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If your organization has recently invested in creating Customer 360s, you probably already know how powerful and game-changing they can be for your marketing efforts. After all, once you've got accurate Customer 360s, it's easier than ever to create segments, lists, and audiences out of your customer data platform (CDP) — which you can use to send tailored messaging based on real data.

But did you know that Customer 360s have other potential uses as well?

Below, we take a quick look at Customer 360s and why they are such a powerful part of modern marketing. We also review some of the key ways you can use it in marketing, sales, and customer support functions.

What is a Customer 360?

A Customer 360 is a single, comprehensive profile that holds all of your business's data about one of your customers or users. They're also sometimes called 360 views or customer 360 profiles. 

They are created by consolidating customer data from disparate systems, including your:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
• Point of Sales (POS) system
• Accounting system
• Marketing tools 
• Website analytics tools
• First-party data (ex: forms and surveys)
• Third-party data providers
• and more

A Customer 360 can contain anything from a customer’s demographics to their purchase history, transaction details, customer support tickets, actions on your website, and more. Any data you collect about your customers can be included in a Customer 360.

This data is ultimately what makes Customer 360s so powerful. By consolidating all of your data into a single profile, Customer 360s offer you the opportunity to design your marketing, sales, and support strategies with as much information as possible. This allows for true 1:1 marketing and the bespoke, hyper-personalized touch that customers have increasingly come to expect. 

The top Customer 360 use cases

1. Design and implement 1:1 marketing

When most businesses think about Customer 360s, this is the use case that comes to mind. And for good reason: Customer 360s offer a powerful tool for marketing teams to leverage throughout the customer lifecycle. 

While each business needs to determine for itself how to use Customer 360s in its marketing efforts, some ideas include:

• Breaking out customers into different segments based on similarities they exhibit, for example, based on geographics, behavior, psychographics, and demographics
• Generating customer audiences and lists to receive specific marketing messages, for example, through social or email, that are designed to resonate with them
• Deploy true 1:1 marketing where messaging is tailored to individual customers using the data that you know about them

By leveraging Customer 360s for marketing, you increase the likelihood that your messaging will hit its target and achieve its desired result — whether that’s more sales, interactions, sign-ups, or some other action. That means more ROI for your campaigns and, ideally, a boost to your bottom line.

2. Optimize your cross-selling and up-selling strategies

Customer 360s aren’t just limited to your marketing team, however. By becoming more data-driven in their approach, your sales team can also see a lot of success: converting one-time customers into repeat customers and boosting the lifetime value of your customers.  

Consider, for example, the different ways that your sales team can leverage customer data to optimize their cross-selling and up-selling strategies:

• Tailoring product recommendations based on what you know about your customers, such as their interests 
• Recommending products based on similarities shared with other customers via a “Customers also purchased” option
• Prompting renewals and reorders based on purchase dates and time; for example, if you know that customers tend to order replacements or refills 10 months after an initial purchase

In this way, Customer 360s help power demand generation, retention, and referrals, supercharging your growth flywheel and making it easier to hit your targets. 

3. Provide tailored customer support

Likewise, the data in your Customer 360s can be leveraged by members of your customer support team to facilitate more meaningful, helpful, and human support, as long as your profiles include all the right data. 

For example, when a customer submits a ticket or calls for support, your support team can:

• Immediately see past tickets submitted by the customer. If the customer sees the same issue as they did in the past, this can point your support team quickly to an effective resolution; if it’s unrelated, the context can help your team diffuse any potential hostility.
• See which pages of your website the customer has recently viewed — potentially including pages about your cancellation, refund, or subscription policies, which might point to a customer who is unhappy with their product.
• Take notes on the interaction which can be used in future interactions should the customer contact you again looking for support. 

How to build an accurate Customer 360

Haven't begun creating Customer 360s yet but wanted to know if they're worth the effort and the investment? After reading about the use cases above, we hope you'll join us in offering a resounding “Yes!” to that question.

Bought in, but don't know where to start? An accurate Customer 360 requires two key pieces of technology:

• A cloud data warehouse (CDW) capable of consolidating customer data from multiple systems into a single location where it can be analyzed, cleaned, and formatted 
• A customer data platform (CDP) capable of transforming that data into valuable, easy-to-use insights

The Simon CDP, designed and purpose-built to sit on top of a Cloud Data Platform like Snowflake, is today's most powerful solution. 

An easy-to-navigate interface means that your sales, marketing, and support teams can all begin gleaning valuable insights from Customer 360s with little to no technical skill required. Strategic deployment of AI throughout the platform means that it's easier than ever to process vast amounts of data and put it to work in impactful campaigns. 

Ready to learn more? Take a free virtual tour of Simon’s platform today.

Last week, Uniphore announced it is acquiring ActionIQ and Infoworks as part of its vision to integrate enterprise data with AI agents to enable better customer support interactions.

This is one of (likely) many enterprise SaaS integration/consolidation plays coming as SaaS undergoes a categorical (in both senses of the word) transformation not seen since the category itself disrupted on-premise software.

In this case, specifically, it looks like Uniphore believes in the power an enterprise CDP like ActionIQ can create by collecting, organizing, structuring and integrating data (across the enterprise) to improve the performance of its AI agents.

What’s also implied for CDPs in this story is where the standalone CDP fits (or doesn’t) in the enterprise data supply chain.

The death of the standalone CDP?

Standalone CDPs are transforming into cloud data connected activation solutions as businesses organize all of their data in cloud data warehouses and invest in compatible applications that connect and interoperate with their data environment.

While this trend of applications connecting to core data infrastructure is not unique to the CDP category, the trend of CEPs (customer experience platforms) and multi-channel marketing hubs building “CDP-light” functionality is also having a narrowing effect on the CDP’s role in the data supply chain.

More simply put, tools are getting better at interoperating with cloud data infrastructure and businesses are bringing more of their data into their cloud data environments. Florian Delval, previously of AIQ, actually had a great take / visual on this just 3 days ago:

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Data supply chain consolidation is naturally concurrent with market consolidation: a tale as old as Carnegie Steel.

It’s not unlike how direct to consumer e-commerce killed some legacy retailers and caused others to make strategic or even desperate acquisitions (remember when Walmart paid $3b in cash for Jet.com?).

I’ve written about how cloud data warehouse evolution is at odds with standalone CDP strategies to control your data, how previous attempts by CDPs to become a platform for all customer experience have failed, how standalone CDPs need to be able to create measurable business value, and most recently a warning against focusing on the “ways of doing the job” and not the “jobs to be done.”

Of the standalone enterprise CDPs, I have always had respect for ActionIQ. They amassed an impressive customer roster and delivered an enterprise solution capable of servicing some of the largest and most complex of organizations. They’re smart and have played a role in defining the category.

What I see with this acquisition is an outcome of these trends playing out; in Tasso (their CEO's) words:

“Finally, while I always believed in CDPs as a standalone category, the rise of AI has changed the game. I now believe that the future of CDPs lies within a larger, AI-first platforms (s.p.). Standalone CDPs will struggle to meet the demands of enterprise buyers who seek end-to-end, AI-first solutions.”

I don't fully agree with that last sentence. Every link in the data supply chain will use AI to support various use cases, whether it's insights generation, identity resolution, content personalization, etc. Standalone CDPs need to justify their link in the supply chain and leverage AI to improve it. AI itself can't be the raison d'etre.

Businesses aren't looking for "AI solutions;" they're looking for solutions to a problem or to deliver a business outcome, and every vendor is expected to have an "AI story" at solving that problem more effectively or efficiently.

The “zero data AI cloud”

Notwithstanding the foregoing, and with respect and congratulations to all parties involved, the positioning of this combined entity is a MadLib of industry jargon that feels contradictory to everything that got us to this point…for two reasons:

1. Businesses don’t want another cloud. They want to bring purpose-built applications and AI agents to their data. The whole point of the AIQ acquisition is to enable seamless data access across the enterprise, which they define as "a composable data layer." To then call the combination of the data layer, modeling and Al agents a "cloud" connotes another data store just to service customer support interactions, in this case.
2. “Zero data” is a perplexing choice of words that seems to contradict the point: to deliver more data to support better outcomes. It's not only focused on the way of doing the job vs. outcome, but it's also a literal contradiction in terms.
   

