What Could a Customer Data Platform (CDP) Do for Your Brand?

This article is excerpted from ANA's CDP Playbook: How to Succeed with Customer Data Platforms.
The past few years have seen a tsunami of interest in Customer Data Platforms. Yet even though many companies now report they have deployed a CDP, widespread confusion remains about what a CDP is, why you would want one, and how to best use it.
CDP Use Cases
Customer data has a near-infinite number of uses in today's organizations. As a result, so does a CDP. But when assessing the value of a CDP, the important question is which use cases only become possible, and/or gain substantially improved results, if a CDP is added. In most cases, the benefit will come from greater access to existing data, whether by combining data from several systems, by keeping data you currently cannot access, or by sharing profiles with decision and execution systems.
Here is one example of a successful CDP application:
How Bark drove a 97 percent lift in year-over-year revenue per user
BARK is a high-growth, e-commerce company and their subscription business, BarkBox, is complemented by their media property BarkPost, as well as their traditional e-commerce offering, BarkShop.
Challenge
Before working with Simon Data, BARK had been doing one-off database pulls to drive their reactivation efforts. The process was time consuming, unwieldy, and stressful. Furthermore, the disparate nature of their data – across platforms like Mixpanel, Recurly, Delighted, and their own data warehouse – compromised BARK's ability to run efficient retention and reactivation campaigns.
Solution
BARK leveraged Simon to segment subscribers who recently cancelled subscriptions and then ran a series of experiments spanning several reactivation cycles to identify optimal strategies across messaging, timing, and promotional offers.
Simon empowered the BARK team to easily run complex A/B tests that measured the long-term effects of discounting on downstream revenue. Additionally, Simon's cohort-based results analysis enabled them to think about results holistically.
Results 97 percent Increase in Revenue
Simon not only empowered the BARK team to hit their holiday sales goals, but also effectively enabled a three-fold increase in their campaign volume during the holidays while maintaining a high velocity of messaging.
For more case studies, and a comprehensive look into all things CPD, download ANA's CDP Playbook: How to Succeed with Customer Data Platforms.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.