Customer Data Platform Tips for B2B Marketing

Globalisation has changed the way people do business. In globalisation, the internet is the primary channel of communication between the business entities and customers. There are a few occasions when you come face-to-face with your customers. Otherwise, the dealings are online. Under such circumstances, it becomes essential to maintain customer data and analyse it on a continuous basis thereby giving birth to a new concept known as ‘customer data platform.’

In simple words, we shall define a customer data platform (CDP) as a real-time unified customer database accessible to other systems. The role of the CDP is to pull data from multiple sources, clean and combine it to create a unified customer profile. You need to update this profile on a real-time basis to create segmentation for personalised marketing.

CDPs have great significance in both the B2C and B2B marketing. We shall concentrate on the CDP attributes in the B2B category. Here are some CDP tips for B2B marketing.

· Integration of data

Integration of customer data from multiple sources is the starting point for the creation of any CDP. The best sources of data in B2B are various platforms such as Customer Relationship Management, marketing automation, product usage data, support ticketing system, and the financial platform. There are some other avenues such as calendar data and email details of sales personnel.

Procuring customer data should not be a problem because you have data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. Systems like Salesforce also allow you to use APIs to export data.

· Organising data

Collection of data is easy. It is a challenging task to organise the data. It is an essential aspect of customer marketing analysis. To coordinate data from multiple sources, you should have a 360-degree vision of the customers. Organising data is vital to avoid duplication. As you extract customer data from the individual CRMs, you can find them having multiple accounts that need elimination. You need the services of a capable IT team to collect and assimilate data from various sources. Secondly, it requires continuous maintenance.

· Analysing your data

Analysing your data becomes easy when you have the requisite data in place. As you have the 360-degree view of your customers, it becomes easy for you to distinguish the attributes of the customers that are good for sales metrics like new bookings, renewing, and upselling the existing bookings. You can also use this 360-degree view to determine the customer lifecycle marketing.

The CDP allows you to concentrate on attributes like engagement with marketing campaigns, product usage, and determining the volume of sales and so on. In other words, you get a complete picture of your customers that can be helpful to your business.

· Use the Data

The most important aspect of B2B marketing is to use the data that you have meticulously organised. The best way to do so is to push the leads and contacts back to your CRM. It will help you to provide real-time information to your sales team whereby they can accurately focus on the customer’s wants.

The CDP also allows you to make adjustments by slicing data to suit your campaigns. It also allows you to automate reports thereby enabling you to gauge the performance of your business.

We have seen four important CDP tips for your B2B marketing campaigns. It is essential to update this information on a regular basis so that you have real-time data on your hands.   

Why is customer data platform gaining importance?

The competition is becoming intense on a daily basis. Every business has to be on its toes to stay ahead of the competition. The marketing campaign is the most significant aspect of the success of any business. Everything depends on the proper analysis of your customers as well as your competitors. It is why you see most of the companies relying on CRM for capturing and interpreting customer data. The objective is to make it easy for the customer to have a great shopping experience.

The CRM has been a practical analysis tool for a long time. Nowadays, you see the emergence of the customer data platform (CDP) as the most effective marketing tool in the industry. We shall now see what CDP is and why it is gaining in importance today.

What is the CDP?

Knowing your customer is paramount to success in business. It is vital to have a persistent unified customer database which is accessible to other systems. The CDP is such a market managed system.

The CDP enables the collection of data from all the corporate channels to channelise it towards a single platform for marketing and sales. The idea is to deliver a higher level of personalised service to your customers. You should have a 360⁰ view of the customer to ensure that. It involves the collection, assimilation, and analysis of a vast volume of data. This analysis provides real-time insights into the business thereby enabling it to take prompt action.

How do you ensure the collection of data?

In the ordinary course of marketing, the sales and the advertising teams have access to customer data from various sources. Some of them are call-centre interactions, social media, emails, product usage data, and mobile apps. The data collected from these sources enables the company to respond to the customer’s needs promptly.

Example of how CDP is useful

You can take the example of the German National Rail Company, the Deutsche Bahn. This rail company uses the CDP to cater to the immediate needs of the passengers. It offers an automatic and timely upgrade to their customers whenever it senses massive overcrowding in the trains. How do they manage to do that?