I’ll be interested to see what comes of this as it relates to ActionIQ’s customers. The technology play makes sense for Uniphore. It’s unclear how the rest of this shakes out.

Marketers are increasingly lauded for possessing the “Swiss army knife” skillset: customer research and content creation to campaign strategy and data analysis — the list grows. Among these skills is the growing demand for data analysis. With the trove of data a digital company can collect, they need team members who can make sense of it to perform their roles more effectively.

Unfortunately, many marketers aren’t schooled in data analysis; we learn as we go. Many of us are stuck manually pulling reports and sifting through them. 

How can we supplement our data analysis skills and make sense of valuable customer information? This article covers the essentials of customer experience analytics and the tools to supplement the lack of a marketing data specialist, making our work easier.

What is customer experience (CX) analytics?

Customer experience analytics discovers, collects, and interprets data about the customer journey. It’s a fancy term for data supporting marketing efforts (and most company efforts, specifically marketing, in this article). Customer experience analytics furnishes evidence that shoppers interact positively with your brand and become loyal, returning customers — or it exposes a journey fraught with friction. 

If done right, CX analytics (which we call it for short) includes as many customer touchpoints as possible to document an accurate, multi-channel journey map. This journey map will highlight customer pain points, seek improvement opportunities, and help you identify gaps where customers fall off the map.

How does CX analytics benefit marketers?

If CX analytics sounds best confined to, well, your CX team, you’re wrong. Yes, the burden of CX data shouldn’t fall solely on the marketer. However, most internal teams benefit from access to CX analytics. This is precisely how accurate customer data makes marketers’ lives easier.

Proving the benefits of branding campaigns

KPIs give concrete answers to the stakeholder question, “Is your marketing leading to revenue?” However, KPIs are harder to track for branding campaigns than direct response strategies. How do you measure the value of your brand recognition?

CX analytics can signal that your brand has a positive reputation, helping you measure CLTV, churn, retention, etc.

Creating personalization opportunities

CX analytics can segment customers by behavior, allowing marketers to reach a particular audience with personalized messaging. 89% of marketers see a positive ROI when they personalize campaigns. Some of the most common hallmarks of good CX and marketing require personalization.

For instance, you can send reminder emails to a segment of customers whose subscriptions will lapse this week about the upcoming renewal. Without segmented audiences, reaching these customers before they churn would be impossible.

Identifying customer retention opportunities

CX analytics identifies customers that fall through the cracks, which is where marketers can step in to keep customers engaged.

From the above example, the segment audience of at-risk churners is one method, but many more opportunities exist to encourage customer loyalty. When you tap into customer data, you find one-time shoppers on the fence about a second purchase, product fans returning regularly, and VIPs making the most of your loyalty program. 

Identifying how these customers interact with your product gives you an idea of how to market toward them to keep them coming back (see also: loyalty programs!).

Increasing ROI

Analytics are a necessity in modern marketing as companies increasingly rely on data-driven decisions. However, 43% of marketers still rely on manual attribution using spreadsheets. To make matters worse, most marketers can’t quantitatively demonstrate the impact of marketing.

CX analytics will help you prove marketing works at all funnel stages. It’ll even help you take it a step further — you can use these analytics to increase ROI once you find gaps in the customer journey.

How does CX analytics work?

Most marketers lack access to robust CX data and are stuck manually attributing marketing efforts. A system of collecting, unifying, and activating data would put marketers ahead of the competition, and that’s what good CX analytics does. 

Real-time data collection

For accurate insights, you should collect data from multiple channels in real time. Manually pulling reports results in inaccurate customer analytics since it introduces human error and does not provide up-to-the-minute information. 

The best CX analytics, when effectively configured, is automatic. That alone saves marketers hours.

Unifying data

To unify data, you bring all the information from disparate sources into one single source of truth (SSOT) in a Cloud Data Platform like Snowflake. This includes social media interactions, website visits, customer service chats, app installs, and more. 

Then, using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Simon can use this unified data to compose a 360 view of each customer, compiling these interactions under one customer ID. With all this data unified, you can segment customers by their behaviors and identify all the elements of a customer journey. 

Activating data

Once data is unified, what’s left is to activate it — make the data accessible and actionable. 

Often, marketers must manually fulfill this activity. We take unified data and use it to create different email newsletters by customer persona or build a social media campaign. We also build reports that make these tactics iterable.

However, these days we have tools that make activating data less of a burden on the marketer — more on that in a minute.

The challenges of collecting quality CX data

We can find a solution by naming the problems associated with quality analytics. This is why most marketers aren’t using CX data effectively.

Data siloes

Simply unify all your data to an SSOT, and you’ll have an accurate picture of each customer. Easy, right? 

There’s a reason so many marketers are still manually attributing with spreadsheets. Collecting data from multiple sources means cleaning and consolidating it, which without the right tool, takes too much time for many teams to execute.

Data scope

Most marketers, though data-minded, aren’t data analysts. How can we ingest data from multiple sources, mainly as our customer base grows and marketing strategy expands to new channels?

CX analytics requires customer insights teams to be on board, and the right tools ensure buy-in.

Creating context

Data needs context to be actionable, but it’s difficult to interpret without experience. Many marketers are expected to pull their reports and analyze results, whether certified to do so or not.

Why CX analytics needs a CDP

CDPs are the answer. Even high-profile and experienced teams need the right marketing strategy, customer data,  and tools — including a CDP like Simon Data to make customer data actionable.

Take, for instance, BARK, a subscription service for dog toys and treats. Over the years, BARK’s demand grew, sales increased, and customer data outpaced their tools for CX insights.

“BARK was dealing with and manually processing a ton of customer information,” says Kristen Elmer, Sr. Director, eCommerce Sales at BARK. “It was too much to manage, and the customer data wasn’t always easily accessible or actionable.”  

A CDP works with a data warehouse to deliver actionable data insights for all teams, including marketing. “Simon makes testing, learning, segmenting, and customizing so much easier. I was doing this work manually in CSVs before, and now we can click, click, click and get a custom email out and not have to worry about undertaking a massive process,” says Kristen.

How do CDPs make life easier? These are the customer experience analytics they use to supercharge a marketing strategy.

The CX analytics your marketing strategy needs

There are some essential analytics for marketing specifically to inform your strategy. CDP or otherwise, you’ll want to be sure you can gather this information.

Customer journey visualization

A full breakdown of the customer journey for each persona is one of the most challenging and essential CX analytics. This requires multi-channel visualization of the marketing funnel from discovery to purchase and beyond.

Journey mapping and funnel analysis are some of the most common ways to visualize customer journeys, and visualization is essential for finding bottlenecks.

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Many tools exist to help you build a customer journey map. For instance, Simon’s Customer 360 gives users access to individualized customer profiles that give an accurate view of each touchpoint.

Sentiment analysis

Keeping an eye on customers’ feelings helps you understand the “why” behind their actions.

Sentiment analysis can involve using AI to summarize feedback from social media, reviews, and surveys. It can also include compiling feedback and attributing an NPS or CSAT score to customer interaction through surveys.

Behavioral analytics

Behavioral analytics, which gets more granular, identify patterns in customer interactions. For instance, they reveal which landing pages lead to the highest conversion or which links receive the most click-throughs. These insights are available in session recordings, heatmaps, and other similar tools.

Predictive analytics

Wouldn’t it be nice to transform customer data into predictions? Machine learning makes that a reality by ingesting all your customer data and identifying patterns in similar customers.

With predictive analytics, you can identify customers at risk of churn or shoppers who need an extra incentive to purchase. Predictive analytics can’t promise a bright future if you follow its warnings, but it does save hours of time identifying actionable insights, saving you from hunting for the patterns yourself.

Making CX analytics work for you

Without tools to support us, many marketers would have to trudge to school for a data science degree to excel in their roles. While it’s important we absorb as much as we can about data analysis, we have these tools to fill in the gaps.

The first step is looking at your marketing goals and current analytics efforts. Where do you need support, and where is your current process lacking? Putting customers at the heart of your strategy will make your marketing strategy more efficient, so it’s worth the audit.

