Email has always been the ROI darling of marketing communications. However, brands find it hard to resist the urge to send emails too frequently and watch the cash register ring. It's an easy trap to fall into. That's why brands need a CDP that goes beyond “opens and clicks.”
By myopically optimizing for clicks, brands lose sight of providing value to the customers on the other end of their messaging. Customer Data Platform (CDP) Marketers can build deeper, more meaningful connections with their customers.
As marketing leaders, we need to rethink how we use email. Stop thinking of email as a campaign tool, and instead of planning campaigns as separate events, start thinking of email as a way to interact with your customers and build relationships. A CDP can transform email marketing into a strategy that drives brand experiences across channels, fostering true engagement and ultimately increasing brand loyalty.
CDP makes marketing about customers, not just clicks
Traditional metrics like opens and clicks only scratch the surface of customer engagement and email effectiveness. While these metrics are certainly appealing for their simplicity and correlation with customer interest, they don't provide a complete picture of customer behavior and engagement.
Email campaign. Think of email as a key part of the relationship you build with your customers across channels and time. Their response to your email can appear on your website the same day or in your store that afternoon, and that same email will drive engagement. To put it bluntly, if a recipient of your email adds a product to their online cart and then purchases it in-store, they typically fall victim to a retargeting campaign with a “forgotten something” message, making the experience disjointed and siloed.
You may find that optimizing for clicks can frustrate or alienate customers, or lead to email oversight, which may improve short-term metrics. Long-term loyalty and brand engagement and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). A customer data platform provides the way to develop the deeper contextual insights needed to deliver personalized experiences that lead to more effective and meaningful customer interactions. Using artificial intelligence (AI), a CDP can predict the optimal number of email touches within a period of time (cadence), including time of day (send time optimization). It can even combine SMS and digital advertising to optimize across channels. All of this leads to conversions that can happen on any channel.
By adopting a strategy tied to customer engagement, your best customers, sifting through your emails in a crowded inbox, may not notice a difference. But your marginal customers may still receive emails curated with the best and most relevant offers, but in fewer emails. The benefits are two-fold: (1) improved sender reputation, and (2) no revenue loss. In fact, revenue across channels may increase at the customer level. Brands should test this and optimize their emails over time for different customer engagement segments.
CDPs improve email marketing
A CDP is a unified customer database that collects, consolidates, and manages customer data from a variety of sources. It creates a single, comprehensive customer profile (potentially piecing together anonymous profiles in the process). Using this unified “identity,” you can run and automate marketing campaigns, send optimal emails, and deliver personalized, seamless brand experiences while responding to customer behavior in near real-time. These concepts aren't new, but the capabilities of a CDP take them to the next level.
- Data ingestion and aggregation: CDPs collect data from multiple sources, including multiple emails, social media, e-commerce transactions, offline interactions, etc. This data is then organized, combined, and stored in a unified customer profile.
- Real-time processing: Unlike traditional databases, CDPs can process data in real time, allowing marketers to make quick decisions based on the most up-to-date data available (reacting to signals across channels).
- Enable Insights: Using AI and machine learning (ML), CDPs can provide insights into customer behavior patterns, predict future actions, and implement ideal personalization across channels.
- Privacy Compliance: A world-class CDP provides tools for effective consent and preference management, helping organizations manage customer data in compliance with privacy laws and regulations.
By integrating a CDP as the foundation of your marketing strategy, your communications become more targeted, personalized interactions that resonate with each customer. This capability not only increases the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, it also builds the foundation for stronger, long-term customer relationships. Campaign is opened and clicked Replaced by measurements Customer Engagement over time.
Here’s how a CDP improves your email marketing:
- Personalization at scale: CDPs can tailor emails to each individual, taking into account past purchase history, browsing behavior, and contextual (demographic) information – this is more granular than traditional segmentation and, with the use of AI technology, more scalable.
- Real-time trigger-based emails: By leveraging real-time data, CDPs enable marketers to send trigger-based emails that are activated by specific customer actions or milestones. For example, emails can be sent as soon as a customer abandons a cart, browses a specific product category, completes a purchase in your store, or reaches a loyalty program milestone, making communications more relevant and timely.
