Why Do Retailers Need a CDP to Generate Business Outcomes?

Partner Content

Retail Market Overview 

The retail industry has faced numerous challenges in recent years, including balancing physical and online presence, adapting to changing consumer attitudes, and navigating product availability issues. The pandemic has only added to these challenges, forcing retailers to adapt and evolve their operations to meet changing consumer demands. 

Besides that, also the way retailers used customer data evolved exponentially with COVID-19. E-commerce dominated over in-store shopping, and hybrid shopping became commonplace as people prioritised social distancing. Even the way people pay for their items has changed, with many now embracing contactless methods that were assumed to reach more mass adoption years from now. 

As customers’ shopping journeys became more and more seamless, the ability to quickly access and use real-time data became essential for retailers’ success. By making the pivot to using real-time data, retail chains can make smarter decisions faster, preserve and expand customer loyalty, and stay ahead of the competition. 

Fortunately, the retail category is inherently data-rich: Varying from online shopping pattern details to customer history and preferences, retail has an incredible amount of first-party customer data that can enable all retailers to capitalise on personalization and loyalty programmes if the data is collected, unified, segmented and activated in the most efficient way to gain a complete view of customer buying habits and preferences. 

To stay ahead of the curve, therefore, retailers need to adopt modern data analytics pipelines so they can process and understand the data coming at them in real time and activate their data to make customer-centric decisions. Personalised experiences across all customer interactions are essential for improving customer engagement and fostering loyalty. To achieve this objective, retailers can utilise Customer Data Platforms that integrate data from various channels to provide a comprehensive understanding of customer behaviour and enables the evaluation and activation of the data. 

What is a Customer Data Platform? 

CDPs, or customer data platforms, are software tools that aggregate customer data from various sources, organise it into centralised profiles, and share it with other marketing technology systems. They accomplish this by combining data from multiple sources, including first, second, and third-party sources such as the Company's CRM, DMP, data lakes or warehouses, websites, mobile apps, and POS systems. 

Once customer profiles are created, marketers can use them to create audience segments and activate them across various channels, including paid media, SMS marketing, customer service tools, and website personalization. The end result is the ability to manage data compliantly and efficiently deliver targeted, personalised experiences at scale across the entire customer journey, ultimately driving commercial outcomes in a timely manner. 

How will CDPs drive growth for retailers? 

In the past two years, there has been a rapid and widespread transformation within the retail industry, moving away from traditional physical retail practices to omnichannel retail and digital commerce. This trend is projected to persist. In order to overcome the challenges posed by evolving consumer expectations and complicated supply chains, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, brick-and-mortar retail must utilise data effectively. However, given the increasing number of data sources, channels, and direct-to-consumer options, retail brands must onboard new technologies and data management capabilities to cope with exponentially growing customer data silos. 

Customer Data Platforms (CDP) are, therefore, a crucial tool for retail brands to analyse and activate data to improve and personalise the customer experience, to stay ahead of evolving customer expectations and competition. Getting into more specific details, a CDP can:

1. Creating a 360-degree view of the customer by stitching online and offline data. [Text Wrapping Break]In this regard, CDPs can break down data silos and combine various data points, such as online behaviour, loyalty program data, and offline data from CRM and POS systems. This enables retailers to efficiently and addressable leverage personalization to delight customers, ultimately driving growth.
2. Creating different audience segments based on different customer signals across the marketing funnel. Behavioural data collected through web and app sources can be used to tailor messages and personalise branding campaigns. CRM data can help identify high spenders, loyalists, collectors, and dormant past brand enthusiasts. These segments can be activated across preferred marketing and advertising channels such as TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and YouTube. 
3. Achieving time to value commercial outcomes, by using a CDP native on Google Cloud. These CDPs use partner APIs to populate matched segments directly in brands' Google advertising accounts, without the need for building an in-house Google Ads API or managing login credentials. Additionally, CDPs such as Zeotap can use proprietary identity stitching and extension capabilities to find emails corresponding to customers' phone numbers and email addresses and append these emails to the existing email list prior to uploading. This increases the segment size, enabling advertisers to optimise their media budget and achieve better results
4. Guarantee Data Security and Customer Privacy[Text Wrapping Break]With the increase of digital data, customers are becoming more aware and concerned about data security breaches. Regulations such as GDPR in the EU are changing how organisations handle customer data. Failing to comply with these regulations can result in significant consequences for businesses. It is essential for retail brands to ensure data security across all systems. CDPs can assist in creating secure, compliant lists to adhere to the diverse data protection protocols, activating customer data putting consumer privacy and compliance front and centre.
5. Improve data-driven marketing through machine learning [Text Wrapping Break]In the digital world, companies collect and store an enormous amount of data that surpasses human capacity to process and comprehend. The automated ML models natively integrated into CDPs help to identify patterns and make it easy for marketers to create segments without depending on any technical team. 

Why Zeotap CDP? 

Zeotap CDP makes it easier than ever for businesses to gain commercial success with minimal effort, thanks to an intuitive interface which prioritises simple use cases that drive results in only 8 weeks. Zeotap's easy-to-use platform, made for marketers, ensures a frictionless deployment and quick value impact.