Key Points About Single Customer Views

• A single customer view (SCV) represents aggregated data stored and processed by an organization about its customers. To present this data on a singular page, a company has to create an SCV from all relevant data sources, such as websites and mobile apps, CRM, e-commerce transactions, etc.
• The main benefits of a single customer view are boosting sales and customer support, unifying information about the customer, data deduplication and actualization, and running a business based on data and not hunches.
• The most significant obstacles during SCV creation are siloed data sources, incorrect, outdated, and duplicated information about the customers, and privacy concerns.
• To introduce SCV to your company, you can use predefined products from Piwik PRO, Exponea, HubSpot, and other companies, or build a custom customer data platform with Clearcode.

What Is a Single Customer View (SCV)?

A single customer view (also known as a 360 customer view and unified customer view) is a centralized record containing all the available information about each customer you do business with. Usually, a single customer view is organized as a customer’s profile in a customer data platform (CDP) or a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

SCVs collect various pieces of data, with the main ones being:

• Contact information
• User and device IDs
• Device-related information (type, system, browser)
• Transaction history
• Finance information

You can utilize this data both in real-time and as a historical reference.

How Does a Single Customer View Work?

Creating an SCV is not an easy task. It requires you to collect data from all your channels and systems into one data source and present it in real-time. The places where you would collect this data can include your website, mobile apps, e-commerce systems, social media accounts, live chat tools, etc. 

The next step is to clean the data, transform it into a proper format, and store it in a central system. To ensure the data is secure, you should also implement user access controls for your team members.

Why Is a Single Customer View Important For Organizations?

Organizations that understand their customers can increase engagement and loyalty, and having loyal clients leads to more sales. An SCV supports the process of understanding the customer, but only under certain circumstances.

First, the collected data has to be fresh. Customer behavior changes over time, so companies should update their knowledge of their customers’ needs. For this reason, the SCVs should be constantly updated with new information.

Second, the company has to deduplicate data. Data deduplication is a significant problem from a marketing point of view. Duplicate user profiles mean that companies waste time on maintaining SCVs that already exist and may lead to drawing the wrong conclusions.

Third, the data cannot be fragmented. By combining knowledge about the customer and eliminating duplicate accounts, the company will get a clear picture of who the customer is and what they need.

By meeting these criteria, organizations can increase their chances of adapting to their clients’ needs.

Use Cases of a Single Customer View

Depending on your company’s needs, you can use SCVs in many ways — from general sales analysis and marketing to more granular actions. 

Below are the most popular use cases of a SCV.

Content personalization: A SCV allows you to personalize communication sent to your clients. You can prepare emails with their name and other personalized information and communicate with them through their preferred communication channels.

Cross & upsell campaigns: A SCV can help your marketing team encourage customers to buy more products and services via personalized marketing campaigns by analyzing their transaction history and other interactions they’ve had with your company. For example, consumer goods companies can recommend additional products from the same product line (upselling) and products from other product lines (cross-selling).

Retention campaigns: There are many ways an SCV can help retain customers and users. For example, companies can ensure that their customers’ issues are resolved properly and quickly by allowing different departments to see all relevant information needed to resolve issues, and by promoting other products and services to help strengthen the relationship a customer has with a company.

The Benefits of a Single Customer View

SCVs not only provide organizations with advantages but also offer benefits for customers. 

Let’s take a look at the benefits for both entities.

Benefits For Organizations

1. Boosting customer support – When your customers call your company, your representatives can quickly identify their problem as they’ll have all the information about transactions, previous communications, actions on your website or mobile application, etc., in one place. Moreover, if the client is handed over to another department, they won’t need to re-explain why they are calling because the notes about the issue will be visible in their profile.
2. Boosting sales – Your sales department can better understand your clients’ needs by checking their purchase history. Fitting communication at the right time at every stage in the customer journey makes your clients more likely to stay loyal and increase their lifetime value (LTV).
3. Having employees on the same page – Having SCVs allows all employees from different departments, e.g. marketing, sales, customer support, finance etc., to view the same data about your customers. Additionally, your employees will feel less overwhelmed and frustrated by the lack of context when working with your clients.
4. Getting rid of siloed or duplicated data – A single source of accurate and up-to-date information means a greater ability to focus on what’s important. By unifying data to one format, organizations get a chance to be more efficient.
5. Making information-driven decisions – Your managers will take actions based on data, not hunches. For example, they can create dynamic behavior-based segments. By classifying clients, it is easier to apply accurate decisions in minutes and measure KPIs. Also, they can conduct customer journey analysis and eliminate bottlenecks in their business.
6. Upgrading analytics – Depending on your goals, you can check your company’s performance in different business areas. Granular information from SCVs can be exported and viewed on dashboards and reports. By conducting a deeper analysis, you can identify key customer segments, the most significant sales sources, and bottlenecks.

Benefits For Customers

1. Receiving personalized offers – McKinsey’s research shows that 80% of buyers appreciate personalization. An SCV helps extract information about what each customer likes and create corresponding offers.
2. Having higher satisfaction after contact with the company – Your customer support teams can quickly solve your customers’ problems as they have all the information in front of their eyes with just a few clicks.

Obstacles In Creating a Single Customer View

Let’s get back to the question of how to create an SCV. What kind of drawbacks can you expect on the road to reaping the full potential of a unified customer view? 

Below we list the four main obstacles you may face.

Separate data sources (data silos)

Because each company has different departments, there are many data sources across the company. The financial team has information about customers’ invoices in their financial software, the marketing department has information about customers’ web visits, the support team has information about customers’ tickets, etc. 

With this situation, nobody can see the big picture of the customer’s journey.

Incorrect information

Contact information can become outdated if it isn’t updated regularly. Records that are spread across the organization and not unified to a single source are significant obstacles when creating an SCV.

Privacy

Each time you want to process information about your customer, you need to be sure that they allow your organization to do that. If consents aren’t collected, then you are at risk of violating regulations such as the GDPR.

3 Single Customer View Examples

The best way to talk about something is to show it, so we’ve gathered three examples of SCV.

Take a look at the single customer views built by Piwik PRO, HubSpot, and Exponea.

Piwik PRO

Piwik PRO is a Poland-based company and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics that offers an analytics suite consisting of an analytics platform, tag manager, consent management platform, and customer data platform.

Founded: 2013
Headquarters: Wrocław, Poland

Exponea

Exponea created a customer data platform that includes a single customer view. Their CDP provides users with analytics tools, personalization tools, email marketing tools, and an omnichannel campaign creator.

Founded: 2015
Headquarters: London, Great Britain

HubSpot

HubSpot provides a comprehensive CRM platform that includes a single customer view. Users can use marketing, sales, service, and website management products in order to grow their businesses.

Founded: 2006
Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts

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The post What Is a Single Customer View (SCV)? appeared first on Clearcode.

In the infographic below, we look at the growth of influencer marketing, the benefits it offers advertisers, and the challenges and opportunities facing influencer marketing technology vendors.

The State of Influencer Marketing in 2023

The Popularity of Influencer Marketing 

While the thought of brands paying social media users thousands of dollars to promote their products and services seems a bit extravagant to some, there are a number of reasons why this area of digital marketing is growing the way it is and why it is expected to reach $22.2 billion dollars by 2025.

Research from gen.video and Geometry Global’s The Influence of Influencers report shows that social media users are more likely to choose travel destinations or purchase electronics, clothing, food and beverage, and health and beauty products after seeing them promoted by influencers. 

Here are some other statistics that highlight the popularity of influencer marketing:

• Social media influencers are not only seen as trusted sources by 90% of social media users, but are also an effective way of driving sales for businesses. 
• Influencer marketing is perceived as an effective form of brand communication, with more than 70% of brands using influencers as a part of their marketing strategy. 
• According to 86% of marketers, the most important objective of influencer marketing campaigns is building brand awareness.
• Influencer marketing is used for many other objectives, including reaching new or targeted audiences (74%), improving brand advocacy (69%), and increasing sales (46%).