In marketing, experimentation is the key to continued success. It fuels innovation and keeps campaigns and programs from becoming stale. The challenge is that experimentation is too often limited to what’s “doable,” resulting in stagnation. Experiments that could redefine marketing strategies and engagement methods fall by the wayside because of logistical constraints, siloed data, or lack of resources.

To take your experimentation to the next level, you need a tool to simplify the complex. A Customer Data Platform (or CDP) can be that tool.  

At its core, a CDP is a platform for consolidating data, organizing it, and (most importantly) making it actionable. Because data is central to both modern marketing and robust experimentation, the right CDP — particularly one with seamless integration into your marketing channels — can turbo-charge your experimentation roadmap.

A CDP empowers and encourages marketing experimentation in a myriad of ways. Let’s look at six of the most prominent examples.

1. Unified Customer Profiles

What exactly is a unified customer profile?

A CDP consolidates data from multiple datasets and sources, giving marketers a unified customer profile. This includes interactions from various channels — website visits, app usage, product purchases, and responses to marketing messages — creating a robust, accurate portrait of each customer.

How it encourages experimentation

With expanded access to detailed profiles, marketers have a greater data pool with which to experiment. They can test diverse content, personalized messaging, and tailored experiences based on unique customer attributes. Moving beyond generalized campaigns, they can design and execute micro-targeted touchpoints that speak to specific customers and their needs.

A real-world example

Consider a pet food company whose customers are pet parents for various breeds and life stages. They could test whether breed-specific messaging (e.g., targeting Labrador owners with food benefits specific to Labrador needs) outperforms general content.  

They could also test unique content for multiple breeds, determining which breeds are more responsive than others. Because CDPs enable dynamic content blocks, this could be achieved far more efficiently than creating individual campaigns for each breed. This boosts overall engagement and helps you identify what matters most to each segment, enabling a new level of personalization.

2. Advanced segmentation and predictive analytics

What it means

A leading-edge CDP empowers marketers to create sophisticated segmentation using AI and machine learning.  Specifically, AI can more efficiently identify micro-segments based on marketing-suggested variables while improving predictive analytics, such as a customer’s likelihood to purchase a given product or category. 

This means campaigns can target specific customer groups based on behavior, preferences, and predicted actions.

How this encourages marketing experimentation

Segment creation becomes more agile, enabling faster, more targeted testing. Marketers can swiftly deploy campaigns tailored to each micro-segment and iterate based on real-time performance, thus enhancing both revenue and lifetime value (LTV) by delivering highly relevant experiences.

Example

A retail brand might experiment with propensity models to validate the likelihood that targeted customers will purchase a specific category or even individual products.  Similarly, they can test different creative treatments within these segments to determine which content, creative and offers are the most effective.

3. Creative testing at scale

What it means

Beyond simply testing subject lines, a CDP enables A/B testing of multiple creative elements through easy-to-manage workflows. AI can further streamline these workflows, suggesting copy for testing and simplifying content personalization via natural language prompts in the campaign builder.

How does it encourage testing?

With these improved efficiencies, marketers can more frequently test a variety of elements, from design components and copy elements to featured products and offers. This empowers the development of new programs and the continuous improvement of evergreen campaigns, empowering innovation and avoiding stagnation.

Here’s an example

In a recurring user flow, marketers might use the 80/20 framework for the A/B testing of creative elements, rotating new creative against winning control treatments. In this structure, 80% of the target audience receives the control (the current default), while 20% receive a new “test” treatment. 

If any test treatment outperforms the control, it becomes the new standard, with variations continuing to be tested against it. This iterative approach keeps campaigns fresh while limiting the risk of reduced performance to no more than 20% of the base at any given time.

4. Cross-channel integration

What it means

CDPs with multi-channel integrations can handle communications across email, SMS, push notifications, and paid media. They also aggregate tracking data across channels, making it easy to analyze the combined impact of cross-channel efforts.

How this encourages experimentation

Marketers can test cross-channel strategies more effectively, optimizing campaigns based on aggregate results rather than individual channel performance. This helps refine where marketing dollars and efforts are best allocated and allows for the mixing and matching of multiple channels based on customer engagement.

Here’s an example

A retailer could test whether lead nurturing is more effective via email, paid media retargeting, or a combination. 

A CDP with multi-channel integrations makes this simple through A/B/C testing of three lead-nurture journeys tracked over a four-week window. The results tell the tale of which journey produces the highest conversion and ROI for the media spend. 

Similarly, marketers can quantify the incremental value of a newly launched channel, such as SMS. Half the audience (control) only receives email, and half (test) receives email plus SMS. The difference in overall performance between the two is the incremental value of SMS.

5. Automated journeys

What it means

A CDP enables automated journeys, using customer behavior and activity data to trigger communications designed to drive engagement and conversion. These journeys can be tailored to unique segments and customer paths, allowing for a more hands-free approach to testing long-term, multi-step interactions.

How automated journeys help with experimentation

Rather than testing individual messages, marketers can measure the impact of complete customer journeys over time. This includes experimenting with different treatment types for customer segments, running automated journeys, and optimizing based on ongoing results.

A marketing example

For a 30-day onboarding journey targeting new prospects, marketers could test three approaches: offer-heavy, content-focused, or a blend of content and offer. Once created, these test journeys can be applied independently to different segments, such as prospects from organic channels separate from paid media. 

The tests can run autonomously over several weeks, with periodic check-ins to ensure that each test delivers meaningful results and to determine when statistical significance is reached for each segment. Once a winner is chosen, that treatment is simply rolled out to 100% of the future audience.

6. Enhanced attribution and measurement

What it means

A CDP offers advanced attribution models, enabling accurate measurement of how different touchpoints and channels contribute to traffic, conversion, and revenue. 

By analyzing each interaction across channels, marketers gain insights into their campaigns' cumulative impact and each element's granular impact. 

How it promotes experimentation

With this detailed insight, marketers can measure the effects of specific experiments and fine-tune their approach. Enhanced attribution helps pinpoint which elements within a multi-week journey deliver the best ROI, enabling continuous optimization of that journey and informing future campaigns.

What it looks like

A retail company might run a seasonal campaign with email, social media, digital ads, and SMS over four weeks. Using a CDP, the marketing team implements a multi-touch attribution model to evaluate each channel’s contribution to revenue. 

Early results could reveal that SMS drives higher in-store traffic, while email and ads boost online sales. This would allow them to shift the focus of SMS to in-store promotions while optimizing paid media ads and email for online engagement.

Go forth and experiment!

As customer data grows in volume and sophistication, so do the opportunities to test new and exciting customer experiences that are informed and inspired by that data. However, to harness this potential, marketers need tools that simplify and streamline the testing process. 

A CDP fills that gap by acting as a customer targeting engine, enabling DTC marketers to mobilize their data for real-time, scalable experiments. By embracing the right CDP, marketers can drive meaningful innovation and refine their strategies faster and with greater insight.

Marketers who use a CDP as a central component in their strategies gain a decisive advantage, transforming data into actionable segmentation and experiments that drive results. 

These marketers can continually innovate, ensuring their campaigns stay fresh, effective, and aligned with evolving consumer needs. In doing so, they build brand loyalty, increase lifetime value, and ultimately drive business growth, particularly in today’s competitive environment.

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Great customer marketing doesn't happen by accident. It takes an army to deliver personalized experiences that drive results — the right mix of resources, expertise, and technology. 

Many brands have valuable customer data but lack the team capacity, specialized knowledge, or even the time to transform it into revenue-driving campaigns. Even with powerful tools like CDPs, technology alone isn't enough to deliver results.

That's why we're introducing campaign services that combine our AI platform with expert guidance from Simon. As a marketer, you probably know what campaigns you want to run, but we break down the barriers to getting them out the door.  We provide the extra resources, specialized knowledge, and hands-on support you need to drive measurable results faster.

