The Ultimate Guide to Customer Data Management

The Secrets of Successful Customer Data Management

Every one of your customers can be represented by a multitude of data points. Of course, there’s age, geographical location, and other basic demographic traits. But there’s also personal tastes, purchasing history, the way they interact on social media, and so much more. Your customers are complex individuals, and building out well-rounded customer profiles at scale requires customer data management.

What is Customer Data Management?

Customer data management is the process of acquiring and keeping track of customer data to better understand your customers and turn those insights into action.

Savvy marketers use customer data-based insights to drive sales and build long-term brand loyalty; for many marketers, however, data quality issues prevail:

• Good data goes to waste. According to the MIT Technology Review, the amount of data created by consumers doubles every two years, but 99.5% of it is never analyzed.
• Data problems cause companies to bleed money. Challenges keeping data accurate cost businesses over $600 billion per year.
• Too many versions of the truth. According to Deloitte Digital, 62% of US retailers have over 50 systems housing customer data. That represents a staggering amount of disconnected and/or redundant data.
• Data breaches are increasingly common. Every data silo your company controls is a potential target. IBM reports that the average cost of a data breach in the US was $4.24 million in 2021. The cost of not protecting customer data can be catastrophic — enough to completely sink a company. A well-designed, next-gen customer data management system helps keep customer data locked down tightly in one place.

Marketers are awash in data, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. For those who can harness it and put it to good use with a data management platform, the possibilities are endless.

CDP vs DMP: Choosing the Best Customer Data Management Software

Marketers looking to implement a customer data management system are faced with an important choice: which is better, a Data Management Platform (DMP), or a Customer Data Platform (CDP)? While DMPs typically integrate third-party data sources, they’re usually developed specifically for ad targeting and may share anonymized data on your customers outside of your organization. A CDP, on the other hand, is designed to enable a 360-degree customer view by creating a unified customer database and comprehensive individual user profiles from all the data sources available to your company.

Reimagining Customer Data Management with a CDP Platform

Customer data management lies at the heart of all next-generation CDP platforms, since all next-gen CDP platforms are built on a foundation of data collection and organization. But that’s not all:

CDPs allow marketers to tap directly into the data stream.

Very few marketers own their data or their data strategy. Marketing teams can route the flow of data through Simon, skipping the data warehouse or data lake. Instead of having to ask others outside of the marketing team to pull data for them, marketers have real-time data at their fingertips, enabling them to test and iterate rapidly.

CDPs ensure marketers can actually use the data.

Marketing teams are tasked with making sure your brand’s messages resonate with an audience that is ceaselessly bombarded with marketing communications. Incisive data is an incredible way to cut through the noise, and a CDP allows marketing teams to build sophisticated campaigns that seamlessly integrate the high-quality, actionable data your company collects.

Why Industry Leaders Choose Simon Data for Customer Data Management

So what’s the best customer data management software on the market?

The next generation of digital marketing tools, The Simon Platform is a comprehensive, fully-integrated CDP that unites powerhouse data-gathering and cross-channel messaging capabilities. With Simon Data, you have easier access to deeper, more useful data to draw more powerful insights on who your customers are, how they behave and what they want, as well as the ability to automatically serve customers the ideal message at the right time, turbo-charging revenue while lowering expenses.

Indeed, among CDP providers Simon Data leads the pack. Industry leaders like Venmo, Tripadvisor, ASOS and BarkBox are driving explosive growth using Simon CDP, along with Simon Journeys & Simon Mail. Here are a few reasons why:

• Get a true 360-degree view of your customers. Your teams shouldn’t have to hunt down the information they need in dozens of places. You need a Single Version of Truth (SVOT), a central repository for all the customer data you collect, regardless of where it originates.
• Craft personalized cross-channel experiences using better customer data. Since your brand’s data will reside in Simon Data, neatly organized and deeply layered, your marketers can effortlessly integrate it into automated omnichannel flows. Simon CDP can identify your customers’ preferences and tastes, tap into their historic purchasing history, and identify their intentions, then automatically respond to their behavior at just the right time to drive purchasing. And it can do all of this at scale, with millions of customers simultaneously.

Use data that’s actually accurate. Every year, poor data quality costs organizations an average $12.9 million. The scale of the problem compounds over time, as bad data becomes entrenched in a company’s “data ecosystem” over time. Inaccurate and inefficient data practices are a massive drain on employee productivity and morale. Still, most companies don’t even track the costs incurred by data problems. Make your data work for you, not against you.