How a customer data platform can transform, elevate, and amplify your personalized marketing

When customers are overwhelmed by choices, the personalization of a product or service is often what influences their final decision. However, effective targeted personalization is becoming increasingly rare. Companies large and small jump at the chance to personalize their offerings, but targeted personalization efforts often come off as annoying or trite to consumers. How can marketers truly create connections with consumers via personalization and avoid generic, “spray-and-pray” attempts?The answers are in your customer data.

What is a CDP?

It’s no secret that data drives today’s marketing. The trouble that most marketers face is managing their data in a way that is sustainable. That’s where a customer data platform (CDP) comes into play. But what is a CDP in marketing, and what does a customer data platform do for your business?A customer data platform is a marketing and CX technology that unites the user’s customer data across both online and offline sources. This allows marketers to access, organize and collect data on an unprecedented scale. The best customer data platforms then integrate with other marketing tools in your stack to leverage data to much more effectively reach your customers and new leads. This all may sound great, but how does a CDP for marketing specifically affect your personalization efforts?

Personalized marketing and the custom data platform

Simply put, when you use a CDP for marketing, you can get much more granular and personal than you can with even your fanciest rules-based ESP settings. Dynamic personalization without a unified view of the customer can’t get much more profound than MM/DD/YYYY triggers, such as "Automated Happy Birthday Discount Email #1." Customer data platform features transform and elevate the process far beyond the traditional birthday offer. Building and making use of custom fields with a CDP should be so intuitive that instead of getting frustrated and impatient with data, your team starts to develop a new creative instinct for inventive targeting. With a CDP unifying your data and integrating with your analytics tools, you can automate around almost endless parameters.And that’s exactly what personalization is all about: optimizing your messaging around the consumer’s unique parameters in order to create a lasting connection.That’s how you remain competitive in today’s environment. And the power of customer data platform tools doesn’t stop there.

More secrets to CDP marketing

CDPs offer you a new way to independently use data in ways that other solo marketing technologies can’t match. Depending on the platform in question, they also integrate with many other marketing tools, which allows you to use that data in a clear, streamlined fashion. Learn more about personalized marketing and discover more examples of Customer Data Platform use cases:○ Why audience segmentation needs a customer data platformIf you’re interested in learning how CDPs unlock the power of your customer data: read the Definitive Guide to Customer Data Platforms. We’ll walk you through every aspect of a CDP, what you need from a CDP, and how to acquire the best customer data platform for your needs.Let’s start this journey: together. A complete, unified view of your customer is one click away - request a free demo to see how Simon transforms and maximizes your data for a seamless customer experience.

In the talented hands of top marketers, segmentation strategies are some of the most effective marketing tactics of today. However, the sheer amount of time and effort needed to collect, separate, and segment your customers, leads, and existing clients into the correct categories is immense.

This makes typical methods of segmentation incredibly inconvenient at the best of times. At the worst of times, companies simply don’t see the need for segmentation, then become frustrated when they can’t reach their audiences. What is the solution?

When you utilize customer data platform software, segmenting your customers becomes platform-driven and intuitive. But what does a customer data platform actually do?

What is a Customer Data Platform?

Let’s take a look at what a CDP is, how it assists you in segmenting your audience, and the role that all this plays in your integrated marketing strategies.

A customer data platform (CDP) is a marketing and CX technology that unifies a company’s customer data across both online and offline sources. The main customer data platform use case is to allow marketers to independently use data exactly as they need as opposed to working with whatever they can get.

How CDPs Upgrade Your Marketing Segmentation

When you use customer data platform tools, you have the speed and flexibility to finesse your segmentation parameters to get the right sample size and distribution. This yields significant results and the insight necessary to drive increased value in your segmentation efforts.

For example, suppose you have an idea for testing different groups against each other. Depending on the CDP in question, the entire process can be contained within one framework that flows directly from your customer data.

Who will convert most quickly? Who converts most reliably? This and similar tests can inform your overall follow-up cadence and significantly impact revenue, loyalty, and LTV.

It’s time to get rid of the outdated, clunky segmentation methods and open the door to integrated marketing.

From Marketing Segmentation to Integrated Marketing: Unlocking Your Potential

Once you have the capacity to segment your audience down to smaller, more personalized groupings, it’s time to leverage that data into all parts of your marketing. With a CDP for marketing, you don’t have to hunt through multiple software solutions, documents, and processes–it’s all in one place.  

From finding your audience to keeping them around for the long term, customer data platform features set you up for data-based success.

If you want to learn more about CDPs, their functions, and their uses, we have the data and research readily available. Read on to learn more about customer data platform capabilities: download our CDP Buyers’ Guide today to start your journey to an informed, calculated approach to your data and marketing.

Last week Salesforce announced enhancements to its customer data platform, offering deeper integration with its own e-Commerce cloud. Salesforce claims that its CDP provides a single source of truth for businesses, pulling together data across the many clouds the software provider offers.At Simon, we’ve long seen the struggle marketers face with customer data: they’re both drowning in data and thirsting for the right data. Often the data they have is messy, or incomplete, or in the wrong format, or it was modeled in the wrong way. Marketers find themselves choosing between bad data or sitting on their hands, waiting in a ticket queue while the launch date clicks closer. While the situation is frustrating, more importantly, it’s a drag on revenue growth. By making better data available to marketers of all skill levels in every tool they use, businesses can more rapidly develop innovative customer experiences that boost performance.While we agree with Salesforce that companies need a single source of truth, we disagree with Salesforce about what makes a great CDP. Yes, a CDP should act as a single source of truth for marketers. Important too that a CDP not lock marketers into a single ecosystem. Still marketers need more than table stakes data ingestion. To transform data into marketing results, a CDP also needs to integrate broadly, to make data usable, and to make intelligent decisions when things break.

Single Source of Truth...or Single Provider of Truth?

Salesforce’s new CDP extends the company’s dominant hand from software to data: a power play for the center of every brand’s data operations. Companies that rely exclusively on Salesforce’s enterprise apps may benefit, but for any digitally native or high growth brand, Salesforce’s CDP is a bad bargain: trading ease of procurement for agility and innovation, two qualities that we fundamentally believe unlock growth and competitive advantage.We see why the bargain is a bad deal in Salesforce’s announcement at Connections: a big focus on deeper integration with Salesforce’s own clouds, not with others’. The purpose of Salesforce’s CDP aligns with its broader marketing cloud strategy: to reinforce its position as a single provider of a closed ecosystem. Like any CDP, it will ingest and route data to marketing end points. Unlike other CDPs, Salesforce’s has a strong incentive to route data to other Salesforce products. Still running Unica? Too bad. Like Oracle’s ESP? Tough. Their strategy necessarily constrains their CDP, and thus limits marketing’s ability to innovate.If you want to be agile and innovative, you need a CDP that natively integrates with the world outside of Salesforce as well. If you want to grow sustainable competitive advantages, you need a CDP that’s open to data sources, marketing tools, and messaging channels, no matter who makes what. Growth-oriented companies need an independent CDP that fits today’s customer data architecture and the future’s.