Simon’s approach to customer marketing excellence

Our services offer brands a unique approach to customer marketing:

Data-driven campaign strategy

Many marketing campaigns start with too much guesswork. We're changing that. Our strategy service digs into your customer data to uncover the campaigns worth running and the messages worth sending. Using Simon’s campaign services, you’ll get:

• Campaign strategies built on actual customer behavior, not hunches
• Personalization that makes sense for your specific audience and goals
• Smart segmentation that targets the right customers at the right time

Data readiness

As the adage goes, “Garbage data in, garbage campaigns out.” We ensure your customer data is clean, connected, and campaign-ready. Our team can help you:

• Determine the data you need for the business outcomes you want
• Ensure you’re collecting the right data for your marketing needs
• Connect data from multiple sources into unified customer profiles
• Structure your data for sophisticated segmentation and targeting

Campaign execution

This is where strategy meets action. We help you move faster by:

• Managing the campaign setup process
• Implementing advanced targeting using Simon's Customer 360 capabilities
• Configuring tests that drive continuous optimization

The result? Campaigns that launch faster and perform better from day one.

Results-focused optimization

Let’s get real about what’s working and what isn’t. Through rigorous testing and analysis, we spot optimization opportunities others miss. We help you improve your campaigns through:

• Strategic A/B testing that moves key metrics
• In-depth performance analysis
• Clear reporting that ties results to business outcomes
• Regular assessments to identify growth opportunities

Flexible support, tailored to you

Every team has different needs. Whether you need help with strategy, execution, optimization — or all three — we tailor our support to match your goals. Our campaign services will help you launch sophisticated, personalized campaigns faster, drive measurable improvements in customer engagement and retention, and get more value from your existing customer data.

Ready to level up your customer marketing? Book a free marketing strategy workshop with us below!

Despite massive investments in martech, data, and every tool under the sun, most brands still struggle to deliver true 1:1 marketing personalization.

After ten years of martech growth, it’s a little wild. 

I hear the same frustrations repeatedly in my conversations with marketing leaders:

• "I don't know who my best customer is."
• "It takes us weeks to launch a single campaign."
• "We have tons of data but don't know what to do with it."

We can do better — and in 2025, brands will have to deliver a personalized customer experience to survive.

Why personalized customer marketing matters more than ever

The data tells a clear story. We've seen that companies that master 1:1  personalization drive 40% more revenue than their peers. And the stakes keep getting higher — 75% of American consumers now say they're more likely to be loyal to brands that understand them on a personal level.

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But here's the reality check: 66% of consumers feel brands treat them like numbers rather than individuals. Nobody wants to be reduced to "Customer ID: 5827327dj" or "Discount Seeker." I certainly don't, and neither do your customers.

The customer marketing roadmap that works

So, how do we actually achieve marketing personalization? At Simon, I’ve had countless conversations with successful marketing and data leaders, like Leslie Lorenz, Head of Retail at Snowflake. We've developed a practical roadmap for achieving true 1:1 personalization in 2025. Here's how it works.

Start with strategy, not technology

I can't stress this enough: start with your business goals, not your tech stack or data wish list. Most organizations have three goals. Ask yourself:

- Do you need to drive attention?

- Convert that attention to revenue?

- Or retain customers and sell them more?

Your answer shapes everything that follows. Too many teams jump straight to tactics and fail because they skipped this crucial step.

And I get it. Building campaigns is the “fun” part of marketing, but this is one place where taking the extra cycles to align your business and marketing strategy will serve as your “North Star” for growth. 

Once you understand your marketing strategy, you must align your data foundation with it. Let’s discuss.

Build your data foundation the right way

When it comes to your data foundation, this is where my collaboration with Leslie at Snowflake has been particularly illuminating. We've found that successful personalization requires three critical elements in your data foundation:

1. Data readiness

We always tell our customers to catalog their needs before building their martech stack. Map your data sources, centralize them on a cloud data platform like Snowflake, and — this is crucial — make sure it's actually marketing-ready. 

Start with the most important question: What data is needed for our customer marketing strategy? If you are just starting this journey, focus on:

• Customer purchasing data
• Web interaction data
• Email and SMS data

If you’re further along in building out your customer marketing program, use your Snowflake data to tackle both customer and non-customer data, such as: 

• Identity data (email, phone number, device IDs)
• Demographic data (Age, gender, location, job title)
• Environmental data (weather conditions, seasonal patterns, local events)
• Behavioral data (website interactions, email engagement, purchase history)
• Preference data (communication, product, & content preferences)
• Campaign interaction data (campaign response, A/B testing, cross-channel)
• Technical data (device types, browser information, operating systems, platforms)

2. Customer360 implementation

With your data in Snowflake, you can replace static spreadsheets with real-time customer insights. Marketing personalization requires more than just access to customer data. It requires activating Customer360s — complete, unique customer profiles for every customer using entity and identity resolution. 

By truly understanding your customers, you can deliver personalized messaging that resonates.

We’ve been talking about the importance of Customer360s for a long time, but in reality, most companies have what I call “Customer40s” or, if they’re lucky, “Customer90s” — not 360s. This means marketers fail to deliver a fully connected and personalized customer experience.

In 2025, that’s not good enough. Marketers need to incorporate contextual data and insights into their marketing strategies.

Let me share a real-world example that I love. Look at how Zillow does this: They don't just track basic user data, they integrate everything from web behavior and financing details to property specifics and geographic context — and it all lives in Snowflake.

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This comprehensive data helps them personalize every customer's experience when they build their marketing segmentation and campaigns.

Get smart about customer marketing execution with audience segmentation

Here's a segmentation secret that's saved our customers countless times: start small. I recommend beginning with recently lapsed high-value customers — this single segment can often pay for your entire personalization initiative.

When it comes to marketing campaigns, the biggest challenge isn't knowing what to say; it's figuring out how to say it at scale. 

Focus on:

- Meeting audiences where they are

- Creating truly personalized offers (not just mail-merge level personalization) and compelling content

- Orchestrating across all touchpoints

- Weaving in personal recommendations throughout the entire customer journey

My hot take? Combine these campaign tactics with “always on” marketing using triggered communications.

Measure what matters

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Successful measurement requires looking at these areas:

1. Core metrics

 Track ROI and engagement by segment, CAC, and CLV. But don't stop there. Consider which segments overperformed — or underperformed.

2. Behavioral insights

 Look for trends in how different segments respond to your campaigns. You might be surprised by what you learn when you dig into this data.

3. AI-driven analysis

 This is where marketing is heading. Use AI to analyze campaign performance, predict behaviors, suggestion segmentation improvements, and identify customer fatigue before it impacts your results.

4. Optimization opportunities

Once you've established your baseline metrics and gathered insights, it's time to test and improve your efforts. Analyze your segments, perform A/B testing, and consider optimization opportunities like messaging, timing, and channel effectiveness. 

Start with one area of optimization at a time, measure results, and then expand based on what you learn. Don’t try to test everything at once. 

My best advice for getting started

After helping numerous brands transform their personalization efforts, here's what I know works:

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1. Start with a clear strategy — not tactics

2. Build your data foundation methodically

3. Begin with one high-value segment

4. Test, measure, and iterate constantly

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Perfect personalization isn't the goal – better relationships with your customers is. 

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Want to discuss this with me? Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to our team at Simon Data. We're always happy to share what we've learned from working with leading brands on their personalization journeys.

The problems CDPs were always intended to solve

About six months ago, I wrote about how the CDP space would need to evolve in light of MarTech consolidation and headwinds in enterprise software. The conclusion was: 

“To be relevant in the current MarTech gauntlet, a CDP must not only help you move data around, but it must also help you recognize your customer, help you know things about your customer that you don’t know today, and most importantly, it must do that in the service of measurable marketing ROI. “

My prediction then was that infrastructure CDPs — like Segment and Hightouch — would push to focus their product marketing on marketing ROI. I mentioned examples of previous times CDPs have made product and packaging decisions to get closer to the marketing persona, often with real challenges (e.g., Twilio Engage). 

The “composable” trend has significantly changed the CDP category over the past several years. It has created much more cost- and resource-efficient marketing data operations. It has also shifted ownership of the CDP toward the IT or data persona and pulled the CDP further from the stakeholders and business outcomes it was intended to impact. 

So, as the road ahead mandates clear incremental business value from a CDP investment, the category has, paradoxically, prioritized the “ways of doing the job” instead of the “jobs to be done.” 

One big caveat is that with improvements in neural networks, data structure will become crucial to training and, therefore, AI-driven marketing campaign ideation, optimization, etc. This makes the end value a marketing team can create fundamentally a data problem. 

