Making the most of customer data and a CDP: 4 common challenges & solutions

With the impending death of third-party cookies, it’s never been more important for businesses to collect zero- and first-party data directly from their customers. That data is an invaluable part of modern marketing, empowering you to more accurately segment your customers and build marketing campaigns that are personalized on a 1:1 level. 

To begin putting that data to use once you’ve collected it, it’s essential to have a customer data platform (CDP) in place.

But not all CDPs are made equal, and it would be a mistake to believe that simply deploying any CDP will immediately solve all of your problems. In fact, choosing the wrong CDP — or not knowing how to configure the one you’ve got — can cause serious frustration and challenges for your business.

Not sure which CDP is right for your business? See how Simon’s CDP stacks up against the competition, and why we believe our platform is the best choice for marketing teams. 

Below, we’ve highlighted four common pain points that businesses often experience when they’re first getting started with a CDP. We also offer solutions that you can use to counteract these pain points and get the most out of both your platform and customer data. 

Pain point #1: It can be slow to get started with your first campaign after implementation.

Integrating any new technology or solution into your business systems can be a complex, slow, and sometimes painful process; that’s true whether you’re talking about a CRM or a CDP. 

If you’re working with a CDP provider without adequate experience, it can take months or longer before your system is fully implemented and operational. And once it is operational, it can take months longer before your team is fully up to speed on how to efficiently run campaigns.

All of this makes it difficult for you to demonstrate the ROI of the implementation — whether you’re deploying your first CDP or you are switching systems. It can also lead to frustration amongst your team members, leading to lower levels of tech adoption and less effective campaigns. 

Solution: Work with a CDP provider with a demonstrated ability to get you up and running quickly.

Just because CDP implementations often take time, that doesn’t mean that this has to be the case for your business. You can increase your chances of a smooth and fast implementation by choosing a provider with experience deploying CDPs for businesses like yours, and for the use cases for which you are planning to leverage the CDP. 

Here at Simon Data, for example, we have 10 years of experience deploying our CDP to support the marketing efforts of more than 150 businesses. We know what it takes to get you up and running as quickly as possible to put your new system to use. 

Likewise, we staff a full team of technical and account specialists that allow us to showcase the easiest path to running campaigns once your system is deployed.

Pain point #2: Customer data lives in a number of disparate systems that don’t always talk to one another.

For most businesses, customer data is created and stored in several different systems and tools. This can include everything from your POS system to your accounting system, website management system, CRM, behavior tracking tools, and more — and the picture only gets messier when you start adding in third-party data.

When your customer data is compartmentalized like this, it can be difficult for you to build a comprehensive profile of each of your customers, limiting the effectiveness of your personalized campaigns. And, unfortunately, deploying a CDP in and of itself won’t solve the problem.

Solution: Enable your CDP with comprehensive, clean data by building on top of a CDW.

A cloud data warehouse (CDW) is a system that aggregates and structures all of your customer data from its various sources and centralizes it in a single, queryable spot. This centralization makes it easier for your CDP to transform that raw data into actionable insights and customer profiles.

The Simon CDP is a Snowflake-connected CDP. That means that it essentially sits directly on top of your Snowflake instance, empowering you to activate all of the data that Snowflake holds about your customers — regardless of which system actually originated it. 

Pain point #3: It’s often difficult to use data to create personalized campaigns without a data or engineering team.

Marketers are often forced to acquire customer data from their data engineering teams. But by the time they receive that data from engineering, it’s already out of date — leading to stale, non-personalized, and clunky marketing campaigns.

Additionally, even if your team is considering a CDP to address this issue, not every CDP is easy or intuitive for marketers to use. Getting the most out of many CDPs on the market today requires that the user has a certain level of understanding about coding and data — skills that most marketers don’t have. 

This challenge often stems from a belief that all CDPs are alike. But the truth is that with over 200+ platforms on the market calling themselves “composable CDPs,” they can be very different from one another, serving different audiences and use cases. 

If you choose a platform that was built first for engineers and developers but try to hoist it onto your marketing team, it’s going to be an uphill battle for them to truly unlock the power inherent in the system. 

Solution: Choose a CDP specifically designed to support marketers.

To support your marketing team, it’s important to choose a CDP that was built with them in mind. That means selecting a solution that doesn’t require an in-depth understanding of data structuring or coding — a solution that your team can quickly pick up with just a bit of training. 

The Simon CDP was built with a marketer-first mindset. With an easy-to-use interface and no-code segmentation, it allows your team to activate the full power of your customer data without the need for a data or engineering team. This empowers faster decisions and more agile campaigns than is possible with many other CDPs.

Pain point #4: Understanding and adapting to customer behavior (and campaign results) can be difficult.

Many businesses get into trouble when they approach their marketing campaigns as something that can be built once and then left on autopilot for multiple quarters or even years. 

But the reality is that truly effective marketing and segmentation isn’t something you can set and forget. Getting personalization right requires constant optimization and testing, based on an understanding of your customer behavior and the past results of your campaign.

Proper testing and optimization of campaigns requires your team to have access to and an understanding of real-time customer data which, as noted above, marketers often don’t have. This can limit your ability to adapt and provide your customers with the offers and messaging capable of moving the needle for your business.

Solution: Choose a CDP capable of predicting customer behavior right out of the box. 

You could build a data team whose responsibility is to analyze your customer data to draw actionable insights that your marketers can use to optimize their campaigns. Or, you can select a CDP that is capable of drawing these insights itself and surfacing opportunities for your marketers to pursue.

The Simon CDP leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze your customer data, predict customer behavior, and anticipate the outcomes of your campaigns. 

Out-of-the-box predictive models help your marketers determine who they should be sending an offer to, when they should be sending it, and can even power product suggestions and nudges. With Simon, AI isn’t an afterthought — it’s built into every step of our workflow. 

Get the most out of your customer data with the Simon CDP

Deciding to deploy a CDP for your business is a big step forward in putting your valuable customer data to use. But getting the most out of your customer data means making the right decision about which CDP you ultimately choose and the data infrastructure you have to support it. 

Here at Simon Data, we’ve built our CDP with marketers in mind. Ready to learn more about how Simon can help you activate your customer data for truly personalized campaigns? Request a demo today to see how we can work together. 

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