The Benefits of Influencer Marketing for Brands

Engaged and Loyal Audiences

Although traditional and digital advertising channels are still effective in reaching a brand’s audience, it’s hard to achieve both reach and engagement at the same time. 

Influencer marketing helps solve this problem for brands by allowing them to reach their target audience and show their product or service while their audience is engaged. 

This medium allows brands to get creative with their campaigns and increase engagement, such as by holding competitions. Being creative and trying out what works and what doesn’t is just a part of every Influencer outreach campaign.

Influencer Marketing Is a Natural Way to Reach a Target Audience

Influencer marketing also establishes a better connection between the brand and consumer as it’s carried out by an influencer (human) via personal recommendations, as opposed to a brand (corporation) communicating directly to consumers via advertisements.

Compare the examples below:

In other words, the idea is to reach key audiences via individuals who are well-known, valued and whose opinion matters to the audience. 

Because most influencers know their audience, they can help advertisers create campaigns that will deliver the best results possible.

With the right tools and technology, influencers can partner with brands to create appealing, creative, and high-quality content in the form of images, audio podcasts, or videos. 

Influence Marketing Builds Credibility and Trust

Because influencers are seen as experts in a given area, their followers trust their opinions, recommendations, and product or service choice. They can better influence their followers’ decisions compared to brands that are simply trying to build brand awareness. 

Influencers work on a daily basis to build an inspiring and respectful relationship with their fans, therefore people rely on their recommendations and consider them valuable. 

The numbers speak for themselves — 80% of consumers complete a purchase after seeing an influencer recommend that product on social media.

In addition, more than half of the consumers declare that word of mouth and social media communications are their preferred ways of learning about new brands and their offerings. 

Influence Marketing Boosts Content Strategies

Coming up with ideas for fresh and entertaining content is a constant challenge for every brand. Luckily, influencer marketing can help to fill those gaps and execute a great content strategy. 

Influencers are familiar with methods of producing engaging and good-quality content that puts the brand’s products or services in a different light and positively impacts a brand’s image. 

Using influencer marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to test out in 2023, as more than 90% of consumers engage with influencers on a weekly basis on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. 

People are hoping for unique and inspirational content that only influencers with their unique approach may provide. 

Influencer Marketing Enhances SEO & ROI

Influencer marketing is considered to benefit a brand in regard to its SERP results and SEO. The analysis from QuickSprout proves that social media interactions can directly or indirectly enhance a brand’s SEO performance. 

Influencer marketing helps brands to have an active profile on social media, which means a constant increase in new followers, multiple mentions, and recommendations of products or services, resulting in building brand  awareness. 

Once the follower sees a specific product or service that a brand offers, they are more likely to visit the brand’s website, which leads to a boost in web traffic. 

For brands of all sizes cooperating with influencers means attracting more customers and scaling up by building brand awareness and more visibility. Those two benefits undoubtedly spark more purchase decisions and result in a higher ROI than other marketing channels. 
Influence Marketing Impacts Purchasing Decisions

Influencers often have a positive impact on customers’ purchase-making process. They present a brand’s goods and services in a way that leads to a positive reception of a brand.

Influencers are also respected and trusted, and numerous studies have shown that they can affect their followers’ decisions at each level of the marketing funnel. The Digital Marketing Institute declares that 49% of respondents said they decided to make a purchase because of an influencer’s referral. 

For teenagers, the number reaches 70%. The survey shows that 40% of people purchase a product or service after seeing it on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. 

Statistics from Think with Google also confirm that six out of ten users will decide to make a purchase based on their favored content creator’s recommendations. 

The Main Technological Threats For Influencer Marketing Platforms

Influencer Fraud

Influencer fraud generally refers to fake influencers and fake followers. 

Fake influencers are social media users who give the impression that they are real influencers by using stock photos and huge numbers of fake followers. Even though they post high-quality images that are not much different from those of a real influencer, the main difference is that they are followed by fake accounts or bots. 

Fake influencers are followed by both fake and normal influencers to boost the size of their audience. The number of followers is very often the main requirement for brands to work with influencers, therefore some of them artificially inflate the numbers to secure more lucrative deals. 

As with fraud in the display advertising industry, influencer fraud causes distrust among brands and leads to them spending less on influencer marketing campaigns. This impacts all players in the industry.

Influencer fraud is a common issue, with 68% of marketers citing fake followers as their main challenge according to the The State of Influencer Marketing 2020: Benchmark Report, up from 63% in 2019. 

Research by Analysis from Points North Group found that one large cosmetics brand spent $600,000 on impressions that were not seen or seen by fake followers. 

In another report, an anti-fraud company called Sway Ops found that a single post tagged as #sponsored or #ad on Instagram contained over 50 percent fake engagements. Out of 118,007 comments, only 20,942 were made by non-bot followers. 

Here are a few more statistics about influencer fraud:

• Fake influencer follower fraud cost companies $81 billion in 2022 
• The total cost of digital ad fraud worldwide is believed to reach 100 billion by 2023.
• Up to 20% of mid-level influencers between 50,000 and 100,000 followers are likely to be fraudulent.

Measuring ROI

There has been no simple or consistent method to measure the real impact of a particular influencer. Therefore, neither marketers nor brands know what the real value of an influencer is and how much campaigns should cost. 

The main challenge here is measuring a campaign’s overall performance and tracking the actual influence an individual influencer had, from the first point of engagement all the way through to the conversion. 

The Influencer Intelligence’s latest report, Influencer Marketing 2020, reveals 84% of marketers feel proving the ROI of influencer marketing is a challenge.

The main issues concern:

1. Brand awareness campaigns are always hard to measure.
2. Technical limitations can negatively impact campaign measurement, as there is no way to add clickable links to instagram posts which means no click-through attribution.
3. If the influencer does include some sort of link or short URL, the user would have to manually copy and paste it to the browser, with no referrer information being passed which brand’s analytics software will count as direct visit instead of from an influencer.
4. Campaign data is also impacted on other social media platforms as referrer information is lost when people click on links inside mobile apps that direct them to web pages in browsers.
5. Users will simply search for the brand on Google after being exposed to an ad, which will again result in the wrong channel being given credit for the visit and conversion.

To solve this problem, influencer marketing vendors can build measurement solutions akin to those used in TV and radio, such as time-based attribution models.

Campaign Automation

The daily routine of an influencer usually involves a variety of activities, starting from social listening and content analysis to looking for appropriate industry experts and outreaching them. 

After sending hundreds of emails and looking through several influencers’ profiles, curating the content and evaluating the campaign performance, you would probably agree that some of the tasks are quite tedious. 

According to 72% of marketers setting up an influencer marketing campaign is a manual and time consuming process that can be automated. As well, 67% marketers say that finding the right influencers is an issue when it comes to working with influencers. 

Some of the main ones include:

1. Finding the right (and genuine) influencers.
2. Communicating with influencers.
3. Managing contracts.
4. Handling payments.

Influencer marketing vendors are in a good position to solve many of these changes by building new features that automate and turn campaigns into a seamless flow.

Seizing Opportunity

The problems that influencer marketing faces, such as lack of control over the campaign performance and technological challenges listed above, can be resolved via technological innovation. After all, influencer marketing vendors are tech companies. 

The opportunity for vendors is using technological innovation as a point of differentiation. 

Although the advertising technology (AdTech) and marketing technology (MarTech) industries have seen a stream of new vendors join on the scene, most lack a clear point of differentiation. 

The ones that stand out from the crowd and attract new clients are best at differentiating themselves from the competition. By building innovative tech and features that solve the main challenges for brands and influencers, vendors are in a good position to take more market share.

The influencer marketing industry is no different than any other emerging industry; the successful vendors will be the ones that spot the opportunities and capitalize on them. 

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The post The State of Influencer Marketing in 2023 [infographic] appeared first on Clearcode.

Below are some figures that highlight the growth of influencer marketing:

• 57% of marketers are set to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2020.
• Influencer marketing is predicted to be a $5 to $10 billion industry in 2020.
• 93% of marketers surveyed use influencer marketing.

