How to optimize omnichannel marketing automation with a customer data platform

The consumer buying journey is going through an evolution forcing businesses to be increasingly agile in adopting omnichannel marketing strategies. Customers today are living in a hyper-connected world looking for more personalized interactions through their preferred channels. This includes all mobile messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and others.

And before making a purchase, customers will touch multiple channels—viewing social ads, browsing your website, visiting your offline store, signing up for your emails, or downloading other related content.

For these reasons, you need to stop optimizing your marketing within channels and start optimizing across channels. And for your marketing to be truly omnichannel and automated, you need to first unify your customer data and deliver a more holistic experience – best done with a Customer Data Platform (CDP).

Read on to learn more about optimizing marketing automation using a CDP.

Before the world went digital, customer centricity was based on businesses having direct relationships with their customers through one channel. An “offline” physical store. It was very simple for local businesses to collect and remember customers’ names, birthdays and preferences as there was only one source of data.

However, today’s digital landscape is much more complex. Companies are required to track millions of customers across numerous physical and online channels to be able to identify and understand customer needs, and tailor goods or services accordingly.

And while most marketers want an accurate and holistic view on customer data, not everyone is managing and leveraging this data properly. With CDPs businesses can democratize data so it can be used across the entire organization (marketing, sales, customer service, business). It’s all about bringing together all these data silos to get a 360˚ view of the customer.

But how does this process actually work? A CDP unifies data across channels by collecting and integrating customer data from various sources, such as:

This allows the CDP to create a comprehensive and centralized customer profile that includes a customer’s interactions with a business across all touchpoints.

The CDP then uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to identify and reconcile duplicate or conflicting data, and to associate the data with a single customer profile.

With a unified customer view, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior, demographics, preferences, and needs across channels. This allows them to deliver personalized and relevant experiences to customers at every touchpoint, which can improve satisfaction and loyalty, and drive business growth.

Even with the availability of numerous digital customer engagement tools, businesses are still facing some challenges with marketing automation.

Last year, we analyzed over 153 billion interactions on our platform to see how customers interact over their favorite channels. Our data analysis has shown that providing an end-to-end experience with an omnichannel approach is the key to building a successful communications strategy.

Omnichannel Marketing Automation uses automated marketing tools to communicate with customers across different channels, such as email, SMS, messaging apps, and voice, in a consistent and personalized way. To implement this strategy, businesses need a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior and preferences across channels, which is where a CDP comes in.

Here are the top five reasons why CDPs are valuable for launching and automating omnichannel marketing campaigns:

With a CDP at the heart of Omnichannel Marketing Automation, you can significantly improve customer engagement, craft tailored journeys, and drive business growth to achieve customer satisfaction.

Nowadays, the common cloud services and channels are available via plug-and-play APIs providing ways for cloud platforms to grow together via integration partnerships. Connecting solutions together helps clients address their most pressing business needs.

A great example of this type of integration is our system integration partnership with Synerise, an organization that drives collection & real-time (live) analysis of customer data and their environmental context from any source, allowing real time execution. Thanks to Synerise AI engine, this integration enables you to understand your customers’ needs and preferences, then engage them via SMS, RCS, or any other preferred channel from our communication platform to a dynamically created customer segment on the Synerise platform.

We help SIs extend and enrich their portfolio with digital-first solutions such as a CDP to reach new market segments from SME to Enterprise. Our native cloud communication platform helps SIs build recurring revenue streams by adding new channels to their marketing communication mix.

By partnering with Infobip, SIs can leverage a $200bn market, which is growing at 27% annually and share a profit margin on traffic usage. We provide go-to-market support, certification, and training to help SIs deliver innovative and transformative customer experience solutions.