Data Lock-In: Is It Really that Bad?

Take a high-growth company like Vivino: their eye-popping $1 billion valuation comes from the company’s ability to develop a brilliant digital experience atop a real-time marketplace. Yet, what could be more personal and human than wine recommendations? Vivino’s soaring valuation proves that customer-centric, cross- channel experiences can rival traditional retail experiences.The arrival of cloud data platforms in the early 2010’s enabled digitally native brands like Vivino to build novel customer experiences and thus, highly valuable businesses. If you don’t follow the data management market, you may not know that a new technology ecosystem has flourished in the last decade. Cloud data platforms enable businesses to build next generation data architectures, which in turn support enterprise operations, in-house data science and analytics, and a multitude of downstream functions, like marketing. Two representatives of these data platforms, Snowflake & Databricks, alone have a market cap larger than Salesforce & Adobe’s entire marketing cloud business units.The future of customer innovation lies in a brand’s ability to embed these platforms within the workflows of every business function. The potential of data to drive business outcomes is vast, but not if customer data is trapped within a silo. The real value of data is unlocked when it can be used freely anywhere, whether that’s in or out of marketing. With Simon, marketers and in-house data teams can collaborate efficiently to orchestrate and personalize experiences, no matter what technologies they use. Better data, better outcomes, no walls.

A Great CDP Transforms Data into Outcomes

Finally, beyond being a source of truth for marketers, is what Salesforce offering enough? In our view, no, Salesforce has yet to provide table stakes data management capabilities of a CDP. The more you know the details, the more problematic Salesforce’s CDP becomes. CDP must provide marketers the ability to:

• Broadly integrate every data source and marketing tool. Yes, Salesforce manages a lot of customer and campaign data, but so much more lies outside of their ecosystem (especially data that can be used to better understand the customer). CDPs must have flexible data ingestion from any source, including data warehouses, SaaS applications, marketing channels, and also ad-hoc sources like CSV uploads or flat-files.
• Transform raw data into usable data, no matter the marketer’s skills. We’ve all experienced the challenge of munging data inside a spreadsheet that came from different sources in different formats. The pain only magnifies 10,000-fold at the enterprise scale, and it’s the reason data-intensive businesses employ large data engineering teams. But marketers aren’t engineers, so to make robust data capabilities available to marketers, a CDP must offer no-code and low-code interfaces, enabling both simple and advanced data manipulations. Providing better data to all marketers — of every skill level — increases both performance and productivity of every marketing program and message.
• Safeguard customer experiences with data quality intelligence. Data is always messy and never fully clean. The “source of truth” needs to be in a place where tooling and process oversight exist to fully monitor when things break or don’t look quite right. CDPs, then, must be the last stop to check data before it’s used to deliver customer experiences. CDPs should automate data usage analysis and be able to take action, such as preventing accidental message triggers. CDPs should also provide simple workflows to track data issues back to their source, so that the problem is corrected in the right place.

Salesforce is using “source of truth” as marketing speak. While a CDP plays a critical role in assembling and storing data, it actually serves a broader purpose in enabling marketers to create innovative customer experiences from data, delivering strategic outcomes and results for their businesses.

We're not typically ones to toot our own horn, but we’re excited and honored to share that Simon Data has achieved “Leader” ranking in the G2 Spring 2021 Report for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). G2’s quarterly CDP Grid® ranks products based on customer satisfaction and market presence and places companies into four categories on the Grid, with the Leader quadrant as the top position. In addition to climbing into a higher spot in the Leader category for the Overall Grid Report for CDP, Simon Data secured a new position as a High Performer in the Enterprise Grid Report for CDP, earned the #2 rank on the Momentum Grid Report for CDP, and was awarded a total of eight badges spanning enterprise and mid-market CDP.

“We’re incredibly proud to see our ongoing investments in our product and services validated by this latest G2 report,” said Jason Davis, CEO and Co-Founder of Simon Data. “These rankings are based on user-generated reviews, which inspires us to continue to deliver an aggressive roadmap that puts our clients’ needs - the ones they have today and the ones that will arise tomorrow - at the forefront. The CDP space is crowded, but the G2 rankings demonstrate our platform’s strength in leveraging data to drive great marketing outcomes, and when combined with our best-in-class service model has earned us the highest honor: recognition from our clients.”

G2 evaluates customer satisfaction based on verified user reviews and market presence as defined by market share, seller size, and social impact. As a Leader on the Grid, Simon Data was rated highly by G2 users and earned substantial Market Presence scores.

What do customers love about the Simon Data platform?

1. The Product

Our customers applauded our strong product offering citing its ability to collect data from multiple sources into one platform, including first-party, second-party, and third-party data from online and offline sources. Other popular product features include the ability for users to connect the product with other systems and marketing technologies, unify their customer profiles and create a 360-degree view of the customer, and improve audience targeting, and alleviate bottlenecks around data access and segmentation.

Annie J.

Mid-Market

(51-1000 emp.)

02/18/2020

"Able to deploy 90+ million emails per month, with a lot of personalization (I.e. product recommendations, or triggered based on user activity)"

Read full review on G2

Sam S.

Mid-Market

(51-1000 emp.)

02/20/2020

"Simon Data allows us to track the performance of our emails such that we can easily pivot and apply those learnings to our segmentation and testing of our emails. We are able to do this without involving too many technical resources on our end, which is definitely a huge help!"

Read full review on G2

SB

Stephen B.

Mid-Market

(51-1000 emp.)

02/19/2020

"We've substantially cut the amount of time it takes to build and send one-off emails, and many automated sends can be accomplished entirely by the marketing team without involving engineers."

Read full review on G2

2. Our Customer Success Team

Our customer success team also earned high scores for their responsiveness and proactiveness in addressing potential issues around data.

Adam L.

Small-Business

(50 or fewer emp.)

02/18/2020

"Their response time to our questions (troubleshooting or otherwise) is extremely fast. We share a Slack channel and stay in constant communication."

Read full review on G2

Lindsey D.

Small-Business

(50 or fewer emp.)

03/01/2020

"The level of support Simon Data provides is the best I've ever received from a vendor. They are quick to answer, always available and are great to work with."

Read full review on G2

User in Consumer Services

Enterprise

(> 1000 emp.)

02/20/2020

"While their software is great, I have found their customer support to be their true differentiator in that they go above and beyond to understand the client's business and will execute alongside our team."

Read full review on G2

3. Ability to impact our product roadmap

Additionally, we were praised for reflecting regular customer feedback in our product roadmap.

Annie J.

Mid-Market

(51-1000 emp.)

02/18/2020

"they listen to our feedback and actually build features to help us get what we need (small enough to pay attention, but big enough to actually deliver new functionality)."

Read full review on G2

Administrator in Internet

Mid-Market

(51-1000 emp.)

01/02/2018

"As a smaller product, you get better service than established big players, and your feedback actively becomes part of their product development. Because you're dealing with their team over Slack, it's really easy to come up with creative solutions and they work hard to understand your business, instead of giving out rote examples."