But just like with all high-growth areas of marketing, influencer marketing is experiencing some serious growing pains.

While some growing pains are business challenges, there are many technological challenges facing influencer marketing vendors.

The Main Technological Challenges Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms

1. Influencer Fraud

Some stats you should know:

• According to the 2019 Influencer Marketing Survey by Mediakix, 50% of marketers cited fake followers as their main challenge.
• Analysis from Points North Group found that one large cosmetics brand spent $600,000 on impressions that were not seen or seen by fake followers. 

Influencer fraud generally relates to fake influencers and fake followers.

Fake influencers are social media users who give the impression they are real influencers by using stock photos and fake followers. Although there is usually a real person behind the account, everything else about the account is fake.

Fake followers are used by both fake influencers and normal influencers to boost the size of their audience. Some brands will only work with influencers with a certain number of followers, so by artificially inflating this number, genuine influencers can secure more lucrative deals.

Just like with fraud in the display advertising industry, influencer fraud causes distrust among brands and leads to them spending less on influencer marketing campaigns. This impacts all players in the industry.

As the influencer marketing industry grows, the vendors that will receive the lion’s share of brand dollars will be the ones that can provide them with certain guarantees that their campaigns will be promoted by real influencers and shown to real people.

2. Measuring ROI

Some stats you should know:

• According to a survey conducted by MediaKix, measuring and improving ROI is the biggest issue brands have when working with influencers.
• Nearly 90% of all influencer campaigns include Instagram as part of the marketing mix according to research by Influencer Marketing Hub. 

Unlike other digital marketing channels like display advertising and paid search that do a reasonably good job of measuring the performance of campaigns, influencer marketing is facing strong headwinds with proving a return on investment (ROI) for brands and advertisers.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, one of the main goals of many influencer marketing campaigns is brand awareness, which is always hard to measure. 

Secondly, there are some technical limitations at play that negatively impact campaign measurement. For example, you can’t add clickable links to Instagram posts, meaning no click-through attribution. 

If an influencer does include some sort of link or short URL, then the user would have to manually copy it and paste it into a browser, but with no referrer information being passed, the brand’s analytics software will attribute this as a direct visit instead of a visit from an influencer. 

Campaign data is also impacted on other social media platforms as referrer information is lost when people click on links inside mobile apps that direct them to web pages in browsers.
 
Also, many users will simply search for the brand on Google after being exposed to an ad, which again will result in the wrong channel being given credit for the visit and conversion. 

To solve this problem, influencer marketing vendors can build measurement solutions akin to those used in TV and radio, such as time-based attribution models. 

3. Campaign Automation

Some stats you should know:

• 72% of marketers believe that influencer marketing can be automated (MediaKix).
• 67% of marketers said that finding the right influencers is an issue when working with influencers (MediaKix).

There are many time-consuming and manual processes involved in setting up an influencer marketing campaign that can be automated. 

Some of the main ones include:

1. Finding the right (and genuine) influencers.
2. Communicating with influencers.
3. Managing contracts.
4. Handling payments.

Influencer marketing vendors are in a good position to solve many of these changes by building new features that automate these time-consuming and manual tasks.

Opportunities for Influencer Marketing Vendors

The opportunities for influencer marketing vendors revolve around solving the problems in their control, mainly the technological challenges listed above. 

Influencer marketing vendors are tech companies after all.

Another big opportunity for vendors is using technological innovation as a point of differentiation. 

The advertising technology (AdTech) and marketing technology (MarTech) industries has seen a stream of new vendors come on the scene, but most lack a clear point of differentiation.

The ones that stand out from the crowd and attract new clients are the ones that differentiate themselves from the competition the best. By building innovative tech and features that solve the main challenges for brands and influencers, vendors are in a good position to take more market share.

The influencer marketing industry is no different than any other emerging industry; the successful vendors will be the ones that spot the opportunities and capitalize on them. 

This article was originally published on Marketing Toolbox

The post The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms appeared first on Clearcode.

We recently worked with one of our MarTech development teams to produce an infographic that illustrates just that.

Click on the infographic to enlarge it.

What Is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a piece of marketing technology that collects and organizes data from a range of online and offline sources.

With a CDP, marketers can view detailed analytics reports, create user profiles, audiences, segments, and single customer views, as well as improve advertising and marketing campaigns by exporting the data to other systems.

Data Collection

A CDP can collect data from a range of different sources, such as websites, mobile applications and customer relationship management systems (CRMs).

The data is collected via application programming interfaces (APIs), event trackers (e.g. JavaScript tags and SDKs), server-to-server integrations and manual imports.

Data Normalization and Enrichment

Because data is collected from different sources, it often enters a CDP in different formats. The data normalization process organizes the data into a common format, removes redundancies, and transforms it into the CDP’s schema. 

The enrichment process makes the data relevant for users (e.g. marketers) by turning an IP address into a geolocation, extracting IDs from cookies, and taking the device type from the user agent string.

Analytics Reports

One of the main features of a CDP is analytics. Because CDPs collect data from a range of sources, they can produce advanced analytics reports that can provide insights into consumer behavior and engagement. 

These reports can then help marketers and advertisers improve the performance of their campaigns and increase conversions on their websites.

Profiles, Audiences, and Segments

When CDPs receive new batches of data, they create new user profiles or update existing ones via profile merging. These profiles contain data about individual users, such as which devices they use, their location, and website- or app-engagement history (e.g. pages visited and items purchased). 

From there, marketers can create segments in the analytics dashboard, and audiences, which include profiles containing common attributes like location and behavior.

Single Customer View (SCV)

CDPs create a single customer view, also known as a 360 or unified customer view, by combining all the data they have about their customers and producing a single record. 

Marketers can analyze the SCVs in their CDP to identify how users interact with their brand across different channels and to power customer service and marketing messages.

Audience Activation

Audience activation is often the end goal of a CDP; it’s where marketers can put the data they’ve collected to work and improve the performance of their advertising and marketing activities. 

There are many uses cases of audience activation, but most marketers will use the audiences they’ve created in their CDP to improve media buys via demand-side platforms (DSPs), send personalized and timely emails, run retargeting campaigns on social media platforms, improve targeting on search advertising campaigns, and perform onsite personalization (e.g. content or product recommendations).

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The situation has prompted advertisers to steadily shift towards new, more direct ways of reaching their audiences – methods that don’t involve the use of third-party cookies and minimize the need for consent collection. This explains an increasing interest in social media marketing – Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and, by extension, influencer marketing.

Why Influencer Marketing Matters

Influencers are currently one of the fastest-growing marketing channels. According to MarketingHub, as many as 86% of marketers are dedicating part of their budget to influencer marketing in 2019. At the same time, 80% consider influencer marketing effective.

Advertising products through celebrities is on the decline – we’ve written about the evolution of influencer marketing in another post on our blog. Working with long-tail, niche influencers is becoming increasingly popular and carries undeniable benefits. It offers extremely precise targeting and drives high-quality traffic to your website. According to a Mediakix study, 71% of the surveyed marketers considered traffic from social media influencers superior to other traffic sources. At the same time, influencer marketing was found to offer better ROI than other channels. Influencer campaigns are modern-day word-of-mouth marketing, and it is proven that 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals – even if they don’t know them – over brands.

While influencer marketing is in its heyday, it is also becoming more fragmented and complex. The success of a campaign is contingent on finding the person most relevant to your niche. This necessitates the use of proper tools to support brands in discovering and managing influencers, and evaluating the results of campaigns.

What Is an Influencer Marketing Platform?

An influencer marketing platform (aka influencer marketing marketplace) is a platform to discover influencers for a specific campaign and connect with, hire and pay them from a single place. This is an invaluable tool for brands wanting to manage multiple influencers within a single campaign. The platform automates some processes associated with managing influencers working on a campaign.

There are dozens of influencer marketing platforms and the most popular include TapInfluence, AspireIQ, FameBit, Heartbeat and Grapevine. However, many of them share the same growing pains and universal problems. This only shows that there is still space for improvement.