This is the problem CDPs were always intended to solve. 

The disconnect is that CDPs must bring these solutions to market with crucial context on the problems that marketing leaders and operators are trying to solve. Undertaking an initiative focused on the “ways of doing the job” (AI-driven marketing optimization, in this case) is a recipe for team misalignment, scope creep, and a result void of measurable outcomes. 

Raise your hand if you’ve undertaken a technology investment in the past several years that failed to realize the intended business outcome. Was there strong alignment from the beginning on the outcome, and was it shared across teams?

 Raise your hand if you’ve undertaken a technology investment in the past several years that failed to realize the intended business outcome. Was there strong alignment from the beginning on the outcome, and was it shared across teams? 

CDPs alone aren't driving personalized marketing experiences

According to Gartner’s survey data over the past two years, 42% of CMOs believe their organizations deliver 1:1 personalized messages to customers, 14% of organizations believe they have the right data to achieve a Customer 360, and about 1/3 believe they have the resources to execute their goals. Budgets declined 3.5x faster this year than they did last, reaching a three-year low. 

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Faced with a diminishing budget, limited and insufficient resources, and sustained or heightened performance expectations, the worst thing a marketing leader could underwrite is an investment without a crystal clear business case.

And yet, our collective industry — and the vultures that circle enterprises’ seven-figure purchasing decisions — have done marketing leaders no favors in helping to either disambiguate their options or deliver business outcomes, precisely because they are compensated to ambiguate options and are not compensated to deliver business outcomes. 

As an example, here is a word cloud of three industry-leading CDP thought leaders’ buyer’s guides: 

I was not surprised to see the prioritization of technical jargon (albeit I expected “composable” would be more prevalent).

I was surprised to see precisely zero mention of the following: 

• Revenue 
• Acquisition 
• Retention
• “Use case” (insane)
• ROI / ROAS 

The list goes on. 

Another set of related trends has emerged alongside CDPs shifting focus to primarily service data and IT stakeholders: 

1. Organizations are using fewer CDPs
2. Yet, organizations, on average, still use multiple CDPs 

According to the CDP Institute, the average number of CDPs per organization dropped from 2.9 to 2.1 in 2024. 

While the use of multiple CDPs historically involved a problem of category definition, I’ll explain here why this is shifting, how it relates to the above trend, and why it matters. 

Organizations “using multiple CDPs” usually meant that the enterprise utilized multiple tools on the spectrum of data collection, organization, and activation. Category bundling — of tag managers, rETL tools, identity resolution-focused tools, and, in some cases, analytics tools and even marketing hubs as CDPs — explained this stat. 

Now, organizations are consolidating tooling across the board and the workflow of their CDP into their marketing hub. I wrote about this when Klaviyo first announced their “CDP” and, more recently when Braze announced their data platform. 

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The real elephants in the room, however, aren’t the multi-channel marketing hub solutions whose ICP ranges from Shopify stores to high-scale digital natives but rather the enterprise data clouds and how these solutions are positioned for the next wave of AI-enabled marketing. 

As I wrote after Salesforce launched its data cloud, the company's strategy is to use Matthew McConaughey to convince you that you still own your data (and you do) when you store it in Salesforce Data Cloud and then lease back access to your data for anything you want to do with it. 

Here’s the thing: business stakeholders don’t care where the data is stored, if the application is composable, etc. They just want access to it to unblock their use cases and to drive business value. For this reason, we’re seeing a combination of: 

1. IT-focused CDPs and rETL solutions used by data teams to organize data within a data warehouse, and
2. Business-user-focused CDPs used to power marketing use cases and the analytics around them (that copy and store data within their own ecosystem and charge you rent) 

While this combination of solutions effectively solves the needs of each constituent group, the decision to use an “Enterprise Data Cloud” solution in addition to centralizing data within a cloud data warehouse is suboptimal from a cost and architecture perspective. 

This leaves business stakeholders abandoned by the category and forced to choose between only bad options. 

While modern CDPs may have lost the script in delivering business value, some, like Simon Data, remain substantially focused on the strategy, operations, and technology requirements of providing an effective customer marketing program. 

We at Simon have not always gotten this right, either. I’m not yet ready to make New Year's resolutions for 2025, and I have too many personal flaws to prioritize CDP positioning even if I were, but as a business, we are investing significant support in this area for our customers. 

The CDP was always intended to be a solution for marketers to access data and unblock data-driven use cases that drive measurable marketing outcomes. However, along the way, and with good reason, the focus has shifted toward this job's technical requirements and capabilities. 

The next frontier of AI-driven and enabled marketing will require not only adherence to the technical underpinnings (which I do not mean to diminish) but also relentless focus on the business outcomes such initiatives are intended to achieve. 

As we approach 2025, marketing leaders face a stark reality: Without goals and measurement, an organization is just a collection of activities. But here's what's keeping CMOs up at night: even with robust measurement, most marketing teams are building their OKR frameworks on shaky ground. In a landscape where customer data capabilities are doubling constantly and channel complexity is increasing exponentially, the approach to setting OKRs as goals and mistaking it for strategy is a recipe for failure.

The most successful marketing organizations in 2025 aren't starting with metrics — they're starting with strategy. Before diving into OKRs and KPIs, leading teams are taking a critical step back to answer fundamental questions: Are you focused on driving attention and awareness? Converting that attention into revenue? Or retaining and expanding your customer relationships?

Each of these core objectives demands different strategies, different channels, and different types of customer data. As marketing technology continues to evolve and customer expectations reach new heights, the gap between strategy-first organizations and metric-first organizations will only widen.

If this seems overwhelming or you don't know how to start, you're not alone! Simon Data can help you think through your marketing strategy to ensure you hit your marketing goals.

Let's break down how to build this foundation before setting your OKRs, ensuring you're not just measuring activities, but driving real business impact in 2025 and beyond.

The strategic sequence for marketing success

1. Define your business goal

Start by identifying which stage of the marketing funnel needs the most attention:

• Awareness and attention: Focusing on reaching new audiences and building brand recognition
• Conversion and revenue: Turning existing attention into customer acquisition
• Retention and expansion: Growing revenue from existing customers through repeat purchases and upselling

Your primary goal will determine everything that follows, from channel selection to data requirements.

2. Align your channel strategy

Once you've identified your primary business goal, audit your available channels and tactics based on three key criteria:

• Execution capability: Do you have the tools and expertise to effectively use these channels?
• Resource alignment: Do you have the team and budget to maintain consistent presence?
• ICP fit: Are these channels where your ideal customer profile (ICP) naturally engages?

3. Map your data requirements

Different marketing strategies require different types of customer data. Before setting goals, ensure you have (or can acquire) the right data:

• Awareness campaigns need audience behavior and demographic data
• Conversion focused programs require intent signals and engagement history
• Retention strategies depend on purchase history and product usage data

Only after you've aligned your business goal, channel strategy, and data capabilities should you set your OKRs. This ensures your goals are both ambitious and achievable within your operational reality. Now that we've gotten the marketing strategy out of the way, let's cover the OKRs you need for success.

What are OKRs?

OKRs, short for Objectives and Key Results, are a framework for setting and tracking organizational goals. Created by Intel CEO Andy Grove in the 1970s, they have since been adopted by industry leaders like Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Uber to drive growth, innovation, and alignment.  

The framework’s flexibility and emphasis on transparency and accountability make it a powerful tool for focusing teams and achieving goals.

Specifically, OKRs define "Objectives" for the team or company and map "Key Results" at the team level that are necessary to achieve them.  Unlike KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which are often more static measures of performance, OKRs help motivate progress by keeping an inspiring "Objective" in sight and encouraging ambitious, yet achievable, efforts to get there.

Setting effective OKRs for your marketing team

There are generally four keys to writing effective OKRs:

Ensure company-wide alignment

Mapping your OKRs to overall company goals and full-year strategy is critical to everyone’s success. Start with company-wide objectives (usually set at the C-Level), then focus on what your team can do to achieve them. 

Every OKR should have a clear line-of-sight to a company-wide goal. This drives the alignment of effort, resources, and budget. 

Simply put, it ensures that everyone is rowing in the same direction. Don’t be afraid to rethink an existing team goal and the underlying activity if it doesn’t map to a company-wide objective. That underscores the value of OKRs.