Read full review on G2

Want to learn more about how companies like WeWork, JetBlue, TripAdvisor, BarkBox, Vivino and many others are leveraging (and loving!) Simon Data's SmartHub CDP?

Explore our case studies or request a demo to experience the platform for yourself.

What is Triggered Email Marketing?

Triggered email marketing is a method of planning and automating email marketing based on customer behavior.  Triggers are the timely signal of an opportunity to reach out. Triggers fall into two broad categories.

• Event-based: Customer behaviors like creating an account, abandoning a cart or browse session, or completing a purchase.
• Segment-based: Changes in attributes or activities, like a marriage, birthday, change in LTV, or relocation.

The main difference between triggered emails and general emails is that triggered emails are automated, one-to-one messages, and promotional emails are manually sent on a one-to-many basis.
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The strongest email trigger campaigns have three attributes in common:

1. Email automation triggers are personalized.

Don’t believe us? Take it from the customers themselves: 72% say they only engage with personalized messaging, and 80% of frequent shoppers only shop with brands that personalize the experience. Simply personalizing email subject lines — probably the most basic of all personalizations — can increase open rates by a whopping 20%. And other simple personalizations, like birthday emails, can generate 342% more revenue than generic promotional emails.

Need more proof? Learn how Tripadvisor optimized its personalization using Simon Data’s platform.

2. Email automation triggers are relevant.

40% of consumers buy more from retailers that send personalized emails, because email automation triggers allow marketers to present customers with product recommendations based on what they’ve bought before or checked out online. It also allows for cross-selling — showing customers items related to the ones they’ve been interested in before. In fact, 43.2% of consumers join email lists to either find out when products they’re interested in go on sale or receive discount codes. In other words, a one-size-fits-all approach to trigger marketing simply doesn’t get the job done.

3. Email automation triggers are timely.

If you ran a clothing brand, when would be the best time to sell someone a coat? Perhaps when you know it’s starting to snow in the customer’s city. How about when they’ve interacted with your photo of a coat on social media? Another possibility would be when they’ve browsed other warm weather apparel on your website. With Simon Data, the possibilities are endless.

The batch-and-blast style of email marketing from yesteryear involved sending one general message to a large group of customers. Today’s triggered emails, on the other hand, are extremely personalized, highly relevant, and sent to a specific, unique customer when triggered.

Why is Triggered Email Marketing Important or Useful?

The entire point of triggered email marketing is time-based personalization. By this point in the evolution of digital marketing, all of the stats in the world only confirm our deepest intuition that the old marketing chestnut is totally accurate:Marketing will see the greatest success if they can deliver the right message to the right customer in the right place at the right time.If you’re not convinced, then:

1. Triggered emails have been found to contribute over 30% of overall email revenue. (DMA)
2. Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. (Aberdeen)
3. Personalized emails have been shown to deliver 6x higher transactional rates than non-personalized emails. (MarketingProfs)
4. Relevant emails drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails. (Emma)
5. Personalized email marketing generates a median ROI of 122%. (eMarketer)

“Right-time marketing,” though, is getting harder and harder.

1. The scale at which marketers must communicate makes manual personalization impossible.
2. Attention spans are getting shorter. In a world where analysis paralysis is more common than the old-school “confident purchase,” being in the mood to buy a particular item is fleeting and fast.
3. The death of cookies and the release of iOS 14.5 is knocking out a huge chunk of the marketing playing field.  
4. GDPR, CCPA, and VCDPA all point to a path of narrowing data availability that will require companies to own their data and (to a large extent) their channels.  

The only way you can deliver relevant messages every single time is by responding to actual customer behavior.

An Email Marketing Caveat

It’s not as easy as simply deciding to send more emails. Consider the fact that more than 290 billion emails are sent daily, a number expected to balloon to 347 billion by 2023. Just sending more emails is likely just an ocean-boiling exercise. But sending more emails that are even more relevant to the customer is a strategy with some promise. If we can replace reliance on third-party data with rich, democratized first-party data, then we stand a chance of getting real traction.Customers expect certain types of triggered notifications, like a purchase confirmation or customer service question submission. But there’s no reason to stop there. The only thing that’s limiting you is your imagination — and maybe you’re current technology stack.

Automation is Much Longer than Four Letters

The term “automation” skews toward the robotic, so “automated personalization” might sound oxymoronic. But planning, designing, launching, learning from, and iterating upon an automated communication process is one of the most humanistically informative activities in all of marketing. Building a triggered workflow that can personalize itself to an individual at a moment’s notice is a creative and technical miracle when done well. It’s not unlike building a video game world that can respond to and evolve with your players. A well-designed trigger flow requires minds that are comfortable with:

1. Branching Logic: If-this-then-that statements are the mathematical bedrock of triggered flows.
2. Empathy: Marketing is the art of building emotional connections, and a well-designed trigger flow can be the best tool to make your customers feel seen and heard.
3. Creativity: Go beyond the purchase confirmation or the Happy Birthday Discount emails. How your triggers respond to customer behavior is just as representative of your brand as your logo or design choices.
4. Experimentation: Nothing is ever perfect out of the gate. Monitoring performance and progress will fill in the gaps where the first three bullets are insufficient.

As you learn and iterate and as your customers pass through your workflows, each touchpoint has the opportunity to become more relevant and timely. According to Digital Commerce 360:

• 77% of online shoppers say they’re more likely to buy from a retailer when its emails are personal.
• 82% of web shoppers say they’d likely buy more items from a retailer if its emails were more personally relevant.

Don’t Let Your Automation Run Out of Gas.

Data powers personalization. If this weren’t the case, you wouldn’t need to know anything about a person to make a personal connection. But we all know that getting to know someone requires finding commonalities. Your data can tell you where your value proposition intersects with a customer’s hopes, needs, desires, and interests. This intersection might not be apparent to the customer, which is why data and marketing make such nifty bedfellows.  

But timely messaging requires timely data. For instance, if there’s a delay, you could send a promotional cart abandonment email after a successful purchase of that item. You could market wedding inventory to someone who canceled their wedding two years ago.

This is where marketers start to run into problems. The list of possible messaging collisions and gaffes is endless. Insufficient or slow data can turn the marketer’s boon into the consumer’s bane. It’s not that their martech stacks have been pumped full of sugar water instead of gasoline. It’s that their fuel is being lobbed into the tank in an ad hoc fashion from across the organization, and only when it’s explicitly requested. That’s no way to drive a car.

Marketing triggers — though not necessarily new — have gained sophistication concerning both intake and output. But the sad reality is that marketing departments don’t own the inputs, which makes the outputs inconsistent at best. All of our powers of logic, empathy, and creativity are for naught if the data isn’t democratized to power performance at the outset and deliver accurate reporting in the end.

To learn more about how marketers can own their customer data to build more nuanced marketing communications, click over to Chapter Three of our CDP Buyer’s Guide, “Why is it Necessary to Understand Customer Data?”