The Challenges of Influencer Marketing Platforms

There is no “one size fits all” platform. Many platforms focus on specific social media channels and offer unique features, but it’s difficult to find one that manages all channels equally well. Similarly, some platforms require an opt-in from influencers, while others proactively reach out to them. Also, while each platform offers a database of influencers, only a combination of a few platforms can give a full view of the influencer marketing market, which can ramp up the total fees.

Difficulty reaching big-name influencers. Some of the most successful industry experts, YouTubers, or bloggers (i.e. so-called macro- and mega-influencers like Gary Vee, Oleg Vishnepolsky or Tim Ferriss) may not even be found through the search engine of a platform. Instead, they are often accessed through talent managers.

No human touch. While platforms offer the benefit of automation for marketers, they often (but not always!) lack proper mechanisms for ensuring the content produced by influencers meets certain standards and is safe for the brand. No matter how advanced a platform, human labor is still indispensable in many ways.

Problems finding good fits. Even with these platforms making it much easier, it is still hard for some marketers to identify the best influencers for specific campaigns. The challenge is confirmed by 61% of marketers.

Many of the growing pains of influencer marketing platforms stem from the fact that this technology is relatively new and still evolving.

What Are the Key Features of an Influencer Marketing Platform?

Most influencer marketing platforms share a number of key, essential features, but many leading platforms are trying to differentiate by offering something unique. Let’s do a quick rundown of the most important features an influencer platform should offer.

1. Search and Discovery Engine

Popular vloggers and bloggers come in all shapes and sizes, from game streamers, mobile phone reviewers, makeup vloggers, fitness gurus, expert foodies, etc. The leading platforms offer big databases of influencers – Upfluence alone boasts a whopping 2.7 million profiles. There really is a niche for almost every conceivable product out there, but the challenge is to know which influencer to pick for a campaign. 

Platforms like Grapevine or TAKUMI offer access to their network of human-vetted influencers, which gives marketers additional quality assurance beyond numbers in the analytics panel. The payoff, naturally, is the size of the database.

A search and discovery engine is one of the core functionalities of an influencer marketing platform and helps marketers find the most relevant influencers for their product. This typically involves a searchable database of potential influencers and automated suggestions for the most relevant people in a specific campaign. 

Searches are based on criteria that characterize both the influencer and their audience. There may be filters for various pieces of information from the influencers’ profiles like performance metrics, rating, historical engagement, post frequency, recommended price, audience overview and demographics.

The results page should provide contact information for each influencer, allowing brands to communicate with them directly, negotiate the deal and hire them for a specific campaign. Some platforms offer draft contracts and handling of various regulatory compliance matters. More on that later.

2. Contact and Relationship Management

An influencer marketing platform should automate all the tedious tasks like messaging influencers, signing contracts, price negotiations, and payments – and support the marketer in keeping track of the relationship.

Automated invitation emails (with email templates to choose from) streamline the process of establishing collaboration with an influencer. Some platforms come with customized email drip campaigns, improving their response rate.

When a relationship with an influencer has been established, a marketing platform works much like a CRM. It groups every relationship automatically by stage, and guides the marketer through the subsequent stages. 

Brands that run campaigns with many influencers will benefit from features like custom groups, tracking contract signatures, mass-messaging and sending automated reminders and messages based on rules.

3. Integration With Channels

While some influencer marketing platforms focus only on a single social media platform, a majority of them integrate with a number of different channels for broader influencer outreach. 

An influencer marketing platform should offer seamless integration with various social media platforms through their APIs and SDKs. This allows the platform programmatic access, custom audiences, and reports. With automation of activities connected with the promotion of the content, brands can reinforce the impact generated with influencer content.

On top of social media, the influencer marketing platform can offer non-social or offline channels. Upfluence, for example, has a discovery engine that also includes blogs. Some marketplaces specialize in particular areas of the market (beauty, sports, entertainment, tech, etc.), whereas others have a wider positioning.

4. Campaign Content Management

Features like campaign content management allow users to manage ad text and graphic creatives, hashtags, mentions, campaign duration, deadlines, giveaways and sweepstakes, and other ad campaign features for multiple brands and influencers.

Through the platform, brands can receive creative content from influencers and preview, accept, negotiate or reject it accordingly. Conversely, influencers can receive various assets: images, videos or copy they can use in the campaign.

5. Influencer Compensation

Campaigns typically utilize the cost-per mille (CPM) pricing model, whereby a certain amount is paid for every 1,000 views of an ad. Alternatively, campaigns like affiliate marketing campaigns operate on a cost-per acquisition (CPA) model. Other pricing models include cost-per click (CPC) and a set cost for the campaign. 

How much money influencers actually make depends on multiple factors, such as a particular social media platform, follower size, engagement rate, and their audience’s demographic. An influencer marketing platform should also have features in place that allow brands to manage payments to multiple influencers form one place. 

Additional features could include escrow payments (a money deposit taken from the brand to pay influencers, but only once the job is done), tax compliance (e.g. varying VAT and other tax rates for international collaborations), and integration of payment systems like PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or credit card payment gateways.

6. Analytics and Reporting

A good influencer marketing platform should allow brands to analyze the actual impact that an influencer’s ad campaign has created for the product or service and calculate the return on investment (ROI) for the whole campaign.

Such reporting capabilities are not much different from onsite analytics offered by platforms like Google Analytics. They track information like publication confirmation (whether the sponsored content was published), views, reach, engagement, ROI, real-time analytics, and URL tracking through affiliate links.

To more precisely measure the above statistics, some platforms utilize their own custom tracking pixels or shortened affiliate links that influencers can put on their blog when promoting a product.

Should You Build or Rent an Influencer Marketing Platform?

The dilemma of whether to rent or build an influencer marketing platform involves the same considerations as in the case of other MarTech and AdTech platforms. Careful weighing of advantages and disadvantages would allow you to make the decision. 

By building your own influencer marketing platform, you gain a number of competitive advantages. We’ll list some of them to give you a fuller picture:

• Save money on fees and commissions. Having your own platform allows you to stop paying regular commissions and fees to third-party platform operators. By operating a platform, you can run an unlimited number of campaigns with zero fees on top of the development cost.
• Control the feature roadmap. You make decisions regarding the feature roadmap and choose functionalities that better fit your business goals. By building a custom platform, you can avoid third-party platforms that only partially meet your needs and offer a number of features that your business will not benefit from.
• Generate more revenue. By developing an influencer marketing platform, you can create a new revenue stream, and can also integrate it with your existing products to offer multi-channel campaigns, drive more revenue to your company and increase your company’s overall market value.

By renting the platform, on the other hand, you can:

• Avoid the development cost. Influencer marketing platforms charge fees, but the cost is still much lower than the development of your own platform or agency fees. 
• Test influencer marketing cheaply. Using a platform allows a brand to experiment with influencer marketing and see how effective it is for their campaign management before spending big bucks on development of a full platform.

Last Words

Influencer marketing is an interesting proposition for brands, especially with regard to programmatic advertising being increasingly challenged by privacy regulations, ad-blocking software and other phenomena like banner blindness. This evolving form of marketing is on its way to become a bona-fide channel, and has already proven to work for all companies regardless of their size. 

The benefits behind influencer marketing for brands – granular targeting with very high conversion rates and decent ROI – motivate marketers to allocate increasingly big budgets for campaigns, but the growing confidence in influencers also creates vast opportunities for companies looking to build their own influencer marketing platforms.

MarTech

What Is Influencer Marketing and How Did it Evolve?

Michal Wlosik

Sep 05, 2019

MarTech

The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms

Mike Sweeney

Jun 23, 2020

MarTech

The State of Influencer Marketing in 2023 [infographic]

Paulina Zawiślak, +1

Aug 31, 2020

The post How to Select Features and Build an Influencer Marketing Platform appeared first on Clearcode.

The success of influencer marketing lies in the nature of the relationship influencers have with their followers. 

