Channel Centric to Customer Centric: A Marketer’s Readiness Checklist

What are the next steps to execute a cross-channel campaign management strategy with an empowered CDP? In this issue of the CDP in Practice Explainer SeriesOpens a new window , we talk readiness.

In previous issues, we explored the gaps between unifying customer dataOpens a new window and actually activating that data intelligently to deliver orchestrated cross-channel experiences. There is no denying that marketers are ready to see value from their data being unlocked across their martech stack with a central, intelligent decisioning engine. In fact, we referred to this kind of CDP as a Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP), just to help make the distinction between the many ‘versions’ of CDPs available today.

(While at the broad level all CDPs have the core capability to centralize siloed customer data irrespective of the volume or source, and create ‘unified customer profiles’ for use across systems, in this series we are focusing on CDPs that focus on the marketer’s primary goal of customer engagement through robust segmentation and customer experience orchestration capabilities, versus a deeper focus on data management features.)

CDAPs are well-positioned to help marketers achieve the 3 defining characteristics of customer-centric marketing:

• Acting on unified data in real-time
• Being more intelligent in the experiences you deliver: true personalization in this era is defined by 1:1
• Unifying the experience across different channels

Unfortunately, the reality is that often even mature marketers are constrained to act as channel-centric marketers instead of customer-centric marketers because their data sources and activation plans are driven by the primary channels they operate in, rather than individual customer journey events. And they are fast realizing that delivering orchestrated campaigns based on unified data is not as simple as buying a single technology solution or building superficial channel integrations.

In fact, true customer-centric marketing needs marketers to approach the challenge from two distinct aspects: the problem of siloed data, and the problem of siloed experiences.

In issue 2Opens a new window , while we proposed that the secret to customer-centric marketing lies in a two-pronged approach that addresses challenges of both – the data and the activation – directly investing in a technology solution- be it a CDP or a CDI + CDAP – is not a silver bullet to address customer engagement and personalization challenges.

That is why the first step to channel-centric marketing has to be total clarity on organizational readiness based on key considerations. In this issue, we move a step closer to finding the right customer data management and activation model by proposing a framework for marketers to analyze their readiness and arrive at the model that’s just right for them.

Organizational Readiness for Customer-Centric Marketing: Key Considerations

1. Purpose readiness:

All 1:1 personalization starts with the data. So it’s common for marketers to start out thinking ‘let’s track everything and figure out how to use it later’, but that approach rarely works. It’s messy, disorganized, and if you aren’t sure what you’re looking to track or don’t have a mapped plan for how you’re going to use the data you collect, you’ll end up creating fragmented experiences. It is safe to say that while data is key to marketing, our technological ability to ‘capture’ data now exceeds our ability to use it. Add the fact that the data, unless activated in the fastest possible time, quickly becomes obsolete, and this data-collection approach becomes even less useful for true customer-centric marketing.

If your purpose is to prioritize marketing effectiveness outcomes (versus building operational efficiency of collecting and managing data), it is important to dive deeper into why you want to prioritize this customer-centric approach to marketing.  Everyone wants a unified view of the customer, everyone wants to master personalization with that unified data, everyone wants to do it at scale and automate as much as possible. The task is to articulate and document what ‘customer-centric’ marketing means in your context. This needs further clarity on what you define as personalization outcomes and orchestrated experience outcomes.

Real-Time, 1:1 Personalization

• Auto-trigger customized messages based on behaviors and lifecycle stage changes
• Deliver 1:1 personalized messages at scale
• Incorporate adaptive segmentation and predictive recommendations across campaigns
• Optimize customer experiences by increasing the speed and scale of testing and iteration
• Gain deeper, actionable customer understanding

Cross-Channel Experiences

• Orchestrate customer experiences across the full customer journey, including owned, paid, online, offline, and customer service channels
• Deliver connected messages across channels, including email, SMS, in-app push, web, display, search, and direct mail
• Optimize digital advertising targeting and ROAS by incorporating first-party data
• Boost marketing KPIs such as conversion, customer lifetime value, AOV, and retention

A detailed checklist can be found hereOpens a new window , courtesy Blueshift.