Be specific when setting goals

Setting clear and measurable objectives and results is critical for marketing success. OKRs should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (otherwise known as SMART.)  For example, instead of saying, “Improve website performance,” try, “Increase conversion rate by 20%.”  

OKRs should be achievable, but that doesn’t mean easy. Goals that bring a little discomfort are a good thing; they force you and your team to think out of the box, experiment with new concepts, and push beyond the tried-and-true.

Set time frames

The “T” in SMART stands for Time-Bound, and it’s one of the most important factors in designing successful OKRs. Each Key Result should have a time frame associated with it. If it’s a full-year goal, consider breaking it down into quarterly targets. This ensures progress and allows for course correction throughout the year.

Be ambitious with OKRs

OKRs should be achievable, but that doesn’t mean easy. Goals that bring a little discomfort are a good thing; they force you and your team to think out of the box, experiment with new concepts, and push beyond the tried-and-true. 

Goals shouldn’t be impossible, but they should be next-level. (That’s why I’ve long thought that the “A” in SMART should stand for “Ambitious” rather than “Achievable.”) 

Important OKRs for customer marketing

When defining OKRs, you should keep them focused on the company’s top priorities. Generally, you should want no more than 3-5 Objectives and, similarly, no more than 3-5 Key Results for each Objective. 

The specifics will vary from company to company and year to year, based on the business's needs. What’s working, what needs attention, and what opportunities or challenges your business or industry faces will all determine which OKRs rise to the top.

That said, the following eight OKR frameworks should apply to one degree or another for most DTC Brands. They provide a good starting point when considering what OKRs give your team the best revenue and profit growth opportunities for the coming year.  (Target numbers are presented for directional purposes. Specifics will vary for each company.) 

Objective 1: Enhance brand engagement

Often written as Brand Awareness, I prefer Brand Engagement as a more substantial measure of Brand Awareness efforts, and a way to avoid awareness for the sake of awareness. 

Key Results:

• Grow social media followers by 50% across all platforms
• Increase social media interaction (likes, comments, shares) by 25%
• Grow traffic from organic channels (search and social) to 20% of total visits
• Expand your influencer network to increase influencer-driven traffic by 20%

Objective 2: Increase customer acquisition

Attracting new customers is vital for DTC business growth and will almost always be included as an OKR, though specific Key Results may vary based on growth strategy and priorities.

Key Results:

• Deliver 100,000 New Customers (20,000 per quarter in Q1-Q3 and 40,000 in Q4)
• Manage blended Customer Acquisition Cost (across all channels) to $65 or less
• Improve Conversion Rate across all marketing channels by 20%.
• Increase acquisition from Owned Channels (email, referral, etc) to 15% of all new customers

Objective 3: Boost customer retention

Retaining current customers is equally important for base growth. Without it, you end up with a “leaky bucket,” and your acquisition efforts will have to work twice as hard.

Key Results

• Reduce Quarterly Churn Rate (no purchase in last three months) by 10%
• Increase Early Repeat Rate (repeat purchase within first three months) by 15%
• Implement a Loyalty Program with at least 30% of the base participating
• For subscription services:  Improve annual plan Renewal Rate by 20%

Objective 4: Improve monthly ARPU

In addition to keeping customers longer, you’ll want to increase their monthly spending, which is otherwise known as Average Revenue per User (ARPU). 

What’s more, Retention and ARPU combine for Customer Lifetime Value (or LTV), which is a critical metric for the overall health of your business. (The more you grow the value of an average customer, the more you can spend to acquire them.) 

Key Results

• Increase monthly APRU by 5% each quarter (21% for the year)
• Increase revenue from upsell and cross-sell by 50%
• Increase revenue from subscriptions and auto-ship by 30%

Objective 5: Grow customer advocacy

Loyal customers are often an untapped resource for fueling brand awareness and base growth. Prioritizing efforts to empower and expand their advocacy to OKR-level focus is well worth considering.

Key Results

• Increase Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 10 points
• Improve refer-a-friend participation to drive 15% of all new customers  
• Generate 500 positive reviews on major review platforms

Objective 6: Optimize paid media performance

Paid media typically constitutes the most significant portion of a DTC marketing budget. While essential to a broader channel mix strategy encompassing owned and organic channels, paid media’s impact on DTC revenue growth and profitability is critical.

Key Results

• Increase ad spend efficiency (measured as Return on Ad Spend, or ROAS) by 20%
• Diversity paid media mix with the launch of 3-5 new paid media channels, driving 20% of new customers
• Drive 30% improvement in new customers from remarketing programs

Objective 7: Amplify revenue from CRM channels

As “owned media,” your CRM channels are an extremely cost-effective way to drive engagement, revenue, and loyalty. But it’s important to set Key Results with an eye toward revenue rather than the more diagnostic measures of open rate and click-through. 

Key Results

• Increase revenue-per-1000 sends (email and SMS) by 20%
• Improve email conversion rate (measured against total sends) by 15%
• Improve 30-day conversion rate (driven by CRM nurture programs) by 30%
• Increase email/SMS capture by 20% (and target a capture rate of at least 10% of visitors)

Objective 8: Improve website performance

While it doesn’t always fall under the marketing team’s purview (depending on the organizational structure), website performance should always be considered and accounted for in the marketing-triggered customer journey. 

Key Results

• Improve conversion rate by 15%
• Increase average-order-value (AOV) by 10%
• Reduce cart abandonment rate by 25%

While these examples are based on real world use cases, they are still just examples. They’re presented as thought-starters for prioritization and measurement. Work with these, but make them your own to ensure that your specific OKRs align with your overall business goals and strategy.

Tips for successfully implementing OKRs

Now that you’ve set your OKRs, there are still a few items that need consideration to ensure their effectiveness throughout your organization.

Be sure to celebrate successes. There is no better way to maintain motivation and momentum than to recognize and commemorate achieved OKRs and milestones.

Ensure transparent tracking

Consistent and easy-to-access tracking of the Key Results noted is crucial for effective OKRs. Use tools designed for OKR tracking and management to keep everything organized and transparent. Your customer data platform (CDP) and CRM system should be invaluable here. Ensure that the Key Results you choose are set up as trackable goals within your CRM system wherever possible.

Conduct regular reviews 

OKRs are meant to be a living roadmap for activity and results. Regularly assess progress against your OKRs (monthly and quarterly) and adjust as needed to stay on track. 

Be sure to celebrate successes. There is no better way to maintain motivation and momentum than to recognize and commemorate achieved OKRs and milestones.

Communicate results company-wide 

Ideally, OKRs are embraced company-wide and become a tool for ongoing alignment, recognition, and course correction. 

To ensure that everyone in the organization understands the OKRs and their role in achieving them, use them as the framework for monthly or quarterly updates, whether conveyed via email or shared in interdepartmental meetings. Encourage collaboration and feedback from stakeholders throughout the process.

Stay agile

Both external market forces and internal business needs may shift during the year. This may necessitate adjustments to Objectives due to strategic shifts or updates to Key Results due to emerging challenges or opportunities.  

While OKRs shouldn’t be changed casually, you should be open to the possibility that priorities may shift and nimble in adjusting them accordingly. Quarterly checkpoints are usually a good time for these discussions, as they provide a natural “pitstop” to assess status.

Turning strategy into measurable success

Setting effective OKRs is about ensuring they serve your primary business goal. As you implement your OKRs:

1. Regularly validate that your chosen metrics align with your primary business objective
2. Assess whether you have the right customer data to measure and improve performance
3. Ensure your channel strategy can actually deliver on your targets
4. Identify and address any gaps in your data or execution capabilities

OKRs are the measurement system for your strategy, not the strategy itself. By following this sequence — defining your business goal, aligning your channels, mapping your data needs, and then setting OKRs — you create a clear line of sight from high-level business objectives to daily execution.

The most successful marketing teams in 2025 won't just be good at hitting their numbers; they'll be excellent at ensuring they're measuring the right things in the first place. Start with strategy, align your data and channels, then let your OKRs guide the way to success.

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The future of marketing is customer-focused. Now more than ever, customers demand a personalized one-to-one experience across all interactions with a brand.