- Recognizing and optimizing the customer's “journey”: A CDP provides insight into the entire path to purchase (customer journey) across multiple channels, allowing marketers to deliver email communications tailored to specific interactions with the brand, whether online or offline, ensuring the seamless experience customers expect.
- Dynamic content: Leveraging data from a CDP, emails can contain dynamic content that changes based on when and where the email is opened – this can be as simple as showing different products depending on stock levels, or more complex, tailoring messages based on weather conditions or local events.
- Enhanced A/8 testing: Armed with comprehensive data, marketers can more effectively test different aspects of their email campaigns, from subject lines to images to calls to action, based on different customer segments, optimizing performance and engagement.
- Use data for AI predictions: With this better customer data, brands can predict everything from the next relevant product or service, where the customer is right now, and what relevant content they need at that moment. Brands can curate their customers' experiences and become a trusted and valuable partner to guide them on their journey.
Through these capabilities, a CDP transforms email from a generic marketing tool into a key element of a broader strategy focused on deepening customer relationships through relevance and context. every The messages sent will not only reach your customers, but they will also resonate with them.
Maximizing Cross-Channel Opportunities with a CDP
How does a CDP enable seamless integration between email and other marketing channels? A CDP's ability to integrate email marketing with other channels is critical in today's multi-touchpoint marketing environment. Here's how a CDP creates a unified marketing approach:
- Consistent messaging across channels: A CDP maintains a centralized repository of customer data that can be accessed across different marketing platforms. This enables consistent messaging whether your customers interact with you via email, social media, mobile apps, or even in-store. Each interaction is based on the same data. This ensures that your customers receive consistent, relevant messaging no matter where they encounter your brand.
- Enhanced Customer Journey Mapping: A CDP allows marketers to track and analyze customer behavior across all channels. This insight allows them to create a more comprehensive customer journey map that takes into account all interaction points. As a result, marketers can design campaigns that support and reinforce each other, seamlessly guiding customers from one touchpoint to the next.
- Targeted advertising based on email interactions: Email interactions can inform or trigger targeted advertising on other platforms: for example, if a customer clicks on a particular product in an email but doesn't purchase it, the CDP can trigger retargeting ads for that product on social media and other websites the customer visits.
- Synchronous Promotion: Once a promotion starts in email, the data stored in the CDP can be used to instantly sync across other channels like social media and your brand website, ensuring all promotional materials are up to date and consistent, reducing confusion and improving customer experience.
- Feedback loop for continuous improvement: By unifying insights from different channels, including email, a CDP helps create a feedback loop where data from one channel informs strategy for others. This continuous flow of information constantly improves your campaign strategy and customer interactions.
By leveraging a CDP's comprehensive data and integration capabilities, marketers can create a truly integrated, customer-centric marketing strategy that not only attracts but delights customers with every interaction.
Email is key to customer centricity and brand experience. By integrating a CDP into your marketing strategy beyond opens and clicks, marketers can engage with customers with highly personalized, relevant, and timely communications that resonate on a deeper level.
Aside from email opens and clicks, how do you measure customer success?
Meet our Email Experts
Chat with one of our experts: Brian Gruidl, VP of Email Marketing at Hansa. Brian has led email development and improvement for brands large and small, including Target, United Healthcare, and Fingerhut.
By Roy Warren
Roy Wollen is President of Hansa Marketing Services, a CDP marketing agency. Roy has worked with top marketers across industries such as D2C, travel, financial services, B2B and retail. Roy is a true consultant, focused on solving client problems using marketing technology and analytics. Roy is also a lecturer at Northwestern University's Medill School of Integrated Marketing and Communications (IMC). Roy teaches Marketing Metrics, B2B Marketing and Digital Analytics. Roy's academic work focuses on data-driven marketing and marketing measurement.
The common themes are proving the value of marketing investments, customer data and measuring business outcomes. Roy holds an MSc from Medill IMC and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
