I’ve found that one of the issues that confuses people about CDPs is how you link customer data to web behavior. Sometimes there’s a perception that if you load all your customer data into the CDP, that means you’ll be able to track those customers’ behavior on your website.
Not quite.
Think of it this way. Let’s say I get an email from Bob about something I’ve written. Bob and I chat by email, talk on the phone a few times, and after a month Bob and I know one another pretty well. Then it turns out that Bob and I will both be attending a conference in New York.
I go to the conference and I see lots of people. I can see which sessions they attend, who they talk to and so on, but I don’t know who they are. One of them is Bob, but I don’t know what he looks like.
All that knowledge I have about Bob from our emails and phone chats is analogous to my offline customer data. When I look around at faces at the conference, that’s analogous to what my website knows about visitors.
Now let’s apply that to your customer data and your CDP.
If I upload customer information to a CDP, that will create a record in the CDP — let’s call it record 1 — with that customer information.
If that very same customer goes to the website, the CDP doesn’t know who it is, because web connections are anonymous. The CDP will create a new record for that anonymous visitor. Let’s call that record 2.
That customer can come to the site every day for a month, and the CDP will dutifully record all that activity in record 2. That’s the customer’s web profile. But all the other customer information that you uploaded is in record 1.
This is the tricky part that some people don’t catch right away. All the information is in the CDP, but it’s not tied together. It’s in two (or maybe more) separate records.
How do we tie them together?
We have to find some data point that’s common to record 1 — that’s our offline customer information — and record 2 — which is the web profile. Typically that would be an email address or a phone number, but you could use any data that uniquely identifies that customer. It could be a postal address, or a customer ID.
Let’s assume the customer data you uploaded to the CDP has an email address. To merge records 1 and 2, we need to associate an email address with record 2, the web profile. Here are some common ways to do that.
- When you send out emails to your audience, include data in the link that will identify the recipient. When the recipient clicks on the link, that data is available to the CDP, which allows you to identify him. That’s not a perfect method, because people do forward emails and post links to social media, but it’s fairly reliable, and it might be reliable enough. Once you have that email address you can merge the web profile with customer information you have from other sources.
- Simply ask for the visitor’s email address. Ask them to sign up for an e-newsletter or to give you an email address in exchange for a white paper, or some other benefit. That allows you to match the web profile to the back-end data.
- Require people to register to access certain parts of your site.
As I mentioned, you can do similar things with phone numbers instead of email addresses. The point is that you need to enrich the visitor’s web profile to have some piece of data that allows you to merge that web profile with data you’ve collected from other sources.
Once you’ve resolved the visitor’s identity and know which industry he’s in, you can use all the information you have on that customer to customize the web experience.
If you’re curious about customer data platforms, please have a look at my e-book: What is a Customer Data Platform? And why should I care?