But traditional CDPs have yet to fulfill the promise of 1:1 customer marketing. Despite significant investments in customer data platforms and marketing technology, brands still struggle to translate customer data into meaningful, revenue-driving customer engagement.

The top three challenges we hear from brands when it comes to customer marketing?

1. They still don’t know who their best customers are.
2. CDP investments aren’t driving value or revenue.
3. Despite having the best MarTech stack, they need more resources to use it properly.

At Simon, our years of partnership with enterprise B2C companies have revealed a fundamental truth: delivering transformative customer experiences requires more than just a CDP. True customer marketing transformation requires the perfect blend of strategy, expertise, and technology — all working harmoniously to drive customer lifetime value.

That's why we're doubling down on our commitment to deliver complete, end-to-end customer marketing personalization by combining the strategic services, resources, and platforms you need to provide the ultimate customer experience.

How Simon is changing the marketing game

Simon Data is revolutionizing customer marketing through an unmatched combination of technology, trusted advisors, and hands-on execution. 

Here's how we're different:

1. We get your customer data right from day one

• Based on your business goals, we help you build a complete, actionable view of your customers directly in our CDP
• Connect and unify data across all your customer touchpoints, connecting data from your cloud data warehouse and everywhere else customer data lives
• Establish the foundation for sophisticated personalization that drives results

2. We connect all the dots

• We help transform fragmented customer data into actionable insights
• Bridge the gap between technical capabilities and marketing execution
• Align cross-functional teams around unified customer data

3. We help you build and execute your campaigns

• Design and implement revenue-driving personalization campaigns
• Leverage our expertise to maximize your MarTech investments
• Deploy sophisticated customer journeys in 90 days or less

4. We optimize and scale with you

• Continuously refine campaigns based on performance data
• Identify and activate high-value customer segments
• Implement AI-powered customer segmentation and targeting
• Scale personalization efforts across channels and touchpoints

What sets us apart is our comprehensive approach to driving customer lifetime value. The best part? You get a proven partner who's transformed customer marketing for leading brands. Unlike traditional CDPs that leave you to figure it out alone, we're with you every step, from strategic planning to campaign execution to measuring ROI. 

Our hands-on approach ensures you're not just implementing technology but building a sustainable, revenue-driving customer marketing program that delivers results. This can be the difference between a successful implementation and a failed one.

While this comprehensive approach already distinguishes us in the market, the results speak for themselves. Our clients consistently launch personalized campaigns in 90 days or less while achieving significant cost savings compared to traditional solutions. More importantly, they're achieving true 1:1 customer marketing at scale.

Whether you're beginning your customer data journey or ready to optimize existing campaigns, we bring the proven strategy, expertise, and tools to maximize your customer lifetime value from day one. We improve CLTV. Guaranteed. 

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A watertight customer experience strategy keeps customers from leaking out of the marketing funnel at each touchpoint. In a world where any marketer can make enough noise to buy a single touchpoint, developing a customer experience strategy isn’t just a good idea — it’s an essential differentiator.

However, a customer experience strategy that puts the customer at the center of every interaction isn’t easy to implement; that’s why using one to drive marketing will set you apart. 

This guide teaches you how to create an effective customer experience strategy and build a playbook that drives lasting relationships.

What is a customer experience (CX) strategy?

Customer experience strategy determines what value you deliver to shoppers at every touchpoint of their journey. This means you can reel customers in from the awareness stage and keep them returning.

This strategy requires the whole team: marketing, sales, service, and support. A communicative team on the same page ensures the brand is consistent and resonant.

In short, a customer experience strategy proactively manages customer perceptions when interacting with your business. With strategy, we can ensure that customer perception is positive!

Why a customer experience strategy matters to brands

Operating by the same undifferentiated playbook as every competitor is what leaves you undifferentiated with an audience. Customers expect more than a product or service these days; they expect an experience. An experience is more personalized, and it aligns with a customer’s values — it leaves an impression.

When done right, an intentional customer experience strategy:

• Increases customer satisfaction
• Reduces churn 
• Improves customer lifetime value (CLTV)
• Boosts revenue
• Encourages positive word-of-mouth
• Builds a competitive advantage

In other words, a customer experience strategy significantly moves the needle on KPIs many brands track. Though the impact of this strategy can’t be precisely measured (as you can measure direct response campaigns), the result will pay itself forward in all aspects of business.

The building blocks of a customer experience strategy

Following some inspiration from McKinsey, we can break customer experience strategy down into its three essential pillars: inspiration, transformation, and enablement. 

1. Inspiration: Research your strategy

As McKinsey puts it, “Leaders start talking about customers, not financials.” Your inspiration for better strategy lies with the customer. Like all good user research, test your assumptions with users and empathize with their needs, desires, and pain points. 

If you’re a lone marketer, this is where it’s clear that customer strategy is a team effort. Other departments will have a wealth of customer information in the forms of surveys, calls, emails, and so on. A lot of inspiration comes from feedback.

By diving deep into customer motivations and behaviors, you can design experiences that resonate on a personal level.

2. Transformation: Baking good CX into practice

The best CX strategies are highly collaborative. This means transforming your business to be cross-functional. 

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Your company should consider customer feedback for all decisions and use data analytics to predict user behavior, identify and measure customer interaction, and assess the potential impacts of your marketing decisions.

Transformation isn’t building something entirely new; it’s ensuring that all your operations and output drivers align with your brand’s promise. 

3. Enablement: Ensuring long-term CX gains

This step is about seeking long-term improvement. You’re here to enable the marketing team’s future success by researching new tools and methods to improve customer experience.

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We live in an exciting time where technology transforms quickly. This means we have new opportunities for better customer experience. However, many of these will fall through the cracks if we aren’t keeping a finger on the pulse of change.

The playbook to customer experience strategy

Like all good strategy decisions, your approach depends on many factors impacting your brand. Your exact playbook is unique. However, following this framework will give you the path to developing your unique customer experience strategy.

Audit your current strategy and resources

If you didn’t think you already had a CX strategy, you do — but it could be more intentional. 

Before improving your customer experience, you need to understand where you currently stand. This is where inspiration comes from, recalling the building blocks of CX strategy. Assess what your surrounding teams have in place and your observations.

These are some key questions to ask as you audit your resources:

• Are we meeting customer expectations across all touchpoints?
• What does customer feedback reveal about our brand?
• Where are there opportunities for better customer communication?
• Which touchpoints do which teammates oversee?

Gather/conduct customer research

To flesh out the CX strategy, gather customer research and fill in the gaps in the questions above. Hopefully, you have already found a treasure trove of helpful resources with the earlier step. But if you didn’t, put your research cap on and talk to customers.

Use a combo of qualitative and quantitative methods to get the complete picture. Both are worth the work. These would be the insights and resources you’re looking to gather:

• Personae: Build detailed customer personas that capture demographic data, behaviors, motivations, and challenges. (Hopefully, you already have these! If not, it’s not too late to start.) These will be useful for further marketing segmentation.
• Stakeholder insights: Talk with key organizational stakeholders, including customer service, product development, and sales teams. Their frontline experience can provide valuable insights into what customers want.
• Customer call recordings/survey data: Review customer calls and surveys to identify recurring issues and opportunities for improvement. This will help you see your brand through your customers' eyes.

Build a customer journey map

Now you have the resources. Use them on a customer journey map to visualize how a customer interacts with your brand end-to-end. From initial awareness to purchase to retention, a journey map identifies key touchpoints with your brand. It will help you find gaps, places where paths branch, or where your strategy overcompensates.

Be sure to map out:

• Customer path to purchase: Where do customers first encounter your brand? What drives them to purchase? Often, this is the longest part of the customer journey map since we attempt to accrue several touchpoints with shoppers to turn them into customers.
• Purchase experience: What’s the checkout process like? Is it frictionless? Every click matters here, so detail is essential.
• Post-purchase touchpoints: What’s your support or follow-up communication? Are customers satisfied with the product or service? 

If you have a CDP like Simon Data (and a Cloud Data Platform like Snowflake) that aggregates customer data into one place, a tool like Simon Journeys can help you visualize customer experiences.

