Three signs your ecommerce business can benefit from a CDP

Ecommerce business sales will continue to make up a large portion of retail sales in 2022.

There’s no question that the COVID-19 pandemic has permanently shifted consumers’ shopping patterns and with the right customer-centric strategy in place, brands and marketers can use the opportunity to differentiate themselves by driving 1:1 engagements with shoppers in the channels they prefer.

Customer centricity is not only a nice thing to have, but it should be at the core of every growing ecommerce brand, focusing on delivering customized experiences for their shoppers in order to make every interaction matter. 

Here are three signs your business is ready to consider a robust customer lifecycle management solution such as the Optimizely Data Platform in an effort to create the aforementioned customer experience at scale. 

Lean marketing team 

You have a small marketing team and your customer data is dispersed across multiple segments, i.e., rewards programs, customer support, purchasing patterns, etc. It can take hours to compile reporting in order to answer simple questions like: 

• “Where do my loyal customers prefer to interact with my brand?” 
• “How often do my customers interact with my brand before completing a purchase?” 
• “What is the average timeframe for a browser to become a known customer?” 

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what products drive first-purchase sales so you can shorten your customers’ path-to-purchase timeline? 

An activated CDP can help you answer all the above questions so your marketing team can send hyper-relevant messaging and recommendations to your shoppers across email, SMS, MMS, onsite channels, etc. 

High growth goals 

If you have ambitious goals to grow your ecommerce sales, wouldn’t it be helpful to deploy automated behavioral campaigns based on when your shoppers are most likely to make their next purchase? The CDP demonstrates how data science modeling allows brands to see into the future so you can be proactive in your outreach. Reward your potential buyers with a “Free Shipping” coupon if they spend over a certain amount to increase lifetime order value. 

With all the pre-built campaign recipes in your CDP, you will be running highly targeted campaigns from the time a shopper first visits your site, browses and searches for specific products (browse abandonment) to finally making a purchase (sales confirmation) in no time. 

The need to minimize acquisition costs 

An activated CDP can help you segment high-value customers by creating similar audiences to mitigate paid media spend. It can also help marketing teams identify their best and most loyal shoppers and directly sync these segments over to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and any other social media platforms for your acquisition campaigns. 

Leave the heavy lifting to your CDP and let it help you identify and reach out to those users who resemble your repeat customers as well as new leads, who will eventually convert into loyal fans. Lastly, optimize these channels by understanding how customers found your business, whether it was via Google Ads or an organic search, to amplify the customer lifetime value of your shoppers.