First, let’s define abandonment

An abandoned cart (or bag, depending) is what most likely comes to mind when you think of “Abandonment,” but it’s much more than that. (Yes, you’re being abandoned all the time.) If we could transparently watch a customer journey like a video game, we could easily differentiate the “classic” abandoned cart from other types of abandonment, such as checkout, browse, or search.

With a proper abandonment taxonomy, we can understand the unique reasons behind different types of abandonment. If we know the cause, we’re much closer to the cure.

Ecommerce abandonment terminology:

• Abandonment Rate - A commonly used metric. Most organizations consider AR to be the ratio of the number of abandoned shopping carts to the number of initiated transactions or the number of completed transactions.
• ‍Abandoned Search - A visitor performs a search on your website, but they don’t click results; instead, they leave the website.
• ‍Abandoned Browse - A visitor lands on your website and continues to view product or category pages but then leaves without adding any items to their cart.
• ‍Abandoned Cart - A visitor adds one or more products to the online shopping cart but doesn’t proceed to checkout.
• ‍Abandoned Checkout - A visitor fills their cart and moves into the checkout process but drops off before completion. This category can be broken down further — depending on how far into the process the visitor got — before leaving the site. Brands can zhuzh these terms to suit their business, but the terms should retain precise definitions across the org.

The important thing is to establish differentiated abandonment concepts for proper measurement, assessment, and implementation so your team can effect change quickly. For instance, a relatively low-price point brand would likely consider a cart Officially Abandoned after an hour, whereas a high-price point brand might wait substantially longer.

By avoiding pre-baked definitions, brands can ensure that any initiatives triggered by the customer’s behavior are specific to that shopper’s unique needs and most likely to drive results.

Second, let’s determine what we’re after

All marketers want customers to buy with as little marketing effort as possible — not because they’re lazy but because they’re strategic. Heavy lifting to influence a purchase event at any scale greater than a mom-and-pop shop is not sustainable.  As abandoning shoppers are inevitable, abandonment initiatives are a critical part of the marketer’s arsenal.

If implemented correctly, abandonment initiatives can dramatically impact core marketing KPIs and overarching business objectives. While revenue is a core unit of measurement, abandonment initiatives can (and should) be considered across other dimensions, which include:

• Objective Impact Revenue - By bringing more shoppers back to their carts, abandonment initiatives encourage more checkouts and directly impact total revenue.
• ‍Average Order Value (AOV) With the right content, abandonment initiatives can bring folks back to their carts and encourage them to upgrade or add items, thus increasing the average order value.
• ‍Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - While messages cost money, either directly or indirectly, abandonment campaigns ensure that you close more customers — either newly acquired or existing — increasing conversions and decreasing cost per customer.

Finally, driving behaviors that reverse abandonment

Marketers typically align abandonment campaigns to a financial goal, like revenue, but you can encourage a series of micro-conversions to drive the behavior that will reverse abandonment. One of the best ways of thinking about this is from the shopper’s perspective and their purchase journey (i.e., the one they take and not the one we chose for them).

We can take some time to recognize vital behaviors across every purchase. When patterns emerge, we can make informed decisions to steer customers toward a completed checkout. If we consider abandonment as the customer having left the site at some point in their journey, we know that we can track and measure a customer’s progress back onto that journey. We can reframe those metrics as critical micro-conversions:

• Customer Micro-Conversion Open Rate - Getting the customers to interact with the communication that was sent to them in follow-up to their abandonment.
• ‍CTOR - Getting customers who engaged with the communication to then follow through on the call to action presented.
• ‍Product Page Visit - Getting the customer to revisit the product (or something within the product category) they had initially shown interest in and then abandoned to spark deeper interest.
• ‍Cart Visit - Getting the customer to create, revisit, or add to the cart they had abandoned (each action could be a micro-conversion worth tracking).
• ‍Checkout Page Visit - Getting the customer to revisit their abandoned cart and initiate or re-initiate the checkout process confirms high intent. Rather than boiling the ocean or merely throwing matches in it with your abandonment campaigns, we can isolate and optimize for each micro-conversion through each campaign, which are designed as intentional responses to distinct abandonment types.

The key to any effort to iterate and incrementally improve an initiative is clarity of where you are and where you’re going. The only way to get that clarity is with data. Learn how the Simon CDP can help you master your data strategy by booking a demo here.

Digital transformation as seen from the outside: Transforming how you work and the products and services you deliver to be more digital. Digital transformation as experienced on the inside: Purposefully evolving your technology, talent, processes, and culture to deliver a seamless experience inside and out.

What does digital transformation look like?

Some companies seem able to see around the curve, and they make early changes that might not make total sense to the rest of us stuck here in the present, unable to peer around the bend.The Starbucks app is one such innovation of which few people saw the transformative potential.With slow initial adoption, now over one-quarter of Starbucks’ customers run orders through the app. It's one of the top digital payment platforms globally, which is insane when you think about it for even a second.When Starbucks introduced it, the app was an entirely new form of delivering a digital experience. By now, countless quick-serve restaurants have invested in replicating Starbucks' innovation.With COVID still in full swing, Starbucks can meet its customers where they are, even from six feet away. But if it weren't COVID, the rapid move to all things digital would have driven greater adoption and usage sooner or later, pandemic or no.

The shortest section of this article

How do you rate your digital transformation? Answer these questions:

1. What percentage of your services or products are sold or delivered digitally?
2. How does that measure up against the competition?
3. How does it measure up against the top dogs in parallel verticals?

The three stages of digital transformation

You might be wondering, by this point, where your organization is on the digital transformation continuum. There are three focal points of digital transformation: c

1. Core business
2. Adjacent markets and products
3. Breakthroughs.

Stage one: Optimizing your core

This stage refers to maintaining relevance by optimizing your core business and your existing markets using existing products and assets. You're shuffling deck chairs for efficiency gains, but it can have a significant impact: a 5% efficiency gain can be substantial for large companies with lots of moving parts.This stage is one that no brand ever overcomes. Even Starbucks, who made the coffee shop a staple of American life, must protect its core business. The question is really: How comfortable is a company when it turns its attention to the core of the business? The answer to that question is simple, though it might be difficult to define when you get down to particular cases. If the company is in a position to reinforce relevance proactively, they've mastered this stage (for now); if the company is cornered into reacting to regain slipping relevance, then they've been caught off guard.Just by the words being used, you can probably hear the difference between vanguard companies versus those that have a hard time keeping up.A company that's comfortable with its core business will talk about retention, securing loyalty, differentiation, and disruption. The less comfortable company will describe their in-the-moment needs in terms of declining market share, rising churn, and maintaining relevance.

Stage two: Adjacent branching

This stage refers to buying or building new technologies to better enable how you work or to improve and diversify how you deliver services and products. This stage also includes serving new markets (by age, gender, country, etc.) or introducing adjacent products (like Casper selling linens and lamps).To continue our Starbucks line of thinking, one could say that their specialty gourmet locations Starbucks Reserve in such hip havens as Portland, Austin, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn) aim to do both: branch into the competitive and persnickety world of craft coffee to gain the loyalty of younger, urban professional consumers by competing with the smaller specialty shops that are omnipresent fixtures in such places.