When combined with strictly technical advantages like limited reliance on third- and first-party data, resistance to ad-blocking and a possibility of minimizing banner blindness, influencer marketing is a very attractive way for brands to promote their products and is on its way to becoming a fully fledged form of social media marketing. 

Relevant tools and platforms are cropping up to make the process easier for brands and agencies, as well as for influencers. 

In this post, we will trace the channel back to its origins.

The Fall of Celebrities

Originally, influencer marketing was reserved for big-name celebrities, but recent data and news confirm that the trend is on the decline. Consumers are more aware and discerning, and rarely fall for marketing tricks employed by big brands. They are more reluctant to buy a product only because the brand employed a popular movie star. While celebrities promoting products may be recognizable, they don’t enjoy the level of trust to justify the cost of endorsement. 

We’ve seen examples like Beyoncé joining Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity – only to appear in a soda ad shortly after. 

Another debacle involved Gal Gadot, a rising movie star (Wonderwoman, anyone?), who was picked by Huawei to be an ambassador for the brand. 

The idea was simple at its core – to have her tweet regularly about how much she loved the camera in her new Huawei phone. 

Unfortunately for Gadot, the web version of Twitter shows what client and device the tweet was really sent from (e.g. Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Android, you get the idea), and she was discovered to regularly tweet Huawei-sponsored content from an iPhone. 

Needless to say, the idea of advertising a product using a direct competitor does not sound like a great strategy.

Similar stories crop up every now and then, and while they seem like no big deal, there is an overwhelming vibe that celebrities are not to be trusted with product recommendations, no matter how respected they are otherwise. 

This is one of the reasons why brands are increasingly turning to marketing via micro-influencers – people who are experts in their domain and have earned the respect of loyal followers.

The Rise of Homegrown Influencers

The focus steadily shifted away from celebrities towards regular people who are actually passionate about their specific niches. Many vloggers, podcasters and bloggers have grown to become professional, respected reviewers of products. Some micro-influencers have even become superstars with viewerships surpassing many mainstream media outlets. 

Marques Brownlee, a prodigy YouTuber specializing in mobile phone reviews, has 8.8 million subscribers and well over 1.3 billion total video views today. For people like him, a well maintained channel is instrumental in not only communicating with fans and building audiences, but also in making a decent living.

As brands are looking for new ways to reach their audiences, influencers seem to be a perfect match. They have the domain expertise and big, loyal audiences who heed their opinions on various matters. 

What’s more, influencer marketing simply pays off. 

A study conducted by Tomoson shows that businesses using influencer marketing make $6.50 for every $1 spent, whereas the top 13% of brands earn $20 or more for every dollar. 

Who Are Influencers Today?

Modern-day influencers are typically normal people who most people can relate to and possibly seek advice from. 

However, when becoming massively famous by offering their opinions and expertise online, influencers must still be careful not to cross the so-called “trust threshold” – the point where their credibility falls apart and the audience begins to question their opinions. 

This can happen when there are inconsistencies in product promotion – for example, when an influencer does not actually use the product that they enthusiastically hailed “the best money can buy” only a week ago.

While the long-tail influencers may not offer the reach of celebrities, they have a very coveted quality instead – unflinching trust of their audiences. They usually spend years earning the respect of their followers and very likely cannot allow themselves to ruin their relevance by advertising a bad product.

What Is an Influencer Marketing Platform? 

An influencer marketing platform is a piece of software that assists brands in connecting with relevant influencers and coordinating influencer marketing campaigns from one place.

Some platforms require an opt-in from influencers, where the staff of the platform can vet them and check that they are genuine and willing to work with brands. Other platforms work more like agencies and proactively reach out to influencers. 

Modern platforms offer relationship management, campaign management, influencer marketplaces, third party analytics, and influencer content amplification. The influencer management system provides tools for brands to manage all influencer relationships from one space; for example, they can create lists of suitable influencers for particular campaigns. They can then track the performance of their influencer campaigns and collaborate on content.

The Leading Influencer Marketing Platforms

Influencer marketing platforms come in all shapes and sizes. They usually offer a core set of functionalities, but each platform also tries to differentiate itself by offering something unique that others don’t have.

Choosing a platform should involve consideration of the price, features, and platform integrations.

Below we list some examples of popular influencer marketing platforms.

Final Thoughts

Influencer marketing can be a great channel, but efficient collaboration with bloggers, vloggers or podcasters comes with its own set of challenges. 

A good platform makes the process less of a hassle.

The recent proliferation of influencer marketing platforms clearly shows that there is potential in the market, and developing a platform like that may prove to be a very lucrative opportunity.

MarTech

How to Select Features and Build an Influencer Marketing Platform

Michal Wlosik

Sep 12, 2019

MarTech

The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms

Mike Sweeney

Jun 23, 2020

MarTech

The State of Influencer Marketing in 2023 [infographic]

Paulina Zawiślak, +1

Aug 31, 2020

The post What Is Influencer Marketing and How Did it Evolve? appeared first on Clearcode.

Email automation allows marketers to schedule targeted messages or send them when a user performs a specific action on a website. It is a very effective method to nurture existing leads, but it can also be used to engage with new customers and regularly interact with past customers, reminding them about your brand and informing them about new deals, promotions, etc.

There is a long list of benefits of using email automation.

While newsletters and one-off campaigns will always have their place in your email-marketing strategy, the smartest companies set up automatic email campaigns that trigger based on a user’s actions.

These automatic emails are timely, personalized and hyper-relevant to the reader. As a result, they are opened and clicked more frequently and drive visits and revenue for your business.

What Is Email Automation?

Email automation is the process of sending emails to an individual or multiple people at a specified time in the future. Marketers can automate the delivery of emails based on a number of conditions, such as time and day (e.g. 4pm on Monday), actions of contacts in their database (e.g. when a contact views a specific web page) and rules defined in workflows (e.g drip and lead-nurturing campaigns). Automated emails eliminate the manual process of having to send emails to people on an individual basis at a given time.

How Does Email Automation Work?

Each email-automation tool is going to work differently, but the basic flow can be illustrated this way:

Here’s an example of how email automation works:

• A person visits a website and downloads an ebook, fills out a form, etc.
• They are added to the email-marketing database.
• They are placed into different audience segments based on their location, interests, behavior, etc.
• The marketer creates an email campaign. They set the rules/triggers, create the drip campaign, schedule the emails, etc.
• The person receives emails based on the conditions and campaigns set by the marketer.

Email-Automation Best Practices

Email-marketing platforms are powerful tools that can grow your business regardless of your industry. However, like with any formidable tool, it comes with specific dos and don’ts. Consumers today don’t want to get irrelevant commercial messages. They already get plenty.

Below are some of the most common email-automation best practices.

1. Send a confirmation or welcome email

When someone signs up to your newsletter or fills out a contact form, send a confirmation or welcome email. The confirmation email reassures them that you’ve received their signup, and the welcome email helps foster the newly formed relationship.

2. Send emails based on time zones and analytics data

As many marketers have no doubt experienced, most emails are opened within the first 24 hours of receiving them.

If you want your emails to be opened, look at the time zone your contacts are in and your analytics data to identify the best time to send emails. Looking at research conducted by email-automation tools like Mailchimp on the best day and time to send can give you a headstart.

3. Segment contacts based on location, behavior, interests, etc.

Another surefire way to improve open rates, click-through rates (CTR) and overall engagement is to personalize emails.

The way to achieve this is via segmenting contacts by location, behavior, interests, purchase history, lifecycle stage (e.g. lead, MQL, etc.) and many other attributes.

By doing so, you are able to target specific contacts and personalize the emails so they are more relevant to the recipients and thus are more valuable to them.

For example, sending an email to contacts living in Melbourne about your upcoming Melbourne event will be more effective than sending it to every contact in your database.

4. Quality in, quality out

How effective your email automation really is at helping your leads convert and driving your sales really depends on the quality of the contacts in your database.

Running email automation only for the relevant, valuable contacts is the easiest way to improve and maintain high open and click-through rates, user engagement and, ultimately, high conversion rates.

