Phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop? For online shoppers, the answer is often all of the above.
Not only do we shop on all kinds of devices but we also come to the site through a variety of entry points, including clickable ads, emails, SMS, social media posts, and more.
It all adds up to many possible directions and paths for customer journeys to take. How to track all of them? The answer is three little letters: CDP.
Why you need to connect across devices
As smartphones became increasingly popular, online sellers shifted their sites to optimize for the mobile experience and started reaching out to customers via SMS. That touchpoint is a valuable one for customers, as many do begin their path to purchase on their phones, but they often only convert on a different device, according to Why the Future of Online Shopping Is Multi-Device, Not Mobile.
It found “that conversion rates are higher when consumers start on a mobile device and end on a less mobile device, such as a desktop or laptop computer, versus when purchase paths start on a less mobile device.”
It’s important to know not just the device for the final conversion but the experience of the customer that led to it. Accordingly, it points out, “user time spent exploring and evaluating a product on a smartphone is extremely valuable from a marketing standpoint even when it doesn’t lead to same-session conversion.”
But you have to track it to make it work, and the prime example of that, of course, is Amazon. As the same article explains, it is set up for “cross-device shopping baskets that ensure the items in customers’ mobile shopping carts appear in their shopping carts on their desktop computers.”
And, of course, your cart choices influence the marketing messages that Amazon will show you afterwards, whether it is suggested products selected in an email or recommendations that come up when you log on.
Personalization is widely regarded as essential to marketing success, and eCommerce marketers aspire to go beyond knowing their customer names and demographics to be able to deliver the tailored experience that shoppers have come to expect in the age of Amazon and Netflix. (See What Netflix Can Teach Us About Effective Customer Data Platform Use)
Your business doesn’t need all the resources at the disposal of mega-presences online to piece together shopping behavior across devices. To effectively market to your customers, all you need is a CDP solution.
From abandoned cart recovery to predictive marketing, you, too, can be like Amazon
Whether your marketing goal is as simple as reducing the sales lost to abandoned carts or as advanced as predicting what your customers would want to buy and which marketing campaigns would deliver the best ROI, the data collected and analyzed in a CDP makes it possible.
For example, Sandra Hurley, Operations Manager of the online retailer Hayden Girls reports having “had real, visible, and measurable results with it.”
She attributed 30% recovery of abandoned cart purchases to the CDP:
“We were able to target customers who abandoned carts or just ended up abandoning the purchase for one reason or another. It’s very powerful when you’re undecided on something and then you get an offer for the exact product you were seeking to buy.”
For English Blinds, the personalization goals required more sophisticated analytics possible only with the comprehensive view of the customer built in a CDP. Polly Kay, its Senior Marketing Manager reports:
“The predictive modeling inherent to our CDP enabled us to streamline expenses on campaigns and cut out some of the need for A/B testing of dual campaigns across different markets to increase our campaign ROI and cut costs. The ability to bring all of our customer data together in one place and so, to incorporate every action from browsing patterns to purchase history to ad clicks and so on have also enabled us to greatly enhance personalization while avoiding intrusion, and develop far more interactive (and so, effective) content for our different marketing verticals.”
In Sum
A CDP is what enables a business to connect all the dots of the customer journey – across devices and channels – with a single, unified platform. On that basis, it is possible to deliver truly personalized marketing to meet each customer’s needs throughout every step of the journey. Whether the point of contact starts through email, SMS, search, social media, or ads.