Four Secrets to Building a Unified Customer Profile

Unified customer profiles are all the rage today. And, there’s good reason for that. They can drastically improve your customer experiences and allow you to better target campaigns to audience segments and personalize messaging to existing customers and targets.

However, many organizations find themselves overwhelmed by the process of creating unified customer profiles. With so many disparate data sources, finding a way to map one ID across them all is nearly impossible. So, it’s understandable that organizations may not know how to get started.

The Secrets to Building a Unified Customer Profile
To build a unified customer profile, you must keep some important things in mind.

1. Stop Searching for the Holy Grail.
Many organizations face serious delays because they try to find ways to map one ID across all their data sources. This is almost sure to fail, or at the very least, cost time that you don’t have. Rather than trying to do everything at once — integrating all channels, all users, and all campaigns — and finding yourself overwhelmed to the point of paralysis, it’s better to start with the IDs you have and determine how you can link them to master IDs. Beginning with data you already have allows you to understand which marketing channels you have good connections for and which you can begin delivering on.

2. Just Keep Swimming.
When building a unified customer profile, you will almost certainly reach a point when you want to quit. It will seem as though you’re doing tons of work but not gaining the results you’d like as quickly as you’d like them. Continue pushing through. This does not mean that you’re on the wrong track. Remember, you will not have an end-to-end solution right out of the gate — no one does. Instead, focus initially on authenticated, first-party data. From there, you can slowly add in more sophisticated profiling as the process progresses.

3. Avoid Being Attached to Trash.
If you’re like most organizations, you have some segments that have been around forever. Either you never use them, or they’re full of old, bad data. There’s no reason to move that outdated information over to your new system. Keeping outdated garbage data does not help you achieve a unified customer profile — and, it will not help you meet your goals either. Instead, start with the data you have. The new data you have coming in will be more beneficial to your targeting than your old ideas or best guesses were. Let the data do the segmenting work for you.

4. Remember Bigger Doesn’t Equal Better.
Sometimes, we hear people brag about how huge their newsletter sends are: “We reached over 100,000 people!” What they don’t consider is whether those 100,000 people were likely to even care about what they had to say. If you’re constantly approaching people who aren’t interested in your brand or product, you’re wasting your time, money, and effort. Instead, use a unified customer profile to determine which audiences are most likely to respond to which campaigns. As you learn more about your audiences, you’ll likely find that your audience segments decrease — but that decrease will leave you with audience segments that are most likely to act.

Unified Customer Profile Benefits
Building a unified customer profile can be a daunting task. However, the benefits of a unified customer profile — increased marketing efficiency, better understanding of your customer journey, and a more comprehensive audience profile — far outweigh the effort of working through your data. Approaching the task in a methodical method can help smooth out the process. This particular task is a prime example of how slow and steady can win the race. By first making measurable progress in the areas that you can — and adding on as you go — you will help achieve a unified customer profile more quickly.

The post Four Secrets to Building a Unified Customer Profile appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/four-secrets-building-unified-customer-profile/

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