Once you experience the full capability of a customer data platform (CDP) your life will never be the same again. Sounds dramatic, but stay with us on this one. When your organization starts using a powerful CDP, you will be blown away by what can be achieved and the ease of adoption, plus the rest of the team will be now working within the same platform, so say sayonara to work silos.

We will be exploring nine customer data platform use cases that will make you turn your head and inspire you to introduce a CDP into your organization today.

Top 9 customer data platform use cases

1. Collect and unify your data

Now when we say connect your data, we mean all your data. From online to offline, from standardized integrations to custom databases, back-end or ecommerce solutions. A powerful CDP is able to hold all of your customers' information from a variety of different sources.

If you're a hybrid organization (both online and brick and mortar), your CDP can connect to your point of sale (POS) system, meaning you can amalgamate a customer's in-store shopping data with their behaviors and purchasing habits online. This sort of insight can ensure that your entire team delivers a remarkable customer experience, every step of the way.

Say you’re a completely digital company, using a CDP like Ortto means connecting all your data sources to the platform can be done with ease. Our no-code integrations are growing constantly, assisting in unlocking data to provide solutions for a range of industries including B2B, SaaS, Ecommerce/B2C, Finance or Advertising.

Once all your customer data is collected it can then be stored as a single source of truth within your customer data platform. This unification of data means you now get a 360 degree look at your customers.

Not only will you have access to this single view of your customers but also discover actions, patterns or trends forming that are important to your business, providing incredible insight for your team. For example, you will be able to view a customer's past purchasing behavior, and model this to predict their future purchases (more on this later).

As mentioned previously, a platform like Ortto can unify data from a range of sources.It will also keep all your data up-to-date in real time, so you don’t need to worry about duplication or expired information.

Having access to a single customer view will allow your whole team, not just the marketers, with the ability to make better business decisions based on much more accurate data.

We want you to be able to build out a robust and data-rich view of your customers, so you can make data-driven decisions in your marketing.

2. Create more powerful audience segments

Your customer data platform provides you with everything needed to gain a better understanding of your audience and brand.

With all data sources now filing into one spot, your team will be able to segment audiences using any combination of demographic, firmographic, behavioral, event-based, and transactional data.

Examples of the different type of customer data may include:

• Demographic: Name, gender, email address, phone number, location.

• Firmographic: Industry, location, Job title, job focus, company, company size, company industry (more applicable to B2B).

• Behavioral: Spending/purchasing habits, browsing habits, brand interactions.

• Event-based: Page views, clicks, conversions, downloads, demo requests, product signups, newsletter subscriptions.

• Transactional: Purchasing history, preferred method of payment, products purchased, purchased with promotion.

By utilizing this data, you can prioritize creating personalized campaigns to the segmented audience. When you’re able to serve up more relevant, personalized content that matches their behaviors or actions, you’ll have a higher chance of converting the customer.

Your organization has the ability to create a segment of customers who have visited a specific landing page, or subscribed to your email, or users who have abandoned their cart. These behaviors / segments then trigger an automated, tailored journey for your customer. An abandoned cart journey will give your customer the option to come back into the sales funnel, essentially picking up where they left off.

3. Identify and replicate your best customers

Having all your customer data housed in the one spot will help you identify what your best or ideal customers look like. Once your best customers have been pinpointed you can create specific campaigns and customer journeys to target lookalike audiences, opening up your reach.

When looking for your ideal customer there are a few key data points to pay particular attention to, including:

• Purchasing habits/history - It’s no secret that a customer either spending a lot with you or purchasing constantly will be viewed as a valued customer. Nurturing and retaining this segment should be a priority.

• Frequent visitors - If your customer keeps on visiting your website, then view this as a green flag that they are looking to purchase. They may just need a little nudge from you to get them to commit to purchasing.

• High engagement - The end game with customers is not only to get them to convert, but also turn them into advocates. If your customer is interacting with your brand, whether through social, email or leaving positive reviews on third-party pages, then move them into your best customer segment.

4. Deliver seamless customer experiences

No matter which device or channel your audience chooses to interact with your brand, you can provide them with a tailored, and seamless customer experience when using a CDP.

From the data collected through your sources, you will know how your customers operate, how they move around your website, or interact with your marketing campaigns. All this information is stored within your CDP and it’s time to put it to good use. And Ortto can help you every step of the way.

For example, a potential customer is browsing your fashion ecommerce website, they have clicked on a few items that are in a similar category, let’s say formal dresses. The next time they are on your website, you can set your homepage to focus on formal dresses rather than the usual generic assortment of clothes.

