8September 2017In My Opinion3 Ways a Customer Data Platform Makes Marketing Automation More "Human"By Frank Grillo, CMO, & Brett Eckrich, Manager, Marketing Technology and Innovation, Harte Hanks [NYSE:HHS]Imagine you've just walked into the corner store to find something quick for dinner. The shopkeeper asks "How may I help you?" and you explain you are looking for an easy but somewhat healthy dinner. The shopkeeper points out that she just started carrying both Lean Cuisines and Amy's Kitchen meals in the freezer section. Bingo. She assessed your needs in the moment and served up exactly what you were looking for.After buying Lean Cuisines three nights in a row, you stop in again. The shopkeeper asks, "Dinner again? How about a salad?" This time you respond that you have a few friends coming over to watch the game, and you actually need some snack food. She points out her favorite dip in the refrigerator section and then directs you to the chip aisle. Marketers often have trouble making this real-time adjustment. Once we have bucketed someone into a "persona," we rarely consider that there is an actual person on the other side of our digital interactions, at varying stages of their journey to making a purchase, with lots of varied motivations for doing so. Rather than asking "how may I help you?" and reacting contextually, in the moment (like the shopkeeper), many of us profile our prospects based on static data and assume to know what they want or need. We then push content to these individuals through marketing automation and other channels that we believe will meet these assumed needs. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don't. When we don't, we risk alienating our buyers.Thankfully, technology enables us to build conversations with buyers that are more like our dynamic exchange with the shopkeeper. We can achieve these types of interactions with a customer data platform (CDP)--a system that employs a unified, persistent, single platform for all customer behavioral, profile and other data, from any internal or external source. A CDP uses this data to generate signals--units of intelligence--that help us to understand our buyers' context, across multiple interactions, over a span of time. Signals also help us predict, in the moment, how we may best help each and every individual we interact with and then executes on those actions. When we use this CDP technology to drive our marketing automation, we can converse more humanly at scale by constantly watching and reacting to our buyers' cues, just like we would if we were interacting face to face.The following are three specific ways in which a CDP helps us to have these more human conversations.1. A CDP Facilitates a Non-Linear Buyer's JourneyMarketing automation platforms (MAPs) enable us to create trigger-based journeys aligned with the traditional notion that buyers move in a straightforward, consistent progression from one stage to the next--there is no skipping around. New research on buyer behavior across multiple disciplines (e.g., economics, psychology) and sponsors (e.g., Google, Forrester) tells us three important things:· Buyer movement through their journeys is often sporadic.Customers will continue to demand relevant, contextual communications, and markets are already beginning to embrace AI and machine learningFrank Grillo
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