Like rain and taxes, customer churn is inevitable. But the good news is that you can woo back lost customers with the right data and tools. One such tool is the Customer Data Platform (CDP). A CDP is a system that unifies customer data and makes it available to other systems. CDPs can harness this data to improve campaigns, and 44% of marketers believe they can help fuel customer loyalty. In this article, we look at how a CDP can help you win back lost customers.
Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: measuring the right marketing campaign KPIs
How To: use loyalty data to power retention and reactivation
See how brands take their email deliverability to the max
Get inspired: great sports betting campaigns to follow
Build a Unified Customer Profile
Having a 360° customer view is key to winning them back with the right offer. A CDP can unify all your data intelligently and update it in real time to provide a constant single customer view.
The Churn Masterclass: get the exclusive 6-part newsletter
Because consumers engage with brands on different devices and platforms, distinguishing between an existing customer and a new one can be difficult—which can lead to erroneous customer identification. 31% reported being “very frustrated” when a company doesn’t recognize them as an existing customer.
With a CDP platform, you can identify known and anonymous customers regardless of the channel or device they’re using. A CDP merges disparate data points such as mobile IDs and loyalty numbers in real time and matches them to create a single customer view. This ensures that you can recognize individual audience members across different channels and devices and engage them in meaningful ways.
CDPs also track every customer activity both offline and online, and show the complete customer journey timeline across all channels. This paints a picture of who your customer is, how they’ve engaged with you in the past, and how they can be most effectively targeted.
When choosing a CDP platform for unifying data, ensure it can resolve identity at scale and enable you to suppress data collection or delete customer data when requested.
Personalize Your Messaging
A CDP helps marketers drive more personalized experiences across channels and deliver relevant win-back campaigns. 40% of marketers see improved personalization as the most critical benefit of deploying a CDP.
To ensure a high level of personalization, you need to move from segmenting groups to segmenting individuals. CDPs segment customer data at a granular level in real time based on several attributes, including site activity, affinities, and transaction history. This means you can create rich custom audience segments based on a customer’s likelihood to churn, purchase behavior, and lifetime value—using this to pinpoint the right customers to target.
When it comes to retention, engaging customers in the right way, time, and place is crucial. 34% of consumers find it annoying when a brand sends them an offer for something they just bought. A CDP platform can automatically identify where your customers are in the purchase lifecycle and offer them relevant communications with dynamic segmentation.
CDPs leverage data to update customer profiles in real time as their attributes change, and move groups of individuals in and out of segments based on defined criteria. This automatically dispatches the right campaigns to customers at the right time, reducing wasted ad spend and ensuring that customers receive the correct personal messaging.
Consumers are increasingly shopping on the go, and 53% of marketers who have a CDP use it for real-time targeting. The CDP is updated with new data during the course of each interaction and allows you to reach your target audience at the right time with the right message.
Predict Customer Behavior
The ability to predict customer behavior is key to winning their loyalty and growing your business. A CDP has real-time predictive analytic tools that can help you reveal your customer’s next move and automatically create opportunities for them.
For instance, rather than reaching out directly to lost customers at random, a CDP can identify customers likely to re-engage using propensity scores. This data helps suggest which customers are worth saving and is key to maximizing your advertising spend.
CDPs also feature predictive scoring capabilities that can help enrich your customer profiles and provide the insight you need to send personalized offers tailored to meet customers’ unique interests and behaviors.
For example, with predictive scoring, you can predict who is likely to churn using historical data, user behavior, and live data. With this in hand, it’s possible to recommend “next-best actions”. For instance, if a customer’s churn score goes up by 10%, you can initiate a win-back campaign that starts with a coupon.
Because not all offers will provide value to your customers, a CDP has propensity modeling capabilities that enable you to optimize your campaign by predicting the likelihood a customer will buy from you. This can help in selecting the right customers to target.
Out-of-the-box CDPs have different data analytics capabilities. When selecting a CDP, have a clear idea of how you want to handle analysis and prioritize those features appropriately.
Leverage Automation
With a CDP, you can automate marketing campaigns faster and more efficiently than ever before. Here are some key examples:
Cross-Channel Coordination: A CDP uses a single source of data to power personalized marketing across a range of online and offline channels in real time. This means you can create new campaigns with multiple channels, creative versions, and other advanced criteria with just a few clicks.
A/B Testing: Automate the testing and fine-tuning of a campaign against micro-segments and channels. You can also run simulations that show how your decision model will perform without making any actual offers to customers. This gives you the flexibility to experiment, build, and grow.
Integration: CDPs can be integrated with a range of external adtech and martech platforms to execute direct marketing campaigns. Not all systems integrate easily with others, so list the tools you’ll need and make sure the CDPs you’re evaluating have those integrations before you make any investments.
Clearly, having a CDP in your technology stack is important if you want to create data-driven win-back campaigns. However, before you decide on implementing a CDP, consider what aspects of your campaigns it’ll help with. Keep in mind that no CDP offers every single feature, so be clear on your context and desired features when exploring vendors.