The Deutsche Ban uses the CDP to gain insights about the customer. It collects data on the customers who are travelling by their trains. It does not matter whether the customer books the tickets through their official mobile app or an online store. The system gathers information even when the customer gets his/her ticket from the railway station. The CDP links the personal data of the customer with the real-time data of the train and endeavours to offer a better experience.

The advantages of the CDP

The CGP can collect data from all the sources, be it the individual shop servers, a dedicated customer database, or even the data warehouse in the cloud.

· The CDP is a cloud-based platform.

· It is a centralised platform that manages the segmentation of the customers.

· The CDP is compatible with existing database management systems like the CRM.

· It provides access to complete and accurate information about the customer thereby helping the business offer the highest quality of services to the customer. It results in enhanced customer loyalty.

· The significant advantage of CDP is that you can link it to contextual events. The example of the Deutsche Bahn is a prime one.

Companies across the world are now concentrating on using the CDP to gain valuable insights into the customer. If one company does not do it, someone else will do it. The customer has a wide choice. Therefore, it is imperative for all businesses to use the CDP to improve their profitability. It explains the importance of the CDP.

       

Customer Data Platform Tips for B2B Marketing

Globalisation has changed the way people do business. In globalisation, the internet is the primary channel of communication between the business entities and customers. There are a few occasions when you come face-to-face with your customers. Otherwise, the dealings are online. Under such circumstances, it becomes essential to maintain customer data and analyse it on a continuous basis thereby giving birth to a new concept known as ‘customer data platform.’

In simple words, we shall define a customer data platform (CDP) as a real-time unified customer database accessible to other systems. The role of the CDP is to pull data from multiple sources, clean and combine it to create a unified customer profile. You need to update this profile on a real-time basis to create segmentation for personalised marketing.

CDPs have great significance in both the B2C and B2B marketing. We shall concentrate on the CDP attributes in the B2B category. Here are some CDP tips for B2B marketing.

· Integration of data

Integration of customer data from multiple sources is the starting point for the creation of any CDP. The best sources of data in B2B are various platforms such as Customer Relationship Management, marketing automation, product usage data, support ticketing system, and the financial platform. There are some other avenues such as calendar data and email details of sales personnel.

Procuring customer data should not be a problem because you have data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. Systems like Salesforce also allow you to use APIs to export data.

· Organising data

Collection of data is easy. It is a challenging task to organise the data. It is an essential aspect of customer marketing analysis. To coordinate data from multiple sources, you should have a 360-degree vision of the customers. Organising data is vital to avoid duplication. As you extract customer data from the individual CRMs, you can find them having multiple accounts that need elimination. You need the services of a capable IT team to collect and assimilate data from various sources. Secondly, it requires continuous maintenance.

· Analysing your data

Analysing your data becomes easy when you have the requisite data in place. As you have the 360-degree view of your customers, it becomes easy for you to distinguish the attributes of the customers that are good for sales metrics like new bookings, renewing, and upselling the existing bookings. You can also use this 360-degree view to determine the customer lifecycle marketing.

The CDP allows you to concentrate on attributes like engagement with marketing campaigns, product usage, and determining the volume of sales and so on. In other words, you get a complete picture of your customers that can be helpful to your business.

· Use the Data

The most important aspect of B2B marketing is to use the data that you have meticulously organised. The best way to do so is to push the leads and contacts back to your CRM. It will help you to provide real-time information to your sales team whereby they can accurately focus on the customer’s wants.

The CDP also allows you to make adjustments by slicing data to suit your campaigns. It also allows you to automate reports thereby enabling you to gauge the performance of your business.

We have seen four important CDP tips for your B2B marketing campaigns. It is essential to update this information on a regular basis so that you have real-time data on your hands.   