Rather than adding any contacts to your database, it is worth asking users for a double opt-in. This is a way to ensure you only have contacts that really want to hear from you regularly.

Unresponsive contacts, on the other hand, can be displayed opt-in boxes from time to time, which helps to prune away uninterested people. This can be done by displaying a message similar to what CXL does:

This way, your database is a self-cleaning, quality source of leads.

5. Don’t always go for the sale

This may seem counterintuitive, but email marketing, just like other areas of marketing, does not have to be all about selling. Constantly asking for the sale may seem intrusive and spammy.

Instead, make sure your emails present real value to their recipients. Your email-marketing activities should be more about educating your audiences (and even entertaining them) than about asking contacts to buy or download something all the time.

Naturally, the CTA at the bottom of the email should still be there, but the sale shouldn’t be the main goal of every email.

6. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe

Respect your subscribers’ time and decisions. Allow them to easily unsubscribe whenever they feel like it. When people don’t want to hear from you again, don’t make the process unnecessarily hard.

This point is intrinsically tied with ensuring your database only contains high-quality contacts. By cherry-picking only the audiences that would be genuinely interested in your messages, you minimize the risk of unsubscribes in the first place.

7. Test, test and test

There are many things that can go wrong when sending automated emails. Testing allows you to catch any broken links, images and tracking tags before the email is sent.

Also, testing can help hone your email to perfection in terms of load time, or scan your subject line for potential improvements.

With testing, you can learn how to streamline your content. Knowing what links your users click can give valuable, strategic insights for future emails. This way, you can fine-tune your content to improve your CTR – adjust the length, design or layout to find out what works best for conversions.

On top of that, some email automations enable spam testing. Because spam filters can defeat even your most elaborate content, some marketing tools automatically run your email against major spam filters, identify when it’s getting flagged as spam and give you actionable advice to tackle it.

8 Popular Use Cases of Email Automation With Examples

There are many ways email automation could come in handy from a marketer’s perspective. Have a look at the most popular use cases of automated emails below:

1. Welcome email

Your visitors may not come to your website to buy something straight away, but since they have already expressed interest in your services or products, they are most likely to do so in the future. Communicating with them on a regular basis is a good way to remind them of your brand the moment they decide to convert. What better way of implementing it with email automation?

Subscribing to your newsletter is a small step towards conversion, and there are several tactics that a marketer can take to help people convert without distracting them too much.

To give your subscribers the feeling that they would be missing something by unsubscribing, offer them some incentives like discounts towards their first purchase or other bonuses.

2. Transactional email

Transactional email typically informs users about the progress of their orders and delivery, but its name is a bit misleading. Such types of email messages can also be triggered by a number of other specific actions on a website or mobile app, not only connected with transactions (purchases, invoices and receipts).

Examples of automated transaction emails include emails informing about the password-recovery process, shipping progress, account notifications or social media updates.

3. Lead-nurturing and drip campaigns

According to research, 96% of visitors to your website aren’t yet ready to buy. However, since they have shown interest in your product or services, they are perfect candidates to continue communicating with to try to get them to buy later on. A great way to do this is to get them to subscribe to your email list.

For a user, subscribing to your list is a much smaller step towards conversion than immediately handing over money to you, and therefore people are much more likely to do it.

With an email-automation tool, you can set up a series of lead-nurturing emails or drip campaigns (read this post to better understand the difference) to regularly remind people about your brand.

• Lead-nurturing campaigns are designed to convert leads into customers over a series of automated emails. Such a campaign could start with very mild, general emails that showcase the benefits or focus on various use cases of your product. Over a period of a couple of weeks, the messaging can change to a more salesy tone.
• Drip campaigns can be used for different, non-sales-oriented purposes such as onboarding new clients. The goal of these emails, instead of selling, would be to get new customers to use the new software.

Check out this post from Moosend for some drip-campaign ideas.

Lead-nurturing and drip campaigns can be used for different purposes. Some CRM systems like Salesforce or Highrise allow you to mark certain leads for nurturing. Then, the platform sends messages to these leads through an integrated email-automation tool like Zapier.

Key points to remember when doing drip campaigns:

• Keep people engaged with your brand over a period of time and help slowly turn them into customers.
• Educate, don’t sell.
• Provide something valuable – e.g. send your recipients email courses.

4. Newsletters informing about new content or products

If you run a company blog, email automation can be a convenient way to inform your audiences about a new product or content you’ve created: blog posts, videos, etc. This is a way to grow your blog’s audience and expose your new posts to people who are most likely to interact with them.

According to Neil Patel, email subscribers are also much more likely to share your content on social-media channels.

Newsletters can be used to create an aggregated list of popular articles from other companies. Moz does this with its newsletter.

5. Anniversary emails with a special offer

Send out emails to people on their birthday (if they have provided this kind of data) or when they’ve been a customer for a year, or other milestone, and reward them. Add an offer – e.g. 15% or a fixed amount off your recipient’s next purchase.

6. Product-related emails and updates

Keep your followers up to date about current events, new product launches, newly introduced product features, services, webinars, etc. Email is a great channel to keep your audiences informed about your product, to remind them about your company and to educate them about the different ways of using your product.

7. Research and feedback

Automated emails are also a great way to send out customer surveys, customer research, product feedback, etc. This will help you understand your customer’s pain points and needs and use such insights to further improve your product.

It may also turn out that your product is completely not what your customers were expecting it to be, meaning you might need to adjust your marketing messages.

Sending out short surveys to your customers will help you come up with ideas for new features and prioritize development pipelines. Surveys let you know what your customers would like to achieve with your product, and why they bought your product in the first place.

8. Product engagement and customer retention

If people haven’t used your product since they signed up or purchased it, the emails can showcase the features of the product and educate the audience. Such messages can also help increase the perceived value of the product in the eyes of the customer. By realizing how useful the product is and fully understanding it, people will more likely convert into regularly paying customers during the trial period.

If the client hasn’t started using the product at all, you can encourage them to do so. You can also ask them if they need help and provide more reasons for using the product.

If your clients have abandoned their cart before checking out, you can send them automated reminder emails to fight cart abandonment.

Losing existing customers can cost your business lots of money, but retention is relatively cheap compared to acquisition. According to Bain & Co, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.

Sending customers email campaigns about their expiring subscription, space running out or unsuccessful recurring payment increases the chances of that client staying with you or upgrading their plan. Dropbox utilizes such emails to inform subscribers that they are running out of space (and encourages them to upgrade to the premium, paid account).

It is a good practice to send emails to people before the trial ends or give them a couple of days’ grace period before requiring them to upgrade to the paid version.

Popular Email-Automation Tools

Email-automation tools come in various shapes and sizes. While most of them share a number of the same core functionalities, they may differ by some smaller, nifty features for specific use cases. Because the competition is fierce, specific platforms are trying hard to differentiate.

For example, Moosend offers weather-based automation that allows you to send automation emails depending on the weather of the user’s location – especially useful for eCommerce stores that sell products like umbrellas, sunscreen, etc.

Also, Mailtrap is an Email Delivery Platform to test, send and control the entire email infrastructure in one place. 

Email-automation tools can be used individually or integrated with CRMs. Tools like HubSpot and Marketo also include email-automation software, but are more complete “marketing-automation” solutions rather than just email-automation tools.

For a more complete list of the leading email-automation solutions, read this post from OptinMonster.

Last Words

Email marketing is a very personal, inexpensive way of reaching your target customers. It is effective for informing people about your product or service and keeping them engaged regardless of the platform. Email allows you to reach mobile users just as it reaches desktop users – mobile accounts for 46% of all email opens, followed by webmail at 35%, and desktop opens at 18%.

Email-marketing automation has been getting a lot of attention recently due to increasingly challenged cookie-based targeting and various limitations imposed by new privacy regulations. Email-based campaigns simply pay off; when implemented properly, they allow your company’s messages to land in the same inbox as your customer’s personal messages, something that cannot be overestimated in the age of ad-blocking and ever-present banner blindness.

