Two types of customer profiles and the ways to build them
When it comes to exploring customer-centricity, there are two types of customer profile to be aware of:
Interactions-based:Every interaction the customer has had with your brand
Data-unified:Information from every data source to create a unified profile view
Salesforce State of Marketing Report, 8th Edition, 2022
When reviewing the ability to track real-time digital interactions, marketers struggle to use meta data to create an insightful profile. Organisations frequently fail to store unknown visitor data, so therefore cannot connect a customer’s activities once they become a known visitor. This impairs their ability to form a 360 interactions-based customer profile.
There are a number of marketing technologies that can help organisations to solve this challenge by creating an affinity interactions-based customer profile.
An affinity profile is the grouping of interaction types that then create personality traits of interest automatically
This allows organisations to track real-time interactions across owned channels such as web, email, mobile application, advertising, CRM sales and services.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization platform enables real-time interactions affinity profiling with the ability to match identities for anonymous visitors to known visitors. This maintains a true reflection of an interactions-based customer profile. It is enriched with:
Existing system data (e.g. CRM, ETL)
Feeds (e.g. API, JavaScript)
Real-time interactions management allows your organisation to understand each customer’s wants and needs, such as:
Recognise your customers through anonymous identity matching across devices/unique IDs
Understand business context through content and product-based interactions
Predetermine your customer’s next move based on their true interest, affinities, and intent
Leverage existing owned data from various sources and connectors to enrich affinity profile
But how is this achievable without mega amounts of technical work?
In an ideal world, all data would be easy to connect and live in one place. However, in reality, we get the data we need for different purposes from a variety of technologies, sources, and moments. These unfortunately end up stuck in unconnected locations. In addition, each of those data sources may have different unique identifiers, which makes the process of matching data hard to achieve. And that’s just the technical aspect!
We all want the ability to unify data sources and form a comprehensive view of the customer in real-time. We could then use this across the customer lifecycle and across departments or functions. A single source of truth against a golden customer record.
Customer Data Platforms (CDP) have emerged over the last few years as the next big wave in tackling big data with clicks rather than code. CDPs are designed to easily connect data from various sources, complete identity matching across several types of unique identifiers and finally offer a single point of truth of a customer profile.
What differentiates a CDP from a Data Management Platform (DMP)? Both ingest and enrich data, but a CDP allows for faster and simpler data segmentation. These segmentations can then be activated and accessed across other platforms to support customer lifecycle activities, including analytics.
Salesforce CDP (Data Cloud) enables these capabilities, powered with AI (Einstein) and other connected Salesforce features that excel CRM possibilities across business functions.
CDPs allow your organisation to:
Utilise all the customer data your business collects
Match data to a person automatically
Act on real-time data and insights
55% of CMOs agree they are collecting more data that they can usually interpret
PwC CMO Survey, 2022