Or set them up on a customer journey, using Ortto. This journey can be triggered once they exit your website without purchasing anything. They would then be automatically entered into an ‘abandoned cart journey’. Depending on your strategy, you could send them other product recommendations similar to what they were looking at, or offer a discount to get them back purchasing on your site. All the data needed for this automation to work comes from your CDP, and in a CDP like Ortto, you also have the ability to create and report on the campaign’s performance.

The best part about using a customer data platform is the functionality to personalize at scale. With the use of merge tags and dynamic widgets you’re given the chance to target personalized content to your audience segments.

Reach your customers via the channels they actually use, with automated customized communication, send timely messages and tailor your offers to the needs and capabilities of your customers.

5. Act on customer engagement

Use the scoring system within your CDP to make better business decisions or even predict the actions or behaviors of your customers.

The more data your CDP holds, the more predictive data becomes available allowing you to make highly probable estimations that a certain customer will purchase, churn, open an email, interact with a Facebook ad and more.

This predictive scoring system can be based around individual customers or segmented groups sitting at different lifecycle stages. Determining the likelihood of a customer churning can allow you to be a step ahead and improve the messaging or experience they would receive.

By refining and testing this journey, you may find that it will turn your predicted churn group into potential buyers.

6. Increase customer value

The qualitative and transactional data stored within your CDP, gives you all you need to improve your cross- and upselling capabilities, in turn increasing the ‘share of wallet’ or, in other words, increasing the percentage of total spending per customer.

A popular cross selling technique that you might recognize is the standard ‘other customers have also bought…”

This is the company's CDP organizing ecommerce customer data and providing recommendations based on your lookalike audience, or the segmented audience that you have been placed into, as a customer. It’s likely that you have shown similar interests, or product behaviors which is why you are now being served up with these recommendations.

Upselling using your CDP is effective because it is based on your customer’s past purchasing habits and behavior. Predictive scoring also assists heavily with this. Based on the past behavior of your customer, your CDP can help you predict the probability that customer is likely to be upsold.

Predictive scoring will ensure that you're only sending upselling messages to customers that are likely to actually buy, which means you don't have to bug the ones that won't and risk losing them as a customer altogether.

7. Enhance ad performance

The combination of all your data sources together provides you with a data rich audience, essentially made for targeting. Your CDP gives you the ability to segment your audience in a way that allows you to leverage your data and provide them with customized messaging and content that will grab their attention and entice them to interact with your brand.

This is an ongoing activity, where you measure and track the results to refine and better the assets or messaging in the next campaign.

If you think about it, customers will interact with your company numerous times over the week, clicking on numerous touchpoints - making a purchase, clicking on an email, interacting with a social ad.

A CDP like Ortto, brings all of those interactions together into one single profile, that is continuously updated in real-time. This customer data will aid you in creating personalized content and targeted advertising. Media channels can then execute specific campaigns based on your target audiences’ most recent behaviors.

8. Avoid data silos

Data is your go-to when making core business decisions. If this is the case, surely you would want your entire team to have access to all the data, rather than having access to a small chunk of departmental data.

A CDP can seamlessly sync all customer data information from across the company. Say a customer's profile was updated by the customer success team, and then the sales team were about to head into a meeting with said customer. The sales team will have current and up-to-date knowledge of the customers experience, prepping them appropriately before the meeting.

As we have mentioned previously, a CDP collects and organizes data into a single source of truth, allowing any department to access the same data. That way everyone is working towards the same goal with the same information.

9. AI will take CDP to the next level

Artificial intelligence is migrating its way into our everyday lives faster each day. Companies need to be able to support the amount of data needed for AI to operate at optimal functionality. A customer data platform can do this.

There are already advanced CDPs that are underpinned by AI in the market, like Ortto.
Ortto AI takes millions of data points to help accurately predict how an audience will behave. It keeps learning as more data comes in when your business continues to grow.

With AI working in the background, you can generate insights and identify customer trends in real time. By using previous customer data and analyzing it, the AI functionality may provide more accurate recommendations for customers, or more detailed responses for customer success agents to use. This is simply just the beginning of what can be achieved with AI-driven CDP’s.

The final word

A robust customer data platform will maximize the value of your data by organizationalizing your data and empowering your entire team to make data-driven business decisions. This will help your entire organization step up the customer experience delivered across all channels, at every stage of the journey, and in every on and offline message.

It’s time to get one step ahead of your customers by predicting their behavior and ten steps ahead of your competition by implementing a CDP underpinned with artificial intelligence. If these customer data platform use cases have not yet pulled you over the line, then we invite you to sign up to Ortto for free, and experience it for yourself.