The top 6 ways CDPs unleash marketing experimentation and innovation

In marketing, experimentation is the key to continued success. It fuels innovation and keeps campaigns and programs from becoming stale. The challenge is that experimentation is too often limited to what’s “doable,” resulting in stagnation. Experiments that could redefine marketing strategies and engagement methods fall by the wayside because of logistical constraints, siloed data, or lack of resources.

To take your experimentation to the next level, you need a tool to simplify the complex. A Customer Data Platform (or CDP) can be that tool.  

At its core, a CDP is a platform for consolidating data, organizing it, and (most importantly) making it actionable. Because data is central to both modern marketing and robust experimentation, the right CDP — particularly one with seamless integration into your marketing channels — can turbo-charge your experimentation roadmap.

A CDP empowers and encourages marketing experimentation in a myriad of ways. Let’s look at six of the most prominent examples.

1. Unified Customer Profiles

What exactly is a unified customer profile?

A CDP consolidates data from multiple datasets and sources, giving marketers a unified customer profile. This includes interactions from various channels — website visits, app usage, product purchases, and responses to marketing messages — creating a robust, accurate portrait of each customer.

How it encourages experimentation

With expanded access to detailed profiles, marketers have a greater data pool with which to experiment. They can test diverse content, personalized messaging, and tailored experiences based on unique customer attributes. Moving beyond generalized campaigns, they can design and execute micro-targeted touchpoints that speak to specific customers and their needs.

A real-world example

Consider a pet food company whose customers are pet parents for various breeds and life stages. They could test whether breed-specific messaging (e.g., targeting Labrador owners with food benefits specific to Labrador needs) outperforms general content.  

They could also test unique content for multiple breeds, determining which breeds are more responsive than others. Because CDPs enable dynamic content blocks, this could be achieved far more efficiently than creating individual campaigns for each breed. This boosts overall engagement and helps you identify what matters most to each segment, enabling a new level of personalization.

2. Advanced segmentation and predictive analytics

What it means

A leading-edge CDP empowers marketers to create sophisticated segmentation using AI and machine learning.  Specifically, AI can more efficiently identify micro-segments based on marketing-suggested variables while improving predictive analytics, such as a customer’s likelihood to purchase a given product or category. 

This means campaigns can target specific customer groups based on behavior, preferences, and predicted actions.

How this encourages marketing experimentation

Segment creation becomes more agile, enabling faster, more targeted testing. Marketers can swiftly deploy campaigns tailored to each micro-segment and iterate based on real-time performance, thus enhancing both revenue and lifetime value (LTV) by delivering highly relevant experiences.

Example

A retail brand might experiment with propensity models to validate the likelihood that targeted customers will purchase a specific category or even individual products.  Similarly, they can test different creative treatments within these segments to determine which content, creative and offers are the most effective.

3. Creative testing at scale

What it means

Beyond simply testing subject lines, a CDP enables A/B testing of multiple creative elements through easy-to-manage workflows. AI can further streamline these workflows, suggesting copy for testing and simplifying content personalization via natural language prompts in the campaign builder.

How does it encourage testing?

With these improved efficiencies, marketers can more frequently test a variety of elements, from design components and copy elements to featured products and offers. This empowers the development of new programs and the continuous improvement of evergreen campaigns, empowering innovation and avoiding stagnation.

Here’s an example

In a recurring user flow, marketers might use the 80/20 framework for the A/B testing of creative elements, rotating new creative against winning control treatments. In this structure, 80% of the target audience receives the control (the current default), while 20% receive a new “test” treatment. 

If any test treatment outperforms the control, it becomes the new standard, with variations continuing to be tested against it. This iterative approach keeps campaigns fresh while limiting the risk of reduced performance to no more than 20% of the base at any given time.

4. Cross-channel integration

What it means

CDPs with multi-channel integrations can handle communications across email, SMS, push notifications, and paid media. They also aggregate tracking data across channels, making it easy to analyze the combined impact of cross-channel efforts.

How this encourages experimentation

Marketers can test cross-channel strategies more effectively, optimizing campaigns based on aggregate results rather than individual channel performance. This helps refine where marketing dollars and efforts are best allocated and allows for the mixing and matching of multiple channels based on customer engagement.

Here’s an example

A retailer could test whether lead nurturing is more effective via email, paid media retargeting, or a combination. 

A CDP with multi-channel integrations makes this simple through A/B/C testing of three lead-nurture journeys tracked over a four-week window. The results tell the tale of which journey produces the highest conversion and ROI for the media spend. 

Similarly, marketers can quantify the incremental value of a newly launched channel, such as SMS. Half the audience (control) only receives email, and half (test) receives email plus SMS. The difference in overall performance between the two is the incremental value of SMS.

5. Automated journeys

What it means

A CDP enables automated journeys, using customer behavior and activity data to trigger communications designed to drive engagement and conversion. These journeys can be tailored to unique segments and customer paths, allowing for a more hands-free approach to testing long-term, multi-step interactions.

How automated journeys help with experimentation

Rather than testing individual messages, marketers can measure the impact of complete customer journeys over time. This includes experimenting with different treatment types for customer segments, running automated journeys, and optimizing based on ongoing results.

A marketing example

For a 30-day onboarding journey targeting new prospects, marketers could test three approaches: offer-heavy, content-focused, or a blend of content and offer. Once created, these test journeys can be applied independently to different segments, such as prospects from organic channels separate from paid media. 

The tests can run autonomously over several weeks, with periodic check-ins to ensure that each test delivers meaningful results and to determine when statistical significance is reached for each segment. Once a winner is chosen, that treatment is simply rolled out to 100% of the future audience.

6. Enhanced attribution and measurement

What it means

A CDP offers advanced attribution models, enabling accurate measurement of how different touchpoints and channels contribute to traffic, conversion, and revenue. 

By analyzing each interaction across channels, marketers gain insights into their campaigns' cumulative impact and each element's granular impact. 

How it promotes experimentation

With this detailed insight, marketers can measure the effects of specific experiments and fine-tune their approach. Enhanced attribution helps pinpoint which elements within a multi-week journey deliver the best ROI, enabling continuous optimization of that journey and informing future campaigns.

What it looks like

A retail company might run a seasonal campaign with email, social media, digital ads, and SMS over four weeks. Using a CDP, the marketing team implements a multi-touch attribution model to evaluate each channel’s contribution to revenue. 

Early results could reveal that SMS drives higher in-store traffic, while email and ads boost online sales. This would allow them to shift the focus of SMS to in-store promotions while optimizing paid media ads and email for online engagement.

Go forth and experiment!

As customer data grows in volume and sophistication, so do the opportunities to test new and exciting customer experiences that are informed and inspired by that data. However, to harness this potential, marketers need tools that simplify and streamline the testing process. 

A CDP fills that gap by acting as a customer targeting engine, enabling DTC marketers to mobilize their data for real-time, scalable experiments. By embracing the right CDP, marketers can drive meaningful innovation and refine their strategies faster and with greater insight.

Marketers who use a CDP as a central component in their strategies gain a decisive advantage, transforming data into actionable segmentation and experiments that drive results. 

These marketers can continually innovate, ensuring their campaigns stay fresh, effective, and aligned with evolving consumer needs. In doing so, they build brand loyalty, increase lifetime value, and ultimately drive business growth, particularly in today’s competitive environment.

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