The Data Dilemma: Activating Commerce Data for D2C Marketers

Want to send fewer but better emails? Convert more customers? Make more money? 

The secret to more effective digital marketing lies in your data — more specifically, your customer data and how you manage to activate it. 

With customer data, ecommerce brands can offer product recommendations, predict customer behavior, create more relevant marketing campaigns, improve the overall customer experience, and ultimately, drive more business success. 

All of this data can live within a customer data platform (CDP) platform, which will gather, organize, and analyze your customer intel for you.

In the highly competitive ecommerce industry, a solid customer data strategy is essential for success. By analyzing customer preferences and behaviors, you can personalize your offerings, build customer trust, and drive repeat purchases. Customer data also provides valuable insights into market trends and future customer behavior, so your business can operate more efficiently.

Despite all the benefits of customer data (and CDPs), one of the biggest obstacles to unlocking these insights is data silos.

Inaccessible data is useless data. Not only does inaccessible data prevent you from providing an excellent customer experience, but it also makes teams less productive. Problems accessing siloed data steal 12 hours from teams every week. 

For impactful results, you must unravel this data dilemma with a unified marketing platform. 

Data Silos Restrict Marketers From Activating Their Data

Data silos are a big problem for ecommerce marketers — so much so, only 22% of business leaders believe that their teams share data well.

When your data is scattered across your organization: 

• Collaboration is strained. Disjointed messaging is bound to happen when different departments own different pieces of customer data. 
• Decision-making feels like a stab in the dark. When data is siloed, you’re left making decisions using incomplete data sets. 
• Your marketing campaigns can’t reach their full potential. Siloed data makes it difficult to provide the personalized touchpoints that customers expect. 

By bringing all customer data together under a single customer view, ecommerce marketers can get a complete and holistic picture of their customers, improve advertising strategies, and provide personalized experiences that bring in revenue. 

Embrace the Power of a Unified Platform

Data silos are a fixable problem. Customer data and marketing campaigns can live harmoniously under one roof with Bloomreach Engagement. Engagement makes multichannel marketing easy, so your emails, SMS campaigns, in-app messaging, web personalization, and more can be deployed using shared datasets for one unified message. 

Our in-memory framework (IMF) infrastructure is the secret sauce behind such robust capabilities. IMF is a unique data architecture that stores and processes data in the memory of a computer vs. a disk or external storage device. So, when customer data is stored here, it allows for split-second read/write speeds, and near-instantaneous reporting and execution. 

That means when you retrieve data via IMF, you can use it much faster — as in, actual real-time marketing instead of “in a little bit” marketing. That’s why IMF infrastructure is ideal for real-time personalization and any other application that requires quick access to large swathes of data. Not to mention, IMF is scalable and won’t experience downtime during peak seasons like Black Friday. 

Here’s an illustrative example of how quickly IMF can perform tasks: 

Bloomreach Engagement is also unique in its custom attribution feature. This feature allows users to create their own rules regarding successful campaign conversions. When ecommerce brands have the last word in how conversions are measured, they trust the data they receive and use it to make better business decisions.

Experience True Ecommerce Personalization

When you work with a unified multichannel marketing platform that breaks down your data silos, you’re left with commerce data. 

While customer data provides valuable information about individual customers and their preferences, commerce data takes a broader perspective, helping your business gain insights into sales patterns, inventory management, pricing strategies, and overall performance. 

You can achieve true ecommerce personalization when your marketing team leverages commerce and customer data. It can look like this: 

• Deliver personalized product recommendations based on browsing and purchase history
• Use AI to identify and target customers with the highest chance of making a purchase 
• Offer special discounts to customers who have taken a specific action, like signing up for your newsletter
• Send email messaging that reminds a customer about an abandoned cart and encourages them to complete the purchase 

Not only do these touchpoints make your customer feel valued, but they also boost engagement and customer lifetime value (CLV).

Customer lifetime value is exactly what it sounds like: a customer’s value to a company over some time. Because customer acquisition is five times more expensive than retention, CLV is crucial to track. 

CLV provides valuable insights into the overall health of your business and its customer experience. By monitoring CLV, businesses can make informed long-term decisions and remain competitive in the dynamic ecommerce landscape. 

Bloomreach Solves Your Data Headaches

With a powerful omnichannel marketing platform like Bloomreach Engagement, businesses can bring together different types of data and use them to create personalized ecommerce experiences on every channel. By analyzing valuable customer information, businesses can make smarter decisions, better understand their target audience, and stay ahead in the competitive online market.

If you want to deploy more effective campaigns, convert more customers, and make more money, we can help you get started. Download our guide, Mastering the Art of D2C Marketing, and get inspired by the best-performing D2C campaigns that acquire and retain customers, drive conversions, and more.