Have you ever felt like your customers are an enigma, with seemingly endless layers to unpack? As a marketing professional, keeping pace with constantly changing preferences and finding new ways to deliver value can feel like chasing a moving target.
This is where customer data platforms, also known as CDPs, have transformed how businesses understand their customers. By pulling together disparate data from across teams and systems, a well-implemented CDP like DataS finally provides a unified view of each individual.
Of course, for a CDP to be truly effective, it must be fueled by the right types of quality data. But with information coming to us from all angles these days, it can be hard to know exactly what data types should power your core customer asset.
In this article, we’ll explore the most common and insightful data feeding top CDPs so you have a deeper grasp of this all-important technology.
Profile Data: The Foundation
At their core, CDPs draw together contact facts and attributes that comprise digital identities. Think of basic data like names, email addresses, phone numbers and demographic details such as location and age range.
This foundational profile information comes directly from your customers themselves through registration forms or sources like your CRM system records. By aggregating these previously disjointed profile threads stored across your business, DataS is able to provide a master record of key identifiers for each person.
And it’s not just basics like names and addresses – a true understanding requires depth. That’s why DataS also collects high-quality profile attributes you’ve collected over time, like behavioral or lifestyle segments and preferences gleaned from past purchases.
This rounded profile establishes a standardized foundation for insight that can be layered upon. Needless to say, without robust profiles – the building blocks are missing.
Purchase Behavior: A Goldmine for Insight
Beyond profiles, one of the richest and most widely used data types is purchase transactions. These order records flowing in from your website, retail locations, partner marketplaces, and other sales channels offer a treasure trove of clues into buyers’ preferences and patterns over time.
DataS collects and analyzes these transaction histories to discover valuable patterns. Things like best-selling products during certain seasons, repurchasing tendencies, average order values, and more help reveal your most loyal and responsive customer segments. Few data types give such a profound understanding of maximizing lifetime customer value.
Sentiment Feedback: A Guide for Continuous Improvement
Another powerful data type that DataS ingests is sentiment signals, which take the form of customer reviews, survey ratings, and even social mentions. These real-time feedback clues are so important because they allow you to check the pulse of customer experience and brand perceptions constantly. As comments and reviews pour in across your website and preferred review channels, DataS automatically analyzes tone and themes to surface what’s working and where improvement may be needed.
Let’s keep diving deeper into useful CDP data types. Beyond core profiles, transactions, and feedback we’ve covered, many platforms also analyze engagement behaviors for a fuller picture.
Engagement Data: Painting the Full Customer Journey
Following individual customer experiences across touchpoints provides important context for decision-making. DataS and other top CDPs import signals like:
- Website & app usage – illuminating intents via common pages/features used
- Campaign exposure history – understanding which messaging drove particular outcomes
- Support inquiries – spotlighting where customers may face issues
- Loyalty points activity – revealing brand champions investing the most
The value comes from observing diverse behaviors en masse. For example, DataS could show which email recipients tend to interact with mobile push notifications as well. These finer-grained behaviors, when combined with other data genres, expose subtle patterns.
External Insights: Filling Out Profiles
Lastly, filling out profiles through external partnership data is increasingly common. Integrating complementary datasets from:
- Loyalty programs
- Digital ad platforms
- Marketing automation
- Data enrichment providers
Flesh out limited profiles by connecting dots across the larger customer ecosystem.
With more signals flowing to its core, DataS forms a complete picture covering both your first-party and third-party experiences with an individual. Maximizing potentially private external datasets requires governance best practices, of course.
In conclusion, we’ve unpacked the core building blocks fueling the most powerful customer data platforms on the market. Whether it’s robust profiles, purchase transactions, engagement behaviors, or external partner data – CDPs like DataS thrive on ingesting and connecting diverse sources of information.
Armed with these insights flowing together, you shift from scattered signals to true understanding. Individual customers become comprehensible in ways not possible before through their unique lens. Opportunities once invisible emerge for more relevant and meaningful experiences fostering deeper loyalty.
The journey of discovery is ongoing as relationships evolve. But with a CDP foundation in place, understanding customers better has never been more attainable.