2. Process readiness

The next key consideration is a close examination of current processes. What silos exist today – data silos, experience silos or both? To what extent? While we have gone over the details of data and experience silos in issue 2Opens a new window of this series, here is a quick recap:

• Data silos are defined as a situation where every single team across functions or even within marketing (by channels) are working with different systems with different rules and definitions. This means everyone only has a partial view of the customer.
• Experience silos mean that given the proliferation of channels and touchpoints, each channel-specific team (social marketing, email marketing, display platforms, and so on) create their own campaigns and messaging, leading to fragmented and disconnected customer experiences.

While CDPs solve for these problems, or attempt to, by unifying customer data into a single profile, that doesn’t mean the data is ready to use for orchestrated marketing purposes. Like we said earlier, even mature marketers are often constrained to act as channel-centric marketers instead of customer-centric marketers because their data sources and activation plans are driven by the primary channels they operate in, rather than individual customer journey events. We’ve gone over those gaps between customer data and activation in detail in issue 1: Activating Customer Data: Realities, Challenges and Missed Opportunities of this series.Opens a new window

Understanding and defining current processes around data management and activation, and the kind of roadblocks, from an implementation standpoint, that impact customer-centric marketing are crucial to moving towards customer-centric marketing. This includes auditing the martech stack, and surfacing your martech struggles (are you taking too much time from campaign data to execution?).

3. People readiness

The third and equally critical consideration is the teams who will lead the initiative, and how the team will be structured. This is a cross-functional initiative that needs executive sponsorship, not only because it involves data sources beyond marketing (customer support touchpoints, transactional data, other CRM data), but all of that data will be used in data activation initiatives to deliver a unified customer experience which goes beyond single-channel performance.

Prioritizing the purpose and related processes will help define who will own and manage the process, what training and skilling may be required, and what collaborative workflows need to be constructed across teams and functions. A related aspect here is the way the teams within marketing are structured. Often, even the most well-intentioned teams are constrained to act in channel-centric ways because that is how the team is structured, measured and incentivized. At this stage, it is useful to examine if the team structure itself is conducive to customer-centric marketing.

4. Technology readiness

Finally, it is time to come to the technology piece of this puzzle. If you have defined data activation and customer experience outcomes as your priority, having a technology platform that can manage data is important but not sufficient.  Like we detailed in Issue 2, for complex customer-centric marketing, there is a need to have the right tools in place to address both the data silos and the experience silos. Unified data as delivered by a CDP does not automatically mean automated, intelligent and orchestrated activation of that data.

This is where the CDI + CDAP model presents a viable alternative for true customer-centric marketing capabilities. 

The Customer Data Infrastructure Platform (CDIs) puts all the data into one place without any loss in data quality, prepares (cleanse and normalize) the data, then routes it where it needs to go. The Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) is built for intelligent cross-channel decisioning and real-time marketing interactions across channels.

The CDAP eliminates the latency between data, insights, and execution, and helps marketers continue to deliver the right interactions across their marketing programs, in real-time.

Next steps:

Once you are able to document the purpose behind your customer-centric marketing goals, as well as the people, processes, and technology models that can help you get there, you can begin actually putting the infrastructure to execute in place. This involves:

1. Testing vendors with demos and pilots: what makes a good demo environment? How can you balance not just specific use-case but the larger strategic intent of the initiative you are testing the solution for? Running a demo with intention will help understand not just solution capabilities but also whether the solution if as flexible and scalable as you need it to be, in order to meet constantly evolving customer and channel dynamics. Aside from giving you a clearer picture of what outcomes would look like with a strong data activation foundation, it will also give you visibility into the evolving performance measures you may need to keep on the radar as you build the solution.
2. Aim to find a partner and not a tool: customer-centric marketing means contextualizing the ‘single view of the customer’ as it relates to activation. This definition of ‘single view’ goes beyond data storage or completeness that may be designed for other use-cases. The activation-focused ‘single view’ understands the context of the multiple events in a customer’s journey and stitches them together in a way that the intelligent decisioning engine can use to run orchestrated campaigns across channels. But the dynamic nature of channels, customer journeys, and the general marketing environment is such that it demands an execution partner who can evolve with your unique context of real-time experiences.

Read the full 4-part CDM in Practice Explainer Series hereOpens a new window

Part 1: Activating Customer Data: Realities, Challenges and Missed Opportunities

Part 2: Channel-Centric to Customer-Centric: How Unified Data + Data Activation Takes Marketers There