Bottom line: If you haven’t done so already, it is high time to get interested in email automation for marketing purposes. Personalized email is more relevant and thus more effective than any other kind of marketing communication. Automated emails can be triggered by specific customer actions, and made to appeal to their interests, driving online and in-store sales with discounts and promotions.

AdTech

AdTech Targeting Methods: The Ultimate Guide

Maciej Zawadziński, +1

Dec 19, 2016

AdTech

What is MadTech? The Convergence of AdTech and MarTech

Michal Wlosik

Aug 24, 2018

Data & Privacy

What Is a Data Clean Room and How Does It Work?

Mike Sweeney, +1

Apr 07, 2022

The post What Is Email Automation and How Does It Work? appeared first on Clearcode.

These methods of customer-data storage not only involved a lot of manual work, but they also meant the information wasn’t properly distributed across the business (between sales and marketing departments, for example), often leading to missed business opportunities.

With the introduction of the Internet came a wave of new marketing-technology (MarTech) platforms to help companies create, manage, and track customer relationships in the form of a customer relationship manager (CRM).

What Is a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)?

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is a piece of software companies use to manage interactions with customers, store information about them, and automate a number of processes connected with a customer’s journey through the marketing and sales funnels. A CRM system is an incredibly important tool for every company, helping to foster customer loyalty and forge it into healthy revenue.

What Does a CRM Do?

At the most basic level, CRM software allows marketers and salespeople to manage and analyze relationships with the company’s actual and potential customers. It enables tracking every interaction with the company and collects information about the customer. This way, when speaking to a customer, the marketer always knows who they are and sees their history with the company. This makes the interaction more personalized, increases the chances of conversion, and encourages customer trust and loyalty.

CRMs include functionalities which allow you to track customer/company interactions through various available touchpoints, including those from:

• Contact forms
• Search engines
• Emails
• Phone calls
• Social media

The software takes care of certain processes—it can offer automation of marketers’ repetitive tasks, sets reminders for important events, and displays alerts if things really need attention. Some CRMs also offer analytics capabilities, allowing you to track the efficiency of various marketing efforts to generate leads and conversions.

CRM software, in combination with marketing automation, provides sales and marketing teams with a set of tools to manage the entire sales and marketing funnels, from lead qualification to opportunity management, forecasting, and deal closure.

End-to-end management of the sales funnel involves a combination of marketing-automation (top of the funnel) and CRM functionalities (bottom of the funnel) systems. We are witnessing the trend that many popular CRM platforms either acquire or develop their own marketing-automation systems to offer the functionality. HubSpot, for example, offers both, while other CRMs enable easy integration with other marketing-automation systems.

Here’s a list of functionalities typically offered by a CRM platform:

• Lead management: A CRM tracks the company’s leads, allowing marketing teams to enter new leads into the system (automatically or manually) and to track and analyze data about them.
• Marketing automation: Some CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce offer marketing-automation functionalities to automate certain tedious tasks in the funnel. For example, the system can automatically send customers marketing emails at times set by the marketer, or publish social media posts according to a schedule. The goal of marketing automation is to keep sales leads engaged and to help turn them into paying customers.
• Sales automation: CRMs can track customer interactions and automate selected business functions of the sales cycle that are necessary to follow leads and attract and obtain new customers.
• Workflow automation: CRM systems help businesses optimize processes by streamlining mundane workloads, which enables employees to focus on creative and more high-level tasks.
• Analytics: CRM solutions can offer built-in analytics tools that offer insights and help boost customer satisfaction rates. A marketer can analyze the data and create targeted campaigns accordingly. CRM analytics help to track attribution and provide insights into the quality of the customer experience, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction.
• Artificial intelligence: CRM solutions like Salesforce offer AI capabilities built into their systems to help automatically recognize patterns leading to successful sales, which can help you build more accurate strategies for future marketing efforts.
• Individualized customer experiences: You can also use a CRM to create personalized and consistent experiences for your potential customers across various marketing channels, which may help increase conversions and boost brand awareness.

Off-the-Shelf CRM Solutions

There are numerous companies offering commercial, ready-made CRM solutions. The platforms come in different shapes and sizes, but are usually provided as SaaS, offering marketers a combination of sales, marketing, and customer-service functionalities.

Below are a few examples of some popular CRM systems:

Salesforce

Salesforce is considered the leading off-the-shelf CRM. According to the research giant Gartner, the pioneering cloud-based solution currently boasts 19.7% share of the market.

HubSpot

HubSpot CRM is known for offering deep insights into every prospect, allowing granular control of every part of the sales funnel. Real-time tracking of customer interaction helps to understand their needs and respond accordingly. HubSpot allows you to track the source of prospects’ visits, their interaction with emails (clicks, opens, or re-opens), and downloads of marketing materials like white papers and case studies from your site.

Hubspot allows you to install additional plugins for seamless integration with Gmail or Outlook.

Salesflare

Salesflare is a CRM that helps sales and marketing teams save time by automatically adding contact information to customer profiles, reduce time spent on data entry by more than 70%.

Oracle

Oracle CRM handles all customer relationship management issues and business processes on a single platform and offers a variety of deployment methods.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM closely trails Salesforce in terms of share and sales. The platform has been growing rapidly over the last few years and is currently available either on-premises or in the cloud.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM is a leading open-source CRM solution. It’s a lightweight platform founded in 2004. The solution is incredibly popular among small businesses and offers both on-premises and cloud-based deployment options. Pricing ranges from $35 to $150 per month per user.

Is an Off-the-Shelf Solution Good for Your Business?

Pre-built CRM solutions like those listed above are created to meet the expectations of most businesses. However, the features they offer may prove irrelevant to the needs of your organization.

Every extra feature comes at a cost, not only money-wise, but also in the form of a steep learning curve for marketers. Excess always leads to complexity; after all, it will take a lot of time for people to learn the new system’s functions. Developing a custom CRM solution is a way to get rid of all the distractions which compromise your sales team’s productivity.

It is very unlikely that your company will need every single feature an off-the-shelf CRM can offer. What’s worse, you have to properly configure and deploy the whole software package, even if the features you desire are only a fraction of the system.

As evidenced above, many software vendors such as Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft offer enterprise CRM systems. However, there are a number of inherent problems with out-of-the-box solutions:

• High ongoing costs
• Excessive features that aren’t used by your company
• Difficult integration with existing company systems
• Limited extensibility and customization of features
• Minimal or no control of your data
• Varied GDPR-compliance standards (some CRM’s interpretation of the GDPR and other privacy laws will likely be different than yours)

Building a Custom CRM

A CRM system is an easy way to quickly start tracking your customers and automate marketing workflows. The decision to go for a custom solution should be based on the consideration of certain factors.

The general problem is that ready-made CRMs, albeit functional and reliable, come with a number of unnecessary or overrated features. While your business may benefit from an off-the-shelf system is some way, sometimes what you really need is a platform carefully built to your company’s needs.

The development of a CRM system that seamlessly integrates with your business requires the participation of the developer and the client to help put together a workable, high-functioning CRM system that can integrate with existing systems of the company.

CRM platforms are becoming the bread and butter of business today, and building your own provides some serious business advantages.