Stage three: Breakthrough transformation

Breakthrough transformations create totally new categories. Amazon's AWS or Kindle were entirely new business categories that many companies have tried and failed to replicate. Starbucks' app, as I mentioned earlier, paved an unbeaten path, down which so many quick-serve establishments are racing to catch up. (Meanwhile, Starbucks can comfortably look beyond where they are, which is already far ahead of the competition.) One could argue that Starbucks' app was an adjacent move, but they created an entirely new way to order, pay, and pick up that initiated a transition to digital that laid the groundwork for how they would be able to weather the storm of COVID-19. The power of their results seem much more than merely adjacent. The transformations at this stage create new business lines, unique differentiators, and new services that customers will come to rely on. It also can give companies a very tall hurdle to slip in front of their competition on the path to market dominance.If you're wondering now how to balance the three demands of the present, near-future, and distant future, let’s put a rough number to it. Though there's wide variation from company to company and vertical to vertical, most established companies should focus around 65-70% of their energy on improving the core business, 20-25% on adjacent business, and the remaining 10% on exploring avenues for and developing breakthrough innovations.

This is a lot to take in

Right you are. That's why this will not be our only article on digital transformation. On the docket, we have articles on digital transformation for enterprise businesses, interviews with and articles by modern customer marketing luminaries, and an inside look into how vanguard companies power digital transformation with data.In the meantime, some food for thought that might jumpstart your ability to throw innovative obstacles at your competition in the race to market dominance:How do you create a portfolio of initiatives to transform your marketing and experience? This would encompass being able to use all of your data, and you would need to bring that data to life through a structured portfolio of bets and initiatives to deliver the next great customer experience or next-generation marketing operation.Is your company playing mainly defense or offense? When you ponder the dream state of your company's customer experience and marketing, which stage does each piece of the puzzle fit into? What innovations are happening in other verticals that haven't been rethought to serve your target market? What pain points can you imagine customers in 2030 having that no one would think of complaining about today?Most importantly, how are you using data today to arm yourself for both defense and offense? How accessible are data and insights to your team and the rest of the company? Data is the starting point of your best defense and offense, and it’s the key to strategic, deliberate transformations across your business. To learn more about shepherding data from a cluttered data lake to utilizing it to power cutting-edge customer experiences, click here to see the revenue gains that ASOS saw after doing just that.

More than almost anything, the ability to test and learn in low-stakes digital experiments to iterate and improve upon any marketing message has captured the imaginations of marketers and entrepreneurs over the last decade. But for most people, the imagination is exactly where all those testing ideas stay. Reporting is clunky. Experiments are poorly designed. It’s nearly impossible to operationalize quantitative learnings into technical processes, let alone the creative process. Cross-channel experimentation is largely in its infancy for most marketing technology vendors, and digital marketing triggers have historically been too limited to get much utility out of them. Following an audience (or suppressing an audience) across those channels remains just a dream for most marketers. Welcome to part two of “Creating a Culture of Experimentation with Digital Marketing Triggers,” where we’ve been outlining core capabilities and best practices that are necessary to design a team and workflow that favor testing and learning over blind certainty. If you missed part one, click here to catch up. If you’ve already read part one, keep on keeping on!Before launching into any experiment, consider the unofficial commandments of marketing experimentation:

The 10 Commandments of Marketing Experimentation

1. Have a hypothesis.
2. Set a goal.
3. Stick to a process.
4. Test one thing at a time.
5. Randomize your groups.
6. Have a reasonable test population.
7. Set an end-by date.
8. Don’t leave them hanging.
9. Don’t be afraid of the results.
10. Celebrate failure.

Yesterday, we covered the first four — which were mostly about internal considerations — and today, we’re whipping into the last six, which are largely focused on the text audience.

Randomize Your Groups

If you are testing content variables, test groups should be equally randomized. This doesn’t mean you can’t target specific segments for your messaging (e.g., experimenting with different types of content in your abandonment email on your most loyal customers). It means that all members across each group should look — at least statistically — the same. The best way to get that is through randomized groupings of people within that broader population. To save time, effort, and avoid bias, teams should make sure they can automatically allocate experiment groups, especially for triggered campaigns.

Have a Reasonable Test Population

It is almost always better to run your experiments on a relatively small subsegment of the total addressable population. If you A/B test two messages against the total population and one is accidentally offensive, you have just offended a full half of all of your customers. On the other hand, if you A/B test two messages against the total population and one is AMAZING, you’ve then wasted the chance at sending the most amazing marketing message ever to everyone you can. Statistical significance refers to the necessary population size for getting around the natural variations in group behavior that you could observe in an A/A test. While the populations all have to be of a reasonable size, they don’t all have to be the same size. You can create a smaller holdout group, and if you’re running multivariate experiments (MVEs), then perhaps you dedicate fewer population sizes to the single-variable baselines than the larger MVE groups.

Set an End Date

Experiments can go on forever, but in a test-and-learn environment, we want to make sure that we are rapidly iterating and demonstrating improvement against our objectives. This is especially true with rolling abandonment initiatives based on customer triggers. We can’t expect to do a massive send to all abandoned carts at once; instead, we have to wait for a sufficient population to pass through. (Hence the reliance on digital marketing triggers in this and other use cases.)When it comes to setting a reasonable timeline, we can learn from historical data how long it takes a certain number of shoppers on average to abandon their cart and/or take the action we are trying to drive. That will help identify when we want to look at the results. If we wait too long, we have either missed an opportunity to deploy a new approach to a wider audience or have missed a period of time we could have been testing for something better. If we pull up too soon, we might be missing out on the full picture, throwing out a potentially high-impact approach.

Don’t Leave Them Hanging

Abandonment shouldn’t be a one-and-done communication. While single event-triggered communications can certainly be effective (and easy to test), there’s an even bigger opportunity in testing across journeys with digital marketing triggers. In testing these journeys, we have the opportunity to experiment with things like frequency, story order, channel impact, micro-conversion, calls-to-action, and more. Pulling these all together into one story allows us to find what the highest-impact, cohesive conversation might be to capture attention, engage, and inspire abandoned customers back to the target goal.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Results

“Business as usual” content can be the last thing some marketing teams want to test. Testing your upcoming holiday campaign has much lower emotional stakes than testing that big-lift welcome series your team built three years ago and very much forgot about. Deep down, it’s scary to find out they’ve been wasting time or money or both. Be comforted, however, just because it is not effective now, doesn’t mean that has always been the case. Times and customer expectations have changed, and we need to be vigilant about keeping up and serving them the best experience now, not a year ago. Embrace the change.

