Single Customer View: What is it and how does it benefit your marketing?

In 2022 we really see the next step in the transformation of e-commerce businesses. They are moving from being a traditional online store to becoming technologically advanced.

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The immense increase in competition and the market acceleration during the global pandemic means e-commerce businesses now rely more on data and technology than ever. Single Customer View, Advanced segmentation, and predictive analysis have become vital even for the smallest eCommerce stores now.

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Mckinsey has coined the term “The Quickening” when they describe how e-commerce has moved 10 years in just about 3 months. So why has data become so important that most e-commerce businesses need to rely on them today? Allow me to explain.

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Data-driven e-commerce stores and single-customer view

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Today, e-commerce success is dependent on how well you know your customers. Consumers today can get any service or product with just a few clicks. So in order to stand out, you need to give them experiences. And the difference between a good and a great experience comes down to personalization. And to do personalization right – you need good data, preferably from an e-commerce CDP. Without a customer data platform, it becomes near impossible to have a single customer view of each customer. But what is this single customer view, and why it is so important for e-commerce businesses today?

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What is a single customer view?

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Companies being able to understand each and every customer on a detailed level is quite a new phenomenon. However, these new tools have already been embraced by customers. This means that they now expect higher degrees of personalized experiences than ever before. They expect your online business to know them as well as their local hairdresser or grocer. And they want you toprovide them with a personalized 1:1 experience wherever they interact with you.

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To do that, a CDP should be able to create a Single Customer View based on all your touchpoints with that single customer.

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This means, unifying all the information you have on one persona or customer, across platforms, channels, devices, and all other touchpoints. With all that information, the CDP can create a profile on each and every customer you have.

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A profile you can use to create personalized experiences, from delivering tailor-made messaging on the website, emails, apps, push notifications, or wherever you interact with your customers.

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This way you can create unique, personalized experiences for all your customers, at scale.

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What are the benefits of a single customer view?

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There is a number of benefits that a company can leverage with the single customer view such as it reduces your need for guesswork about the customer need. It reduces the business cost that you spent on understanding the customers’ behavior. And it enhances your efficiency when communicating with your customers.

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A single customer view can take your existing e-commerce marketing tactics to the next level. Whether you are looking to increase shopper engagement or convert browsers into buyers, or buyers into repeat purchasers. Let’s have a look at some of the main benefits of having a single view of your customer.

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Increase your sales

Ultimately, every e-commerce is looking to boost sales in some way. With a single customer view, you can do that by creating targeted, relevant communication with your potential and current customers. But there are many ways to do to increase sales with a single customer view including these:

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• increase purchases with personalized product recommendations. With a unified single view persona of the customer, an e-commerce marketer can increase the customer’s lifetime value with one-to-one recommendations based on the individual customer’s interests, past purchase history, and recent browsing behavior.
• Recover abandoned carts at a higher rate. If a potential customer abandons their shopping cart, e-commerce marketers can automatically deliver an email to that individual. Or use retargeting to recover abandoned shopping carts at a higher rate.
• Acquire new loyalty program members. You can increase sales by bolstering their loyalty programs. To get new member, you can personalize incentives based on individuals. E.g. by only using certain products or content relevant to the specific customer.

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Reduce your costs

For e-commerce businesses that have traditionally taken a “spray-and-pray” approach, new marketing technology can help eliminate wasted spending.

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A single customer view can help you create strikingly precise advertising by reaching your customers with products relevant to them, at the right time, and on the right channel. In times where profitability plays a bigger and bigger role in e-commerce cutting your costs on wasted marketing is one way of achieving that.

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• Suppress ads from unlikely buyers. E-commerces can suppress advertisements to customers with a recent purchase or customers with a low propensity to buy at the moment. It makes no sense to spend money targeting people with a picture of boots they’ve previously purchased or have no intention of purchasing.
• Limit discounts In the same way as above, customers who are likely to buy at full price don’t need a discount offer. With a single view of the customer and the right technology, you can suppress discounts and incentives to customers with a high propensity to buy. This again helps you increase efficiency, and boost your profits so you can grow your store with that money.
• Increase your operational efficiency. In addition to this, access to unified customer profiles means better operational efficiency. It reduces hand-off times for specific tasks like segmentation-list building, eliminates tasks like checking segments overlap and accuracy across systems, and reduces marketing’s reliance on other teams.

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Use advanced predictive analytics

A unified view of your customers combined with machine learning can provide advanced e-commerce analytics to better understand your customers. Boost your decision-making when it comes to picking your e-commerce marketing strategy.

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If you connect machine learning from your CDP to your first-party data, you can build predictive models based on trusted data and feed the output of those models back into customer profiles for segmentation.

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For example, with a few clicks, you can build a segment of customers with high Customer lifetime value. Or a high propensity to buy and give them a premium offer.

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All of a sudden, you won’t have to rely on others in your company, or even outside your company to identify which customers are most profitable and most likely to grow your webshop. Check out the illustration below to see what it looks like with a Customer Data Platform from Custimy.

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Get a complete single customer view with an e-commerce CDP

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By leveraging the right technology e-commerce business can take advantage of the many benefits of having a complete single customer view of each of their customers. That technology comes in the form of a Customer Data Platform (CDP).

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It is typically based on first-party data, meaning you have full ownership of the data. You won’t have to rely on other outside parties to access and use it. YOU own the relationship with your customer, and nothing is more powerful than that in today’s e-commerce marketing world.

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If you know where the data comes from, where it was collected, and how and why you use it, you can trust it much more. This means you can use it to get huge advantages over your competitors. You are the only one knowing these things about your customers.

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Trust your data with Custimy

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And if you use it with a CDP you can create a strikingly precise and personalized experience for your customers. This means they get a far superior experience when shopping with you. Sometimes that is greatly increasing the chance that they become repeat buyers and profitable customers.

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With Custimy.io you can be confident that you are working with accurate, up-to-date, and complete data. Something that gives you that all-important single customer view of your customers. In addition to this, you can use that data to create advanced segmentation to find more of your most valuable customers. Or even to predict the behavior of your customers such as churn, the propensity to buy, and price sensitivity.

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Unified single customer profiles can provide e-commerce businesses with the confidence and utility they need to level the playing field against the e-commerce goliaths controlling the market.

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By using the first-party data from your Customer Data Platform to put customers first in your e-commerce marketing strategy to build those personalized experiences so you win them and retain them.

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How Custimy can boost your single customer view

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Single Customer View provides you with unique insights on a 1:1 customer level. Use it to find look-a-like personas and enrich your advertisement to Custom Audiences.

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• Understand customers on a deeper 1:1 level, and target them based on behavioral insights such as buying patterns, preferences, sizes, designs, preferred communication methods, and attribution functions.
• Improve the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by giving your customers exactly what they want. Improve their loyalty through a comfortable, high-quality, and personalized customer experience.
• Identify whether your customer is profitable through insights and KPIs such as total spent, predicted CLV, return rate, propensity to buy, probability of churn, and more.
• Use your insights to understand how your customers prefer to communicate. Identify the best ways, times, channels, and methods for communicating based on the highest engagement rates.
• Understand the habits and preferred products of your most valuable customers through insights into their behavior and preferences. And segment customers based on most likely to buy right now.

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