Benefits of Building a Custom CRM

• Stripping down excess features. With a custom-built solution, you get exactly what you want without any of the superfluous functionalities you may never use. The development can focus on the features you really care about. A lightweight and effective customized CRM can cost only a fraction of the off-the-shelf price, but be better integrated with your business at the same time.
• Getting the exact information the way you want it. A custom CRM can be built around your business and your processes, and not the other way round. You can generate even the most granular reports, which provide a fuller view of your customers and your business.
• Better control over the feature roadmap. Control over the technology and development process of the application gives you the power to control what features will be implemented next, and to what deadlines.
• Lower cost. Off-the-shelf CRMs are not cheap—Microsoft Dynamics CRM costs around $5,000 for the server software and around $1,100 per user, or $65 per user per month in the case of its in-cloud version, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. While the initial cost of building bespoke software may be even higher, the investment will pay off in the long term. Since the software is designed and developed to your specific needs, there is no need to purchase additional add-ons when a new feature is required. A custom CRM enables you to easily add new users without the need to purchase separate licenses for each additional user.
• Data ownership. As most CRM systems are hosted in the cloud, the data you collect is stored in the vendor’s databases. While there are ways to easily access your data (e.g. via APIs), it’s still not 100% owned by your company. This can be a real issue for large companies that require ownership of their data and have strict data-protection policies. By building your own CRM, you can fully control your data and store it in on your own databases.
• Better integration with existing systems and platforms. From sales to customer service to technical support, your daily operations will be able to run more efficiently when the system is integrated across multiple departments. By pulling data from various sections of the company, you can achieve a customer view beyond the singular perspective of individual departments.
• GDPR compliance. As mentioned above, one company’s interpretation of the GDPR and other privacy laws can differ from another’s. A recent report from Demandbase found that 80% of marketers were concerned that their MarTech vendors might expose their company to GDPR legal risks. Taking your marketing technology in-house allows you to build your CRM platform in accordance to your company’s legal policies and also assists with complying with the GDPR—for example, being in control of responding to user-rights requests, such as the right to access or delete their data.

The CRM Platform Development Process

The process of building a well-integrated custom CRM solution comes at a cost beyond the price. It requires relentless focus on, and understanding of, the existing business processes of your company.

Since the CRM-development process involves active participation of the client, it is also a great opportunity to take a step back and decide which processes in your company are working and which aren’t. Granted, the development itself may take more time and attention of the company’s workers, but the resulting product will be one that accurately meets the requirements of your company and reflects its processes, accurately mapping the customer journey down the funnel.

Read more about a typical CRM platform development process here.

The Future of CRMs

Modern CRM systems are evolving and starting to offer functionalities beyond what they currently do compiling customer data across different channels. We are seeing social media integration, AI, holistic profiling, and much more.

By partnering with a company offering custom CRM development, you can expect that the resulting CRM solution will be scalable and ready to grow along with your company by closely reflecting its processes and seamlessly integrating with existing systems.

This is also an opportunity to tap into emerging technologies and become the trailblazer with competitive advantage in the industry—long before the off-the-shelf vendors catch up.

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Now, the situation is completely different. We are dealing with an abundance of channels and sources of data, and the only problem is knowing how to conveniently collect and leverage it all in marketing efforts.

Combining all the data in one place is key to efficient marketing. While the information is generally available, it is usually scattered across multiple silos—databases, platforms, and systems that store a company’s data but aren’t connected with one another.

Creating a reliable image of the customer requires access to first-, second- and third-party data. This may entail gathering incredible amounts of historical behavioral information about the customer from across numerous sources and stitching it all together to achieve the most complete image of the customer.

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a platform used by marketers to collect all the available data about the customer and aggregate it into a single database, which is integrated with and easily accessible from a number of other marketing systems and platforms used by the company.

Data Aggregated in a CDP Can Include

• Transactional data about past purchases
• Browsing history
• Demographic data
• Behavioral data
• Event data (clicks and file downloads, etc.)
• Data about product usage
• Partner and third-party data (optional)

While the acronym often appears in the context of ads, the application of CDPs is not limited to marketing only. Apart from marketing, CDPs serve a wide array of purposes, such as customer support. The goal is to aggregate various data sources (online and offline) and use them to compile a “view” of the customer in a single place, also referred to as a single customer view (SCV).

CDP technology is the cornerstone of campaign automation and customer-journey management, segmentation and data analysis, online advertising and marketing solutions, and real-time personalization.

How Does a Customer Data Platform Work?

The role of CDPs is to collect lots of data about customers who do business with a company, create a detailed image of the customer, and deliver effective, personalized communication across all channels.

Why is it important to gather so much information about the user in the first place? Simply because the more you know about your “perfect” customer, the easier it will be for you to implement lookalike modeling to find similar people you can target your marketing to.

This, in turn, requires deterministic and probabilistic algorithms. We’ve written about them in other posts on our blog.

The image below illustrates the role of a customer data platform:

What’s the Difference Between a CDP, CRM, and DMP?

Customer Data Platforms may seem very similar to CRMs and DMPs, as they are all responsible for collecting and storing data about customers. There are, however, certain differences in the ways they work.

Distinguishing Features of CDPs, CRMs, and DMPs

CDPs are the youngest platform of the three. They primarily use first-party data, and are based on real consumer identities (personally identifiable information, or PII). The information comes from various systems in the organization and can be enriched with third-party data. CDPs are mainly used by marketers to nurture the existing consumer base.

Here’s what you need to know about CDPs:

• CDPs are focused on marketing (communicating to known audience)
• They are focused on conversion, retention, and engagement marketing with an existing customer base.
• Primarily use PII and first-party data.
• A CDP typically leverages first-party data, but can be enriched with third-party data.
• CDPs are used by companies to keep user data in one place, and to access that information to implement personalized marketing strategies across multiple channels (e.g. web, ads, email, mobile).

DMPs, on the other hand, are primarily responsible for aggregating third-party data, which typically involves the use of cookies. In this way, a DMP is more of an AdTech platform, while a CDP can be considered a MarTech tool. DMPs are mainly used to enhance advertising campaigns and acquire lookalike audiences.

Here’s what you need to know about DMPs:

• They are focused on advertising (communicating to unknown audience)
• They typically leverage third-party data, with first-party data acting as an additional source of information.
• DMPs were built before Google and Facebook opened their custom audience APIs, offering the ability to merge first-party data with additional ad-network-provided targeting criteria.
• A DMP is designed to improve display ad targeting.

CRMs are very much like CDPs, but do not handle multiple data types and typically require lots of manual maintenance. Although they are used for similar purposes as a CDP, they are not efficiently scalable.

Here’s what you need to know about CRMs:

• CRMs are much like CDPs, but do not handle multiple data types.
• Use PII and first-party data.
• Usually require salespeople to manage its accounts.

What Can Marketers Achieve by Using a CDP?

In 1916, John Wanamaker, an American merchant and a prominent political figure widely considered to be the godfather of modern marketing, spoke his famous quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

Fast forward a hundred years and marketers are facing the very same dilemma; this “wasted” money is the bane of modern marketing and advertising, just as it was back then.

Efficiency

Granted, no marketing efforts can consistently guarantee good results at minimal media spend, but marketers can vastly increase their success rate by advertising and marketing to the right people. This involves either communicating to a carefully selected audience, or to those who have already expressed interest in the product. Doing this would typically require proper and accurate segmentation, and a centralized, complete view of the customer. This is where CDPs really come in handy.

Before the introduction of CDPs, making use of multiple data sources was a time-consuming process with a lot of manual management, verification, and de-duplication, which was often not free of human error.

De-Siloing

The need to eliminate data silos became obvious. A data source was needed that would aggregate various other data sources and be consistently available to all systems in the organization. Marketing, business intelligence, and customer service became increasingly dependent on the availability of data to drive the business. This is possible with CDPs, which eliminate data silos and make immediate decisions based on multiple variables.

CDPs centralize data about customers, saving hours of integration work. Also, business rules are gathered in one place and can be leveraged throughout various tools and platforms in the company, saving lots of work in the process (so-called democratization of data).

Better Insights

Integrating a number of customer-data sources into a single, centralized platform can offer more accurate and actionable insights. With this in place, faster, data-driven business decisions can be made.

Single Customer View

A comprehensive, holistic view of the customer is made available to other systems and multiple departments of the organization (also offline). This helps create the most comprehensive customer experience.

Summary

A single customer view—a 360-degree representation of all the aggregated data a company knows about its customers—is the coveted holy grail of every marketer. The role of a customer data platform is to help achieve that—to collect customer data from a number of different sources (i.e. platforms and channels used in the company) and offer a holistic view of the customer to allow execution and optimization of personalized customer journeys.

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Top Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Data Management Platform (DMP) Companies [Updated in 2024]

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The post What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and How Does It Work? appeared first on Clearcode.