Celebrate Failure

No team wants to fail. However, when it comes to making the most out of experimentation, failure should not just be anticipated, but celebrated. Why? Failure means you tried something, learned something, and got a not-so-great idea out of the way. The most innovative brands understand that marketing is driven by many factors both within and outside of its control. The only way to navigate the complex waters of customer behaviors and preferences (especially when it comes to abandonment) is to throw yourself in and try things out.As a marketing leader, with buy-in from the top, you have an opportunity to create a culture of experimentation. Celebrating failures and successes tells your team that they are supported to take calculated risks and not fear for their jobs if something doesn’t work. The excitement and frustration of trial and error build a sense of intellectual (and emotional!) novelty that will create a stronger team bond. Some marketing leaders go so far as to give awards to the biggest “failed” experiment. Others have created a “Wall of Shame” (tongue-in-cheek, of course!) to highlight what didn’t work, thus engraining the lesson into the community of the marketing team, beyond just institutional knowledge. If you missed part one of this series, click here to catch up and start getting ideas for your digital marketing triggers use cases. If you enjoyed these pieces, then you’ll love our white paper the success that’s possible when marketers own their data strategy: How Self-Serve Segmentation Led to a 300x Boost in Engagement

Over 100 years ago, either John Wanamaker or Lord Leverhulme (it’s still up for debate) said, “Half of my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Now that marketing has such a vast wealth of data, lamenting the difficulties of knowing what’s effective means nothing more than, “I don’t know how to turn data into insight.”Digital marketing triggers are the perfect tool for building controlled experiments for anything — you can control for timing, geography, current weather patterns, customer behavior, or practically anything with a ready dataset.When creating content, we can start from a great place if we just set a plan in motion, listen to the data, and apply known best practices. Don’t expect your content or delivery to be perfect from the get-go. The hard reality is that it will take some work to make your content as effective as possible by taking deliberate baby steps, testing, learning, and steadily pacing toward optimal results. When it comes to abandonment, we have an evergreen, rolling customer behavior to test, learn and optimize on for years to come. Abandonment is the first thing many marketers think about when they hear the phrase “digital marketing triggers.” Though triggered campaigns have much broader applicability, we’ll use abandonment examples to keep things simple up front. Before launching into any experiment, consider the unofficial commandments of marketing experimentation:

The 10 Commandments of Marketing Experimentation

1. Have a hypothesis.
2. Set a goal.
3. Stick to a process.
4. Test one thing at a time.
5. Randomize your groups.
6. Have a reasonable test population.
7. Set an end-by date.
8. Don’t leave them hanging.
9. Don’t be afraid of the results.
10. Celebrate failure.

Today, we’ll tackle the first four — mostly about internal considerations — and later this week, we’ll whip into the last six, which are largely focused on the text audience.

Have a Hypothesis

Before any experiment, teams should align on a What & Why Strategy.The What is a statement of what you and your team believe; it’s what you’re interrogating with your planned experiment. These testable beliefs can (and probably should) come from the work your team has done to understand the customer, their journey, and the barriers they face. A solid Why will make prioritization easier: simply phrase the purpose of all experiments in terms of expecting ROI (or other KPI) and pick the one with the greatest leverage. It could be complicated by mismatched metrics across Why's (like say you have 10 experiments you’d like to run, but each channel or initiative cannot be measured that same way). In these cases, default to the one metric that will prove the greatest overall business impact. You need total clarity on what you expect to be true. If it’s too vague, you won’t be able to design an effective experiment that will return clean data. For example:“We want to test subject lines to see which gets the better open rate for this week’s send.” Versus“We believe that our emails are seeing a low open rate because our subject lines are too generic, and so if we test emojis at or near the beginning of a subject line, we can demonstrate a lift on our current average open rate by at least 10%.”Now you try with your most pressing testable belief with broader business effects:“We believe that [current state] and so if we [planned action] we will be able to see [measurable outcome].”

Set a Goal

Setting a specific objective allows us to challenge ourselves and set a minimum threshold for what we’ll accept as success. This target metric can be as high or low as makes sense for the team, but all goals should demonstrate impact on a larger brand-level objective. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Stick to a Process

As a team, commit to a process to identify, define, and deploy the experiments in question. Use this guide as a tool and checklist to get you started. Regardless of how you run it, make sure you can support a purposeful, measurable experiment design and conclusion with data. To do this, you must be purposeful about measuring outcomes. Experiments must remain consistent from test to test. This is easiest with digital marketing triggers, which can be set up and kept in holding until it's ready to deploy.

Test One Thing at a Time

You can’t trust the results of a rushed experiment that doesn’t isolate variables. When you create the content for your investigation, be sure to maintain consistency, so there are no confounding factors. (In statistics, a confounder is a variable that influences the dependent variable and independent variable, causing a spurious association.)If you’re doing multivariate testing, you’ll either need a large audience or patience to focus on optimizing one variable at a time. That being said, even in multivariate experimentation (MVE), you should be planning test groups for baselines for each of the single variables so you can truly get a full picture of the impact of each variable against the variables together.Some variants to test:

• Latency
• Frequency
• Subject line
• Content copy
• Content visuals
• Call-to-action
• Channel
• Journey Flows

If you’re interested in learning about how to manage statistically significant audiences, when to stop and extrapolate insight, or how to react to results, click here to read Volume II.

Or the many ways that LTV will fail you

Allow me to start provocatively: Lifetime Value is not the all-powerful übermetric you’ve heard it is, and no such metric exists. There is simply no universal way to measure past and predicted successes generically.Instead, it’s important for every business to investigate customer behavior along what I call the Loyalty Funnel — that part of the marketing funnel that angles toward the promised land: Customer Advocacy.

You are Now Entering the Customer Loyalty Funnel

When a customer makes their first purchase, they leave the sales funnel and enter the loyalty funnel. We can split where customers enter the loyalty funnel into two broad segments that themselves can break down further:Low-price first purchaseHigh-price pointDiscount-buyers & giftersSmall basket of high price-point itemsSmall basket of low price-point itemsLarge basket of high price-point itemsLarge basket of low price-point itemsLarge basket of mixed price-pointsThat might not look like a very tangible explanation, so I’ll use Casper’s business model as an example because it’s fairly straightforward. Casper started with their mattress as the one thing. Every purchase was either a Small Basket or a Large Basket with a High Price-Point. But then they added pillows. And sheets and blankets. And nightlights and sleepwear and doggie beds and more. The Loyalty Funnel strategy proposes that a customer who has “completed the set” is more valuable than the customer who spent the same amount of money (or even sometimes more) on a small grouping of the same products. If you think about this concept in financial terms, LTV measures the size of an investment but not its diversification. Brands that don’t pay attention when their high-LTV customers over-allocate on one product will build a taller and taller pedestal to fall from when trends shift.

LTV is SKU-focused. Loyalty is relationship-focused.