Top Technological Trends Transforming Fashion & Retail

The constant innovation taking place in retail technologies in fashion are quite progressive. It is dynamic and transformative. The demands of customers in retail today are changing and brands have already begun to adapt in order to be relevant and achieve customer satisfaction. New technologies like fashion AI, the retail business’ intelligence software for fashion are taking the market by storm. They drive valuable business operations, augment overall customer experience and value proposition. The fashion industry is gradually harnessing new technologies that help retailers boost their business. Let’s have a look at the top technological trends in fashion. 

Artificial Intelligence

AI is one of the biggest technological advancements in the recent past. Artificial Intelligence has the ability to convert a large amount of data into enhanced information. This improves speed, reduces cost and elevates flexibility across the value chain. In the fashion industry, AI helps retailers with predictive fashion forecasting, capacity planning, and merchandising. In a 2017 report, McKinsey & Company said that an AI-based approach can result in the reduction of fashion forecasting errors by 50%.

Automated Supply Chain

Technologies driven by insights provided by the web and software solutions backed by data enable retail businesses to make better decisions with regard to their daily business operations. Automated supply chain process in the industry is followed and practised diligently as it enhances retail tracking while increasing competence. Why is this technology being rigorously followed by fashion businesses? Customers today expect brands to attend to them when they really need it, at any time of the day – be it change of orders, delivery, or product info. Customers today want modifications and services to take place at the click of a button and brands need to modify themselves. 

Better Procurement Tools

With new technologies every day, the lead time to create merchandise is shrinking. The purchasing managers in the fashion industry need to have the ideal procurement tools. As the demand increases, the procurement tools help a retailer streamline operations, faster access to breakthrough trends with latest data, and effectively regulate cash flow with the help of real-time admission to the status of the invoice, by putting in place an intelligent procurement tool.

Cloud Solutions

Fashion brands are eventually taking to novel technologies that help them reduce the effects of turnover on the business. They are moving towards using cloud-based services for better collaboration with suppliers, shortened administrative functions, lower costs of materials & goods, and of course, increased profits. Cloud-based services modify the fashion infrastructure outlay and involve fewer resources with enhanced workflow.

Looking for analytics services and insights to better your retail business? Manthan designs prescriptive applications using AI while providing contextual analytics for fashion retail. To know more, visit www.manthan.com for more info.

CHANGING THE FACE OF FASHION RETAIL INNOVATIVE MARKETING TRENDS FOR 2018

The fashion retail industry is vast, varied, and constantly changing. What is new and modish today might become old-fashioned and outdated tomorrow. Hence it is important for all retailers to follow the most recent marketing trends in fashion. To abide by the changing tastes and needs of the consumers, most fashion retailers and fashion companies have understood the need for adopting marketing trends that are insights-driven. This helps retailers make data-based decisions, curate search data, and gain maximum profits – all in real time. The secret? Analytics Solutions!    

So how do we fill the gap between customer needs and competition-advantage? We build a ramp-walk. Here are few disruptive fashion retail marketing trends that are the fashion industry a facelift.

Shopping on Social Media platforms:

Social media, being the most happening medium of communication, lay a major influence on the fashion industry. Almost all the big and famous brands are now creating and developing social media links that will connect the consumers with their retail websites. Even social media stars are made a part business communication strategy to garner attention. Eventually, the increase in revenue.

Help from machines: 

Retailers are banking of AI technology to make more informed decisions. Almost 45% of the retailers have adopted AI technology – a game changes in their business curve. AI technology helps analyse data and record online sales in a database. This smart data then influences the end customer in making a purchase decision. What products are trending at the moment? AI has the answer. 

Exhibit to sell: 

Several retailers have embraced the idea of stepping out of the conventional shop and holding exhibitions. Holding exhibitions allows the retailers to display a few of their products around a theme, that entices the consumers to check out other products that are available in the shops as well. Fashion Retail Marketing Analytics Solutions allow retailers to curate that theme which connects seamlessly with the customer. 

So far in 2018, the above marketing trends are helping fashion retailers gather customer insights that delight and engage. Wish to seize business moments with real-time insights? 

Then Manthan is your go-to little black dress.

