smartphone to search for a product while driving, for example, and then resume the hunt an hour later at work while using their laptop.

Your customer may only log into your website from a home desktop computer, making it difficult to see that he or she also checked out your offerings from a work laptop the day before without logging into an account because their boss owns that device.

Perhaps a customer used a tablet to send an email to customer service too. Now, you have a more accurate view of this person’s interests, with partial overlaps from the email and cookies used with the home desktop computer.

Keeping an eye on shoppers’ behavior over multiple channels gives you a more comprehensive and fuller account of their interests (and how those interests may change over time, such as in response to adjustments you make on your landing page).

Connect with Lytics to achieve a unified customer view

All the data that you can collect on consumers turns into actionable insight when you have a unified customer view. When data is locked in separate silos, it’s imperative to take a different approach.

A cloud-based data warehouse is the most efficient way to collect and analyze information from customers and then make sure you have a way to resolve their individual identities. That’s where Lytics comes in. Our Cloud Connect product helps you connect all your data so it works well together — and with the rest of your tech stack.

To see the product in action, try Lytics Cloud Connect free.