Each business needs to define what customer loyalty uniquely looks like for them and strategize to encourage that behavior as soon as possible in the customer journey.So if you’re a fitness club, you might have a goal of getting new members in the door eight or ten times in the first month. You might want them to set up a free personal training session in the first 30 or 60 days. Throughout the first year, you can identify the moments where you can celebrate victories with the customer and engage them to invest more and get the full value from your brand.Two years ago, Everlane debuted The Uniform campaign where they built a coordinated outfit and played to a minimalist aesthetic and lifestyle. This is “complete the set” product diversification at its most straightforward. It’s not far off from Casper’s mission to be not a mattress company but a sleep brand. One can imagine that Everlane simplified and amplified customer loyalty KPIs by focusing on drumming up interest in pieces of the uniform. If it lines up with the best possible business outcomes, this “complete the set” strategy provides a clear path to success. Two years from now, maybe the buzz of The Uniform will have worn off, but a huge cohort of Everlane customers will have bought their t-shirts, jeans, jackets, shoes, and more in the meantime. The likelihood of a customer switching between hip clothing brands is pretty near 100%. But if I’ve completed the set but then prefer another brand’s shirts, I might still be loyal to Everlane for pants or jackets for years to come.

How a CDP can power a loyalty strategy

Knowing your customers is the surest route to building strong brand affinity. Big flashy marketing campaigns might create buzz, but buzz can only get you so far. (And buzz can be quite expensive with difficult-to-quantify results.) Just as enduring one-to-one relationships require small but regular touches rather than Big Annual Gestures, a customer relationship grows best with personalized upkeep. This is why loyalty benchmarks are so effective: When it’s working, there’s little guesswork on either side about the next step. Let’s say we’re building our loyalty benchmarking strategy across three product categories. We’ve looked at the data and determined that customers who bought across all three of these categories go on to be the most loyal and among the most valuable. We get three Mission: Loyalty cohorts. Those who came in on Category A, Category B, and Category C. If you’re a marketer, I’m sure you’re already getting blue-sky ideas about how to get these customers to the full buy-in point. (Could it be because the objective is so clear?)Just because the end-point is clear doesn’t mean the path is. Your unique KPI requires a unique strategy, not some out-of-the-box marketing blast. Cookie-cutter strategies and tactics are for cookie-cutter KPIs, and as I hope we’ve established, the complex relationship between your brand and its customers cannot be quantified with purely generic success metrics. The scary and exciting next step is to build the path, or paths. Customer behavior is always shifting. That’s as uncontroversial a statement as one can make these days. So there really cannot be one long-term, consistent path to success, even if the metric for success never changes. Picture building a road that leads to the peak of a mountain. We’ll call it KPI Mountain. You want to get as many people up that mountain as quickly and efficiently as possible. The adaptable marketer is the one who opts to build a network of one-lane roads over a single multi-lane highway. Just as Casper and Everlane’s product strategy involves a diverse-enough array of products at low- and high-price entry points, marketers need to meet customers where they are and guide them up the mountain. If you’re going to be able to do this, you need to act fast. Something like COVID represents a monsoon that knocked out a lot of marketers’ well-trodden paths, but smaller shifts in customer behavior happen constantly. This leads me to Readiness and Responsiveness as the two keys to great customer relationships. Speed is not a virtue unto itself, but it does enable readiness (real-time data ingestion, dynamic content) and responsiveness (self-service segmentation, cross-channel orchestration, triggered messaging). If you depend on a technical department to build segments, your customers will be too fast for you. If you need deep support just to personalize messaging, your customers will be too fast for you. If you’re unable to access the right data on your customers across all the places they’re interacting with your business, your customers will be too fast for youNot everything that calls itself a CDP can do this, and with enough technical elbow grease, one might be able to pull it off with something that doesn’t call itself a CDP. The thing that matters is what are you empowered to do?Every business is different, and every customer is unique. There will never be a generic all-powerful übermetric, but if you’re quick with the data and patient enough to find the value that your customers see in what you have to offer, you can uncover and influence the KPI that drives real growth for your brand.If you want to know more about what a CDP is, what it does, and what outcomes a CDP could enable, click here for the Table of Contents page of our CDP Buyer's Guide to see any area where you'd like to dig deeper.

If you’re curious about the drawbacks or benefits of adopting a CDP in the context of external vendors — such as freelancers or agencies — then you’re in the right place. You’re also in the right place if you’re an agency brushing up on your martech knowledge so you can better advocate for what’s best for your clients.

CDPs & Privacy

The high-profile data breaches that have become part of the news landscape over the past couple of decades have inspired the deliberate siloing of data. The thinking is likely based on a mental model like “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” There’s a perfectly reasonable argument to be had on the other side of that divide.Because ultimately, data privacy isn’t about the accessibility of data but rather the type of access: is it usable, or is it usable and visible. By providing access to usable but not visible data, a marketer-focused CDP’s no-code UI allows non-technical stakeholders to safely manipulate segments, workflows, and cross-channel experiments without posing any security risks. So if your Email Gurus™ or Social Media Ninjas© are at an agency, you can rest assured that they’re getting the full value of your data without risking customers’ privacy.

The Tidal Wave of First-Party Data

When Chrome drops cookies, customer acquisition and engagement will become primarily reliant on first-party data. This is a great victory for individuals’ privacy, but more than a few marketers are concerned about their capabilities to personalize and build customer relationships in the future. The insomniac marketer who gets out of bed in the middle of the night to cry into a literal box of cookies might have this inner dialogue running through their rattled brains:

“Now I can’t acquire new customers or drive incremental sales without you, Cookies. And Cookies, you told me I didn’t need to fully invest in an operational 360-degree view of the customer. You told me you would take care of me, Cookies, but now you’re leaving me?  “I don’t even know how to work with first-party data. I don’t know if we have enough. I don’t know where it all is. Cookies, why hast thou forsaken me? “This company hasn’t really been in the relationship-building business with its customers, and now it’s on me to turn us into George Clooney at a cocktail party overnight. Nooooo!!!”

Centralize the Data on the Dinner Table So No One Goes Hungry

As our CEO and co-founder Dr. Jason Davis emphasized here, not only is your first-party data cheaper; used properly it’s more effective at driving meaningful results. Assuming you’ve read or at least skimmed the contents of the rest of the CDP Buyer’s Guide, we’ll skip comparing types of CDPs and those general topics and instead focus on why and how agencies, brands, and CDPs work great together.

Increased operational efficiency

With functional, secure data seamlessly accessed from one UI, in-house marketers can build cross-channel segments for immediate use by the agency, and vice versa. Brands won’t just collaborate over strategy, copy, and KPIs; they’ll now be able to creatively test and learn in a secure data environment.

Improved ROAS

By putting first-party data in the center of your strategy, you can improve ad match rates and reach with known-customer profiles and also improve retargeting efforts. Additionally, with real-time data ingestion and a home base for customer profiles and universal segments, spend-efficient workflows could be employed to reduce your reliance on walled-gardens and expensive ad publishers. The other cost-saver is dynamic suppression: if a customer buys those red shoes, you don’t want to send them a discount code for those red shoes two weeks later nor do you want to throw away money pestering them with social and search ads for that pair of red shoes.

Streamlined costs and workflows

The amount of effort and wasted time required to manually build segments and incorporate new data sets dwarfs the minutes it takes to do so in the right CDP. A good CDP can also eliminate superfluous technology in your or your clients’ marketing stack with more flexible integration powers. By iterating on and increasing the sophistication of marketing’s automation with triggered journeys, everything from new campaigns to new data models can begin to move more quickly.