2018 RETAIL ANALYTICS SOLUTION IN FASHION

The retail segment is booming at a rapid pace. This means two things: Lots of choices for consumers and stiff competition for retail companies. In a volatile market, how do you leverage customer engagement with your product and influence buying behaviour? Fashion retail analytic solutions seem to be the answer right now. E-commerce fashion companies are clocking into the power of AI to recognize what customers demand and to meet it as quickly as possible. As a business intelligence and analytics company Manthan provides retail companies with a unique AI-driven platform to boost their business. Here are some effective solutions for fashion analytics.

     A company’s data is leveraged through Manthan’s AI-system for predictive analysis. Data which consists of the past and present buying behaviour of consumers is collated and analysed. Based on this data, you can generate predictive insights of what the customer will demand next. Following this fashion analytics code, retail companies can stay one step ahead of their competition by stocking on merchandise which will be in demand.

    Through this centralized system, retail companies can make fast buying decisions, and also have an online management of inventory and pricing of the commodities. Pricing strategies can be aligned according to supply and demand behaviour and current market pricing trends. Once decisions regarding sales and pricing have been put in place, they can be effectively worked upon to lead to much better sales in the future. For example, based on fashion analytics results, a company can look at what works at which price. Did a certain product have better sales because of its pricing strategy? Did a product not generate enough sales because of its high price tag? These are patterns of customer buying behaviour that can be analysed to impact revenue growth.

     Using the power of AI can impact the marketing management strategies of a company for the better. AI is also one form of advertising solution for your company. Your company can detect what works and what doesn’t depending on intuitive supply chain intelligence and customer behaviour. AI is the ideal fashion analytics tool which can help you augment sales and boost your company’s visibility. The quantitative and qualitative analysis is provided and business decisions based on this can be etched out by the company. These days, lots of companies have latched on to the power of AI-driven technology to boost their brands. If you haven’t then what are you waiting for? At Manthan, our goal is to make sure that brands can leverage customer engagement which can then lead to skyrocketing sales. Get in touch with us to see what the next step can be for your business’s growth. 

WHY CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM IS A GAME CHANGER IN THE FASHION INDUSTRY

With a lot of options available at their fingertips, consumers of the fashion industry are becoming more and more demanding with each passing day.  If you are not capable of meeting their never-ending demands, it won’t take much time for them to move on to another brand that’ll meet their needs and requirements. In simple words, brands have to pay more attention to the experience they are providing to their customers, to retain them. Because of the same reason, customer data platforms have been increasingly becoming popular in the fashion industry.

Data are generally collected from digital and traditional sources inside and outside the company. This is then identified and used as a source for ongoing analysis and discovery. Smart fashion brands have been using this for decades to understand the market, gain an advantage over their competitors, and increase their sales. Want to know more about the importanceof customer data platforms in the fashion industry? Here are few. Read on.

Identify markets

     Customer Data Platforms can help you to analyze the preferences of the people across the globe. It gives you a better insight into the changes in the mindset of your targeted audience, their culture, and lifestyle, thus helping you to identify the right market for your product. It also gives sufficient information to identify your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses.

      Personalized Marketing

Customer’s personal data is now out in the open like never before. The ability of firms to mine bits of actionable business intelligence from such a pool of information has also increased over the years. Browsing history, social conversations, purchase data, and spending trends are all lying in the data lakes waiting to be discovered. If used rightly, these can reveal a lot about your customer’s taste, style of shopping and needs. You can now identify what they are buying, when they are buying and how thus personalizing your marketing.

Increased customer loyalty

In today’s fast progressing world, where your competitors are just a click away, customer loyalty is the new marketing. When they feel taken care of and understood, they are more inclined to buy from you again and again. Especially in fashion and retail, customers place a priority on receiving great service. A customer data platform allows marketers to segment the customer data at deep levels. This means the marketer can offer the most granular and personalized experience to their customers without having to continuously try and make customers fit into their programmed molds. Also, access to the full record of the customer can contribute to customer loyalty.

Data science is undoubtedly a game changer in today’s fashion marketing. The importance of having the right Customer Data Platform in place has become very significant for retailers. Manthan’s Customer 360 is a Customer Data Platform that houses analytical and data science capabilities including look-alike predictions, data explorations, segmentation, and micro-segmentation. To learn more, clickhere>>>