Correct misalignment in the customer journey

After building a journey map, address any gap between your brand’s goals and the customer experience. This is the most important step. We can’t give many specifics because this is where your strategy will be personalized to your brand. But we have some pointers:

Are there bottlenecks or touchpoints where customer expectations aren’t being met? Are there missing steps where you notice users typically fall off? And what’s more, do you have unnecessary touchpoints where customer engagement is nonexistent?

Build a sustainable plan for CX

While employing all this work to better CX, you’ve likely noticed practices that aren’t futureproof. There may be gaps in team knowledge or communication, faulty processes, and under/overinvestment in specific channels.

Find tools and training to futureproof your company's CX strategy and keep everyone on top of the plan. The best CX strategy requires continual learning.

Focus on long-term scalability:

• Investing in the right tools (hint: a CDP like Simon can make gathering customer insights in real-time a cinch)
• Grow with your team and share information
• Document the processes in place so you’re never caught reinventing the CX wheel

Iterate!

One of the marketing buzzwords: iterate. Now’s your chance to lather, rinse, and repeat.

As long as you have customers, you’ll have new feedback to learn from. CX strategy is not a one-and-done process — if it were, many of us would be out of a job. 

So, prove your CX strategy is worth the time! Encourage customers to share their experiences and use this feedback to drive continuous improvement.

Conclusion

Think about your most recent online interactions with companies. Were their ads attractive, their service helpful, and their messaging personalized? Or were they instead bothersome, intrusive, and poorly timed? CX strategy is still a key differentiator for businesses, so it’s a great time to double down on it. 

By following this playbook — conducting research, mapping the customer journey, building a plan, and iterating — you can use CX to power marketing. Customer-centric marketing is always best!

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) offer significant opportunities for brands, but standing out in crowded inboxes is challenging. Simon Mail, Simon Data's email service provider (ESP), enables a targeted approach to BFCM campaigns. 

By focusing on smart segmentation, personalization, and multi-channel coordination, you can create campaigns that engage customers and foster long-term loyalty. Here’s how to leverage Simon Mail to deliver impactful, personalized BFCM campaigns:

Build smart segmentation and personalization

Instead of sending generic emails to your entire list, use an ESP like Simon Mail to implement data-driven segmentation. By analyzing first-party data, you can tailor emails based on customer preferences, browsing behavior, purchase history, and engagement levels.

For example, you can segment your audience by loyalty tier or past purchase categories. Offer personalized product recommendations or exclusive deals to high-value customers, increasing relevance while maintaining lower overall email value. 

Create pre-BFCM engagement

Pre-season BFCM is more important than ever. Build anticipation before the holiday kicks off by offering loyal customers early access to BFCM deals. Use Simon Mail to create targeted campaigns for select audience segments, providing them with exclusive previews or special discounts.

You can send an early access email to engaged customers who’ve purchased items during previous BFCM events, offering them a 24-hour head start on sales. This tactic improves customer engagement and loyalty while reducing the risk of spam complaints and unsubscribes.

Use distinct design and clear messaging

In a sea of Black Friday emails, clear messages help your brand stand out. Simon Mail's A/B testing features allow you to optimize various elements of your emails, such as using minimalistic layouts and vibrant colors to capture your audience’s attention.

Using A/B testing features, you can optimize subject lines, experiment with preheader text, CTAs, and visual elements to see which versions resonate most with your audience. 

Offer value beyond discounts

Not all customers are motivated solely by price cuts, so create campaigns offering more than sale prices. Consider delivering additional value, such as loyalty points, exclusive content, or even an opt-out option for those not interested in BFCM promotions. This keeps your messaging aligned with customer needs and reduces fatigue.

For instance, you can use an ESP like Simon Mail to create post-purchase flows that offer vouchers or loyalty points redeemable in the new year to foster long-term relationships and drive repeat purchases beyond the holiday season.

Make the most of multi-channel coordination

BFCM isn’t just about email. Using Simon Mail, you should integrate your email campaigns into other channels (SMS, push, and in-app messaging, for example). Your emails should provide detailed, long-form content, while SMS and push are best for time-sensitive promotions.

Here’s an example: send a detailed email showcasing your BFCM deals, followed by an SMS reminder just before the sale starts. This dual approach can increase engagement and conversion rates.

By coordinating across multiple channels, you can meet your customers where they are and keep them engaged throughout the entire BFCM period. Cross-channel orchestration ensures your messaging is consistent and timely, driving better engagement across all touchpoints.

Focus on customer retention

Use BFCM as an opportunity to attract new customers and drive retention. In your ESP, set up an automated email campaign for new customers acquired during BFCM:

1. A welcome email
2. Product care tips for the product they purchased
3. Product recommendations based on their purchases
4. An exclusive offer for their next purchase

This type of strategy encourages repeat purchases and customer loyalty, and, with Simon Mail’s automation in place, you can easily create journey flows that track customer behavior over time to better deliver personalized offers that keep customers coming back long after BFCM is over.

Monitor performance and optimize in real time

Effective BFCM campaigns require constant vigilance and the ability to adapt quickly. An ESP’s analytics and reporting features allow you to monitor campaign performance in real time and make data-driven adjustments.

Create a dashboard to track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions for each BFCM email segment. If you notice a particular segment underperforming, you can quickly adjust the content, offer, or sending time to improve results.

Leverage an ESP like Simon Data for BFCM success

By leveraging Simon Mail’s capabilities in data segmentation, personalization, and cross-channel coordination, you can create impactful, personalized BFCM campaigns that resonate with your audience. The key is to focus on quality over quantity to build long-term relationships and ensure your brand stands out in the crowded holiday market.

We’re thrilled to announce that Simon Data, a leading Customer Data Platform (CDP) for enterprise marketing teams, has been recognized as a Leader in the CDP category in Snowflake’s 2025 Modern Marketing Data Stack report. 

As marketers navigate the rise of generative AI, the convergence of ad and martech, and growing privacy concerns, it’s more important than ever to have the right technology stack in place. Snowflake’s report highlights the essential technologies marketers leverage to build robust data and martech stacks today. 

By analyzing the usage patterns of approximately 9,800 customers, Snowflake identified 10 key categories that organizations prioritize when constructing their marketing data infrastructure. These categories include:

• Data integration & modeling
• Consent management
• Business intelligence
• Analytics & data capture
• Data enrichment & hygiene
• Identity & onboarding
• Customer Data Platforms
• Marketing & customer engagement
• Programmatic solutions
• Measurement & optimization

This recognition builds upon Simon Data’s previous success as a Leader in Snowflake’s 2024 Modern Marketing Data Stack report. 

"Being named a Leader in the Customer Data Platforms category for a second year is a testament to our team's hard work and dedication. We're proud to be recognized as a trusted partner for Snowflake and for businesses seeking to leverage the power of customer data,” said Jason Davis, CEO & Co-Founder of Simon Data.

Simon Data’s CDP empowers businesses to:

• Unify customer data: Break down data silos and create a single, unified view of every customer across all touchpoints
• Activate deeper customer insights: Gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and preferences to drive smarter marketing decisions
• Deliver hyper-personalized experiences: Personalize every customer interaction across all channels, from marketing campaigns to customer service
• Optimize marketing ROI: Maximize marketing campaigns' return on investment (ROI) by delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time

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Since its recognition by Snowflake in 2023, Simon Data has continued to innovate and expand its CDP platform with hundreds of new features and functionalities, including:

• Advanced journey orchestration tools that help customers create impactful customer journeys across multiple channels
• AI-powered tools that help marketers create rich, personalized content within Simon Mail and other communication channels
• Enrich existing customer data with Match+ by syncing additional hashed emails (HEMs) and mobile ad IDs (MAIDs) from our identity graph providers, increasing match rates and optimizing ad spend

“Customer experience is the new battleground for brands, and Simon Data provides the foundation for companies to deliver exceptional experiences at every touchpoint,” said Jason. “We are committed to helping businesses leverage the power of customer data and technology to build stronger customer relationships and drive business growth.”

"We're thrilled to once again recognize Simon Data as a Leader in the Customer Data Platforms category,” said Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake. “Their commitment to helping marketers deliver personalized experiences aligns perfectly with Snowflake's mission to mobilize the world's data. Simon Data's CDP provides businesses the tools to extract maximum value from their customer data and deliver exceptional customer experiences."