Increased revenue generation

There are a number of ways a powerful orchestration CDP can increase revenue. Speed-to-market: With real-time data ingestion that can bypass your data warehouse for immediate operationalizing and segments that can be built on the fly by anyone on the marketing team, your ability to execute and iterate on campaigns just got a lot faster. Better personalization: With identity resolution, a 360-degree customer profile, cross-channel orchestration, and cross-channel triggered workflows fully realized thanks to the increased speed of data, you can get closer to the dream of reaching the right person, right place, right time, right message. Increased wallet share: Improved data visibility and functionality can also increase customer wallet share through targeted repeat-purchase campaigns and the ability to train a model that uses comprehensive customer data to spot cross-sell or upsell opportunities.

Having “The Talk” (About CDPs)

Armed with the knowledge that CDPs are the engines that can power a world-class marketing program fueled even only with first-party data, agencies and their clients can begin conversations about how they can begin to strategize moving into a hybrid model before moving onto a future-focused strategy powered by first-party data and merely supplemented with third-party data.

Questions to Ask

Clients → AgenciesAgencies → ClientsDo any of your clients currently use a CDP?Do you currently or have you ever used a CDP?If so, which? And are they happy with it? What are their primary use cases?If so, how can my agency leverage the power of your first-party data?Have you ever collaborated with a client through a CDP or leveraged data via a client CDP?If not, can we discuss planning for the move into a world with much less readily available third-party data?How do I merge first- and third-party data?Do you have other data sources you'd like to leverage for targeting or content in campaigns?How can we get more campaigns out with the same service hours?How are user identities mapped across sources? Do you have a single customer view across all your data sources?How can we do more thorough experimentation and operationalize learnings?Are you satisfied with how fast you can get your campaigns out?To learn more, check out our CDP Buyer’s Guide if you haven’t already, and see here how a marketing-owned data strategy gave one of our subscription clients a 300% lift in engagement over the course of one year and nearly 1,500 active segments.

Data, America’s Favorite Past-time

I’ve spent a good chunk of the past year reading books about America’s past-time, like “Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball,” “The Yankee Years,” and most notably “The Numbers Game,” which sparked an aha moment for me — marketers could learn a lot from baseball’s sabermetrics movement. It’s common knowledge among OG baseball fans that statistics are an integral part of the game. For others, “Moneyball” marked the first time that the casual fan learned about the power of data in baseball. In Michael Lewis’s famed book-turned-movie, Oakland Athletics General Manager, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), employed Harvard-grad Paul DePodesta (Jonah Hill) as an assistant to help spearhead a new era of data-driven decision making within the organization. The truth is, the use of data in baseball precedes “Moneyball” by decades. Baseball buffs may recognize the names Henry Chadwick, Allan Roth, and Bill James, who all worked through various iterations of baseball’s “golden record,” which showcased a comprehensive history of baseball statistics dating back to pre-WWI.

Cultivating the Data-Driven Advantage

James devised Sabermetrics, which pays homage to the Society for American Baseball Research. Sabermetrics applies statistical analysis to baseball records, especially to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players. This new set of evaluation criteria shined a light on the misuse of vanity metrics that most baseball fans associate with top talents — like home runs and batting average, etc. When assessing a player's value, there are many factors to consider. Teams like the A’s have exploited this knowledge to maximize their small payroll and compete with big-market behemoths, like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers. Evaluating players this way gave the little man (i.e., teams with low payrolls, like the Athletics) a fighting chance. When thinking about how this applies to the marketing world, it’s quite simple. In the last decade, digitally native brands have taken the world by storm. Thanks to affordable web development technologies and the possibility of word-of-mouth via social media channels and influencers, the market point of entry is relatively low for new brands. Ever wonder why Casper, which has nearly a $400 million market cap, is thriving while incumbent, Mattress Firm, filed for bankruptcy in 2018? In part, it’s because Casper understood that to take down the behemoths, it must win with a data-driven strategy that leverages customer analytics to make their CAC:LTV ratio as favorable as possible.

Data Can Help You Become the Curveball

For marketers, leveraging data to amplify the customer experience isn’t a new concept. There are tons of companies doing this well already — like Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix. They use proprietary technology that takes user behaviors and preferences to personalize every experience. They’re the Yankees and the Dodgers: big market, big budget, and the resources available to make this a reality. Naturally, these resources are scarce among smaller, newer brands. They must fully maximize the ROI of every penny spent, finding novel ways to not only stay competitive but become market leaders in crowded spaces (like Allbirds for footwear or Away for luggage). In the past five years, new technology partners have emerged that give smaller, leaner brands a chance to compete against the big guys. In particular, the CDP category emerged to bridge the gap between marketing and data teams to ensure that all customer data is clean, centralized, and actionable. The same way the arrival of Stats, Inc enabled faster, data-driven decision-making for MLB ball clubs is effectively what the CDP is doing for consumer brands. It’s an affordable piece of software that can transform the way companies speak to their customers and share their stories without the need for a 20+ person engineering team with unlimited budgets and resourcing.

Better Data for Better Decisions

At Simon Data, our platform begins with giving access to and displaying data that is made useful for non-technical marketers. Ironically enough, our segmentation dashboard features a host of client-specific graphs and histograms that we refer to as baseball cards:

Baseball cards give fans the ability to quickly assess a player's value by looking at the card’s back. A good CDP gives marketers unfettered access to how their campaigns affect customer acquisition and retention efforts. Viewing these kinds of insights in a central location can dramatically improve a marketer’s decision-making. Similarly, baseball’s front-office executives can make real-time in-game decisions based on the data they have at their disposal, like how batters fare against righties or lefties or the probability that a pitcher will break down in the 7th inning. The parallels between both industries are there.

Ignore Data at Your Peril

The Yankees are the most storied franchise in all of sports, but they haven’t been “The Yankees” in quite some time. Sure, they’re always competitive, but just one World Series championship in the last 20 years is a bit jarring. After the Yankees three-peated from 1998-2000, they went on a spending spree to replace their old starters. Why not? They’re a huge market and have an ownership group that isn’t afraid to spend. The Yankees learned in 2004 (the year Boston won their first title since 1918) that they were missing the mark from an analytics perspective. Boston was getting value from no-named prospects, while the Yankees were piecing together high-profile players in an attempt to “buy” championships. Why was this the case? Boston’s GM at the time, Theo Epstein, was a sabermetrics practitioner, and the Red Sox had a foundation rooted in data when constructing their roster. The result? Three more championships (2007, 2013, 2018), with Theo building a legacy as one of the greatest GM’s in baseball. Succeeding in 2021 and beyond will require organizational transformation. Newer brands are setting themselves up for success by aligning data, product, and marketing from the start. For older brands, the clock is ticking, and irresponsible spending won’t solve the problem. How will they define their legacies? To learn more about how putting a no-code personalization platform into marketers’ hands will revolutionize your growth, read our recent white paper, How Self-Serve Segmentation Led to a 300x Boost in Engagement.