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Rule The Data Democracy With An Intelligent Marketing Suite

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Raahul Seshadri, Director of Engineering, WebEngage

Having started programming at an age of 11, Raahul today is a wizard in Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, PHP/Laravel, MySQL, Postgres, Go, and NodeJS.

Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, once said, “I tell my employees that we're in the service business, and it's incidental that we fly airplanes.” Instead, he attributed the success of his business to exceptional customer service. Incidentally, the same applies to all companies, and it all starts with understanding your customers and how to meet their needs best.

Data democracy is the first step toward understanding your customers. In the early days, data was fragmented and siloed across the organization. As a result, you either didn’t have access to valuable information or couldn’t get them in time to make use of the narrow window of opportunities. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have now unlocked data from the shackles of the IT department and have made it accessible to marketers in real-time. When you combine data with an intelligent marketing suite, it takes the marketer from mere data to information, insights, automation, leading to continuous strategic innovation.

The Customer Data Platform market is expected to grow exponentially over the next five years, from USD 2.4 billion in 2020 to USD 10.3 billion by 2025 (Markets and Markets). CDP investments skyrocketed in 2020, influenced by the rapid digital adoption during COVID-19. In 2017, deployments were at 19 percent, with a decline in 2019 at 17 percent, and in 2020, it jumped to a rate of 29 percent. The numbers are an assertion to the upcoming boom of CDP adoption.

The Journey from Data to Insights
Although data is considered to be the new oil, it alone does not result in invaluable insights. You need a system that can translate data into useful information, which CDPs help you do. First, it creates a 360-degree customer profile from the open data. Then, you put this information to use by

creating dynamic customer segments or analyzing funnels, cohorts, and other valuable aspects of customer behavior. Regardless of the scale of data you have, you can generate these intimate details in a matter of seconds. That is the power of big data.

Then, from information, we move into insights. Of course, not all pieces of information are equally valuable at all times, and you can easily get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data produced every day. This is where targeted analysis like RFM (Recency Frequency Monetary), behavior-based segmentation, automatic recommendations, and customer paths equip you to supercharge your engagement strategy.

How Insights Drive Automation
Now that we’ve moved from information to insights, we still need to put these insights into action. Before the era of automation, you took broad-level insights and based your marketing strategy on the dominant sentiments of customers. Today, CDPs allow you to hyper-personalize the customer experience. Person-alization is almost non-negotiable in an overcrowded era with options for every second product.

Automation is a multi-tasker
Knowledge is power only when you apply it at the right time. If you don’t act upon critical information quickly, then the value of that information depreciates rapidly. Today, it’s possible to automate your engagement strategy in real-time using a visual decision tree so that customers are engaged during key milestones of their brand journey. This ranges from informing your customers when to buy a refill to nudging them for a forgotten cart.

The second is personalization. Personalization also allows you to control the experience on the web-site without having to depend on the response from the IT department. This includes everything from predicting and recommending the next purchase, informing when the flight tickets are a notch cheaper, to re-engaging with a dormant customer.

Data democracy is the first step toward understanding your customers. In the early days, data was fragmented and siloed across the organization


How Marketing Automation Enables Strategic Innovation
Before the era of intelligent marketing suites, you’d struggle to get access to the data, ponder on hypothe-sizing it, and then act on one when you’ve exhausted your energy nodes. You can’t innovate if each iteration takes an unreasonable amount of time, and you end up getting results that are obsolete by the time you get it.

CDPs put the power of rapid innovation and strategic thinking back into the marketer’s hands while freeing them from operational chaos. You can iterate rapidly on the strategic front and run experiments simultaneously. It is possible to do this today because you can encode hard-learned lessons into the tool that empowers you to deliver an unbeatable customer experience.

Conclusion
CDPs allow you to take data and turn it into valuable information. This information is critical when a brand wants to rule the data democracy in reality. Slicing and dicing to get the actionable insight with-out operational effort are what an intelligent marketing suite enables one to do.

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