3 Ingredients to Unlocking Next-Level Growth with a SmartHub CDP

Creating timely, meaningful interactions with customers is the key to unlocking the full potential of your marketing. Limited by data silos, technology gaps, and disconnected channels, marketers are finding it more and more difficult to engage with customers — but there is a solution: the SmartHub CDP.

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Speaker:

Josh Francia: Chief Growth Officer, Blueshift

The Customer Data Dilemma and the Need for Reciprocity

Josh Francia: Hi, everyone, my name is Josh Francia. I am the Chief Growth Officer at Blueshift. And today, for the next 15 minutes, we'll talk about the three ingredients to unlocking next-level growth with a SmartHub CDP.

A little bit about Blueshift to get started: We are a leading customer data platform trusted by major brands worldwide, including:

Media: Discovery and BBC
Personal Finance: LendingTree
eCommerce: SlickDeals
Retail: Tuft & Needle
eLearning: Udacity

We've been featured by Gartner, Forrester, and G2 Crowd, and were recently named to the Deloitte Fast 500 for growing tech companies in North America.

Today we'll talk about:

How a SmartHub CDP unlocks potential growth.
The three ingredients you need for success with a CDP.
How you can get started today, whether you have a CDP or are just considering one.

Let's quickly level set. There's a lot of talk about CDPs, but many brands have recently adopted the term, leading to confusion. Marketers often wonder, "How do I know what a real CDP is? And how do I know which one is right for me?"

Last year, Gartner addressed this in their CDP Market Guide. They categorized vendors into four types based on two axes:

Who manages it? (IT vs. Marketer)
What does it do? (Data Management vs. Execution)

The SmartHub category falls firmly in the upper-right quadrant, focused on marketer-managed execution. According to Gartner, a SmartHub CDP emphasizes marketing orchestration and personalization, leveraging customer data to give marketers control to create event-triggered and planned user journeys within a single platform. Marketers can use its predictive analytics, segmentation, and easy interfaces to design customer journeys based on first-party data and real-time interactions.

Ultimately, a SmartHub CDP has three components:

Smart: This means accessible AI that helps marketers do their jobs better, not complex AI that only data scientists can use.
Hub: It orchestrates the entire customer journey across all channels, not just one or two.
CDP: It unifies all your customer data and provides the analysis and segmentation that helps the AI learn and the orchestration becomes better.

Ingredient 1: Leverage AI Predictions

Josh Francia: The first ingredient for success with a CDP is to leverage AI and its predictions. These predictions can help you understand what would be impossible to know otherwise. I'd like to talk about four key types of predictions:

1. Predictive Audiences (The Who): Who are the right people to target right now, and what products are they interested in?

Example: If predictive scores indicate a group of customers is interested in purchasing a hotel in the next 20 days, you wouldn't send them offers for rental cars or cruises. You'd send them hotel offers. What if you knew this for all your products?

2. Predictive Content (The What): What content will resonate most with this audience?

Example: I know you're interested in hotels in Miami, but what type of hotel? A five-star luxury resort or a budget-friendly option? On the beach or in the city? What amenities are important? Knowing this allows you to deliver the perfect content.

3. Engaged Time Optimization (The When): When should you talk to them?

Example: Sending a perfect marketing message at 7 a.m. when a customer is in "get the kids to school mode" will likely be forgotten, even if they open it. What if AI could tell you the best hour to engage, like 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, when they're most likely to process the information and take action?

4. Predictive Channels (The Where): Which marketing channel is most effective?

Example: What if you knew a customer is 90% more likely to respond to an SMS than an email? Of course, you'd send them an SMS. AI can provide the likelihood of engagement across different marketing channels.

If you knew all these things and could programmatically use them in your customer journey, you can imagine what that would do for your success. In a recent survey, 98% of marketers who use AI reported seeing positive results in their campaigns. Therefore, leveraging predictions is the first ingredient.

Ingredient 2: Personalize Everywhere

Josh Francia: The second ingredient is to personalize everywhere. We need to reduce friction at every touchpoint by making every interaction relevant to the customer. This relevancy isn't just about content, but also about context and timing.

Example 1: Travel: A customer has booked a hotel and is five days from their trip. Instead of bombarding them with "book more hotels," a relevant message would be, "Here's how to use virtual check-in," "Here are restaurants in your area," or "Here's the weather for your stay."
Example 2: Customer Service: A customer at the Fountain Blue in Miami calls their travel company with a problem. Wouldn't it be great if the agent, just by the phone number, knew it was Josh Francia at the Fountain Blue and said, "Hey, Mr. Francia, I know you're at the Fountain Blue. What seems to be the problem?" Instead, most customers are forced to reintroduce themselves and provide information the company already has.

Personalize everywhere means ensuring every interaction with your brand is a seamless, positive experience for the customer, not just in marketing but across all touchpoints.

Ingredient 3: Grow Your Loyal Customer Base

Josh Francia: The third ingredient is to grow your loyal customer base. We can visualize this as a ladder to loyalty:

Unknown Visitors: This is where most marketing dollars for brand awareness and demand generation go. The goal is to turn them into known visitors.
Known Visitors: You convert them by owning their interest. This can happen through a transaction, a website registration, an app download, or a loyalty program signup.
Customers: Once you own the transaction, you have a customer. That's a huge win, and many marketers stop here, moving on to find the next customer. This is a mistake.
Repeat Customers: You need to make the experience so amazing that they return without you having to reacquire them. If their expectations were violated in a previous experience, they won't come back.
Loyal Customers: The ultimate goal is to own their mindshare. When they think about their next transaction (a trip, a financial product), they only think of your brand. You achieve this through always-on, relevant engagement in between transactions.

Transactions are episodic. A customer may travel two to three times a year or use a financial product every few years. So, you must own their mindshare during those long gaps with continuous, relevant engagement. This allows you to spend your marketing dollars on true net-new customers, giving you a huge competitive advantage. The last thing a brand should have to do is constantly reacquire its own customers.

Getting Started Today

Josh Francia: So, the three ingredients are:

Leverage predictions with easy-to-use AI.
Personalize everywhere by adopting a customer-first perspective.
Grow a loyal customer base with continuous, relevant engagement.

You can get started today with the following resources, which are attached to this session:

Smart Guide to Data Activation: A primer on how to use customer data to make informed decisions and get started.
Smart Guide to AI Marketing: Actionable steps to begin using AI marketing.
50 Essential Questions for Your CDP RFP: Questions to ask when evaluating CDPs, especially given the variety of platforms available.
Tuft & Needle Case Study: A real-world example of a brand that activated its data and used AI to achieve enormous growth.

Thank you so much for your time. I hope you found this valuable. If you have any questions or need help, please reach out at hello@blueshift.com. Thank you.