5 ways a CDP powers personalized experiences

To adapt to advances in technology, the move toward first-party data, and the rise of digital-first consumers, brands have had to evolve their personalization efforts and marketing strategies rapidly in recent years. These days, customers want and expect tailored experiences at every touchpoint throughout the customer journey. For brands that get it right, it can mean earning 40% more revenue than their competitors.

When it comes to delivering next-level personalization across different channels, a CDP is crucial to success. Use cases such as customer data management — gathering and segmenting data in real-time, plus the ability to identify loyal customers, make the customer data platform a star player in your martech stack. Here are five ways a CDP helps drive personalization at scale:

1. Unifies data

Your personalization strategy is only as strong as the data it’s built on. Thanks to a CDP’s silo-busting capabilities, you can connect and consolidate real-time and historical data across all platforms, creating an accurate, single customer view based on the most up-to-date customer information. This 360-degree view of the customer gives you the best possible understanding of each of your customers and their relationship with your brand.

2. Segments to improve relevance

Audience segmentation is a powerful CDP functionality. Segmentation allows you to target specific groups of customers with offers, promotions, or other notifications based on attributes such as location, demographics, or transactional and behavioral criteria, for example loyal customers, ecommerce customers who have abandoned their shopping carts, or those at risk of churn.

By focusing on specific customer profiles, customer segmentation enables you to target the most relevant customers with tailored experiences — delivering the right message on the right platform at the right time. Personalized customer experiences lower acquisition costs, boost conversion, and improve retention by ensuring that your customers don’t receive irrelevant offers or messaging — the types of disjointed experiences that lead to disengagement, unsubscribes, and customer churn.

3. Enables omnichannel customer experiences

With a single customer view in place, you have a better understanding of your customers and where they are in their journey. Access to previously inaccessible data and customer insights, for example offline data, means you can improve the accuracy of your personalization efforts. In addition, the fact that your unified data is available in real time means your CDP can easily share real-time data with other systems, and ultimately help to push out the right content to the right customers on the right channels.

4. Leverages AI and machine learning to activate decisioning

Working hand-in-hand with personalization and experimentation platforms, CDPs leverage AI and machine learning to assist with marketing automation, facilitate next-best action recommendations, real-time campaign activations, and customer journey orchestration.

Marketing teams can align and adjust campaigns to suit the current context of their customers and activate real-time decisioning based on predictions, trends, and insights that would otherwise go undetected. By delivering the most accurate and personalized customer experiences possible, brands improve customer engagement.

5. Puts privacy first

According to research by Accenture, 83% of consumers say they would exchange data for a more personalized experience. On the other hand, 81% of consumers say they need to trust a brand to buy from them. To both satisfy the demand for tailored experiences and allay the privacy concerns of today’s consumers, marketers need to tread a fine line.

GDPR and other emerging data privacy legislation requires systems to be designed with privacy in mind. This means that organizations must implement technical and organizational measures that support data protection principles. A CDP meets these requirements by centralizing access to a customer’s personal data and sharing this data with other systems, without these systems directly accessing each other’s data.

The time to personalize is now

Where personalization is concerned, speed is of the essence. Today’s consumers want to connect with brands in a way that feels secure, intuitive, individualized, and authentic — and they expect this as standard. With a next-level CDP in place, meeting these expectations is easy — the sooner you take the first step, the closer you are to achieving real results and rewards.

How Sitecore can help

Sitecore CDP is an advanced CDP that eliminates data silos and connects and consolidates your data to provide a single customer view from all online and offline channels. Real-time segmentation and targeting capabilities give you the ability to roll out marketing campaigns with speed and accuracy, while AI and machine learning capabilities extract value from your data, helping you to create relevant and tailored customer experiences that drive loyalty and revenue. Sitecore CDP prioritizes data security, ensuring compliance with the latest data protection legislation, while still delivering impactful customer insights.

When combined with Personalize, brands can leverage industry-leading decisioning, blending data, personalization, and segmentation rules to guide each customer’s next-best action, ensuring an optimized, tailored experience.

Sitecore is helping some of the world’s most recognized brands to forge lasting relationships with their customers. Request a personalized demo today or find out how to build customer loyalty and trust with a CDP and discover how you can deliver valuable and engaging customer experiences that resonate.