Guest post by Sam Ngo, Director of Product Marketing at BlueConic
Smart marketing leaders are putting the customer at the center of their marketing infrastructure. With new privacy regulations and an ever-changing data landscape, brands need to own their relationships with customers and customers need to have transparency and control over their data. While many marketers fear new privacy regulations, companies should embrace it. It’s an opportunity to rethink the data they currently collect and decide what data is actually helping them build mutually beneficial experiences for the customer and the business.
Companies must build out their first-party data assets now. As third-party data becomes less reliable, companies need to leverage a customer data platform (CDP) to empower their marketing team with their own customer database; or risk falling behind competitors who are already evolving their practices and infrastructure. While many brands collect first-party data today, some struggle to free that data from disparate systems and channel-specific silos. With the right CDP, you can consolidate all of the data from your CRM, ESP, and other online and offline data sources into one, centralized location and use that data for real-time marketing efforts. Companies that have first-party data at their fingertips can leverage a single view of the customer to create valuable 1:1 experiences for their customers and prospects at every touchpoint.
Authentication, consent, and value exchange are core to customer identity. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen privacy and compliance regulations evolve at a rapid clip. Customer expectations are rising, and new privacy regulations are being passed – creating a new normal for marketers. Marketers will have to explicitly ask for permission to gather customer data and use it to inform marketing and customer experiences. To operate in this new normal, marketers must anchor customer identity with:
- Authentication: As cookie data becomes less reliable thanks to ITP and other browser tracking changes, companies must ask explicitly ask individuals to identify themselves in order for companies to accurately recognize them across channels – including offline ones. Create experiences where customers want to identify themselves quickly so you can understand their behaviors and offer personalized experiences and specific value exchanges.
- Consent: New privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA require you to ask for consent for what you can do with an individual’s data. How you present these requests, however, is up to you.
- Value exchange: Customers are willing to give you data – but only if they get something in return. In fact, it’s not that different from the idea of building loyalty programs. Brands will need to find creative ways to collect data and give customers something of value in return.
AI for marketing. A truly effective individualized marketing approach requires not just a complete understanding of who each prospect or customer is now, but also the ability to predict how those individuals are likely to engage with you in the future. As a CDP that embeds Jupyter notebooks for the purposes of predictive modeling within the platform, BlueConic makes it possible for marketers to use the outcome of these models for segmentation, analytics, and real-time customer scoring. Not only does this eliminate operational inefficiencies by reducing the number of hand-offs between marketing and data science & BI teams, it also allows marketers to design experiences based on a combination of customer attributes including predictive customer scores and various behavioral, transactional, or preferential data.
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