3 Ways to Increase Speed to Market With Your CDP

Psst! Want to know the secret to being a market leader? Hint: It requires actually leading. Your speed to market — how fast you transform ideas and opportunities into campaigns and customer experiences — directly impacts your ability to stay ahead of competitors.

But making the right decisions quickly can’t be done in the dark. To gain a competitive advantage, you need customer data to know what works, what doesn’t and what makes the most sense for your target audience.

Unfortunately, data won’t do you much good if it’s siloed, incomplete or locked away behind IT and analytics teams. And even if you’re able to access the necessary data to inform your marketing strategy, testing and measuring new strategies at scale is complicated and time-consuming. Without the right tools, you’re forced to trade marketing innovation and digital transformation for the status quo.

But here’s the good news: customer data platforms (CDP) are designed to overcome these exact challenges. Keep reading for three ways you can use your CDP to increase speed to market and more effectively engage your customers.

3 Ways to Increase Speed to Market With Your CDP

1. Unify & Democratize Data

The first step toward marketing agility is making sure your organization’s customer data is accurate and actionable. You don’t want to target customers with uncertainty, yet only 35% of leaders responsible for customer data management say they have high-quality data to work with — and merely 24% of this group are able to conduct real-time customer analysis.

Use your CDP to unify your different data sources and create a comprehensive customer 360 view of all your contacts. Once you’ve resolved customer identities and can define customer attributes on demand, centralize where your data lives, who has access to it and how it’s used across your systems.

Empower your business users to collaborate at a faster pace around a single source of customer intelligence truth so they can generate new insights in real time and activate your customer data across all your marketing channels.

Self-service and pre-built customer data capabilities not only eliminate time-consuming ad hoc requests for your IT team, they also boost marketing velocity. Consolidating and standardizing internal logistics concerning access to customer data has helped ActionIQ customers increase marketing efficiency by 25%, saving brands as much as $1.4 million over three years.

One major retailer used ActionIQ to achieve a 75% reduction in time to market for new marketing ideas while reducing reliance on its IT team by 90%.

2. Utilize Marketing Automation

Nothing kills speed to market quite like slow, tedious processes, but activating customer data in the right place at the right time is complex and cumbersome. Maybe that’s why 63% of marketers say they plan to increase their marketing automation budgets.

Use your CDP to automate different elements of your organization’s marketing strategy:

• Launch triggers to automatically activate real-time customer experiences based on both streaming data sources and your customers’ full historical profiles
• Arrange multi-step customer journeys to automatically guide customers down the sales funnel across different channels
• Schedule customer experiences and omnichannel journey orchestration while automatically monitoring, A/B testing, leveraging control groups and reporting on performance
• Create audience segments based on different attributes — such as location and loyalty status — and proactively determine which segments will be targeted for specific marketing campaigns and when

By identifying which products perform well with new customers and the best times to engage them based on their attributes and initial purchases, one ActionIQ customer generated a 25% increase in 90-day purchase rates after the first order by automating the process of reaching out to customers at critical times with new offers.

On the flip side, Pandora Media used ActionIQ to automate audience suppression across paid media campaigns and reduced customer acquisition costs by 50% in key segments. By exporting certain segments to their paid media channels, the streaming music provider manages more than 80 automated daily and weekly suppression lists to ensure new subscribers don’t receive acquisition-oriented offers.

3. Simplify Testing & Measurement to Accelerate Speed to Market

It doesn’t matter how quickly you bring a new strategy to market if it doesn’t drive results and benefit your company. But evaluating and optimizing performance continues to take a backseat for many brands. For instance, only 17% of marketers use landing page A/B tests to improve conversion rates.

Use your CDP to quickly and easily analyze customer behaviors, visualize trends, identify anomalies and make changes as necessary. Instead of using complex processes, it’s a simple matter of selecting which customer metrics you want to measure and compare.

Create and operationalize models to discover optimal send times and determine which channels perform best with high-value customers. Map and measure analytics for each split in the customer journey to understand how messaging performs at different times and touchpoints.

With all your customer data centralized in one location, you can automatically recalculate audiences on the freshest data sets from both batch and streaming, deciding when and at what frequency to update customer insights based on new information. Set variance thresholds and anomaly alerting to stay up to date on any significant changes or new uncertainties that may indicate a need to modify your tactics.

One ActionIQ customer tested and implemented an email welcome series for new subscribers, changing the product category and time delay between messages to find the optimal purchase window. This helped the brand drive a 17% increase in purchase rates over the first 30 days of new subscriptions.

Speed to market is essential to owning share of voice and differentiating your brand from competitors. But it’s equally important to make sure your strategy resonates with customers.

Don’t just collect customer data — use it to surface valuable insights and take action on them quickly with CDP marketing.

Learn More About How to Increase Speed to Market With Your CDP

Download our CDP Market Guide (updated yearly) to learn more about CDPs, how to use customer data to increase speed to market and the role technology plays in helping you engage customers more effectively.

We also invite you to contact our experts to see how your specific organization can boost speed to market with ActionIQ.