MarTechTalk: Maximising revenue through smarter use of your Customer Data Platform

On 28 November, MarTech Talk host Kevin Craine was joined by Priyal Borole, VP/Director MarTech and Communications Delivery, OneMain Financial; Pratyush Sinha, Head of Marketing, Blenheim Chalcot; Nagendra Shukla, Co-Founder, UnBound; and Ronald Gerlach, Chief Marketing Officer, Gaubert Oil Company.

Views on news

Generative AI has the power to spark creativity, through the creation of new content and ideas like conversations, stories, images, videos and music. With the help of CDPs, GenAI has the potential to create content targeted at segments or even individuals. GenAI can also drive predictive analysis to anticipate customers’ needs or enhanced customer service. Now it’s also possible to gather customer feedback in real time, which can accelerate adaptation to customer needs and preferences. 

Customer data

As trends and methodologies keep evolving, marketers shouldn’t stick with one particular way of managing data but remain flexible about it. CDP is not a customer-facing tool but middleware, and every organisation will have, by definition, disparate data sources. Once you’ve identified what data sources you are missing, a CDP can help fill in those gaps, whether the data missing is online, offline, on social media, etc. This is the point where CDP’s data enriching capabilities come into play. 

The metrics to be used to measure CDP’s RoI depend on the nature of the business. For products and services with long sales cycles, it’s customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost and retention rates. Timely availability of profile attributes for marketers, however, is also key, for them to be able to act on data through the right channel. For content, the best metric is recognition ratio - the percentage of your engaged profiles identified by one or more unique identifiers.

CMO roles are becoming more of a technological role and their responsibilities will increasingly include data management and overlap with those of a CIO. As real time data is expensive, you must narrow down the number of data points where you want to leverage real-time data. To decide whether your data integration on the CGP works fine, you need to monitor three points – ingress of data, the processing of data and the egress of data. 

The panel’s advice

Tools by themselves won’t solve the problem. 
You must be principled regarding what data you need in order to avoid data overload.

AS CDP works in the background, you can measure its performance via outcomes.

Make sure your data is good quality and consistent and review it on a regular basis.