How To Use Customer Data For Marketing

You’ve been carefully collecting and curating your customer data. Yet, you’re left with the nagging question – now what? The good news is you are not alone. Many businesses struggle to figure out the best way to use their data for optimal results.

We’ll discuss how to use your customer data for marketing with certainty and maximize the use of your customer data. 

Using Customer Data with Greater Certainty

In our recent 2022 State of Customer Data Report, we looked at emerging trends in the world of data, one of which was marketers’ lack of confidence in data usage. This lack of conviction stems from the overwhelming amount of data available. As a result, many marketers struggle with a lack of data integration between technologies or data sources. This gap translates into difficulty turning actions into insights and ultimately proving ROI.

The graph below is from a report commissioned for Simon Data by Forrester consulting. It shows how orgs feel about using customer data for marketing. Most respondents didn’t feel highly confident in their abilities. Additionally, the response tally was under 100%, meaning a proportion of marketers felt such a lack of confidence that they declined to respond. 

Maximizing The Customer Data You Have

We reached out to some thought leaders in the customer data space to get their opinions on our trends. Tim Duncan of Bottle Rocket gave us his take on using customer data for marketing confidently. Bottle Rocket is an experience consultancy that provides services that drive business results and exceed customer expectations.

“Data is the fuel that powers a martech stack and its quality and richness has everything to do with how confident your marketing teams will be in the campaigns they deliver. Moving into 2022, being able to make sense of and properly action on this data will start to become table stakes for most serious digital marketing organizations. There is a compounding effect that eats away at long-term growth for marketing teams that seemingly never reach a place where they have a robust data profile that they efficiently action on across all their digital channels. Using a composable CDP like Simon Data that give both marketers the flexibility to collect data but also make sense and action on it is an easy way to set teams up for success in this area.”

-Tim Duncan, Product Growth Lead at Bottle Rocket (Ogilvy Experience)

Provided that, his quote directly relates to maximizing the value of your data by creating a complete picture of your customer. And, the best way to build these robust data profiles is by using a CDP. 

Making the Most of Customer Data with a CDP

One major problem with the amount of data is that it lives siloed through various systems. For example, an eCommerce company will have many martech systems- loyalty programs, ESPs, reviews, mobile apps all collecting different data. Each system offers a slice of insight into your customer. However, without bringing all the data together in one place, you don’t have the whole pie. 

A CDP collects and gathers data from those disparate systems. Then, it cleans and consolidates each bit of an individual’s customer data into a single customer view. This view is a robust profile of all information you have on a user.

Segmenting Your Customer Data

This is precisely the problem we saw when working with Tripadvisor. They collected a large amount of data from various sources. Yet, they had no aggregated view of all of their customer data. Not being able to see or access all your data can create a sense of uncertainty about what you’re doing. 

While we prefer to operate with perfect information on our customer preferences, that isn’t always possible. However, creating a single customer view where all the data you have collected is available is the best way to understand your customer’s behavior. That’s what Simon + Snowflake enabled for Tripadvisor’s marketing team- a complete picture of all of their data and behavior. 

Through this partnership, Tripadvisor personalized experiences driven by advanced segmentation, automation based on behavior, and dynamic campaigns. For example, suppose you were going on a vacation to Dove Mountain and looking at activities in the area. In that case, Tripadvisor can now see that information in conjunction with nearby hotel pricing. When a hotel in that area drops in price, you receive a valuable message alerting you of the drop. This campaign triggers a meaningful experience that sends deals directly to members that previously browsed hotels in that area. 

This dynamic personalization is the type of experience a CDP can offer. To see more on the value, Simon enabled for Tripadvisor read the full case study!