The most important thing brands can do now is join their various customer data together into a single table with one row per customer. Call it a source of truth, a golden record, a master customer file, a C360 or a C180….call it whatever you want.
Keep it in the cloud, on your premises, in a CDP or MDM. It doesn’t matter as long as you have it. This table is the foundation for everything you will ever want to do with your customer data and thus your customers. If you’re not doing this now you are falling behind. Quickly.
The continued growth of C360s is truly setting the stage for AI to flourish in your business. Bringing data together across channels is giving eyesight to the blind. Even better, the ability to see across the customer lifecycle enables hyper-personalization at scale. This is the golden goose for marketers. The only true way they can determine and employ strategies and tactics so they can optimize for customer Lifetime Value (LTV) instead of just tactical channel metrics like conversion rate from email.
This table is the story of your business, told in data that can be easily comprehended by the most advanced computer intelligence ever created. It thrives on scale. It is your future. And it’s really not that difficult to get started cooking this up. So what are you waiting for?
Creating a C360 does not have to be overwhelming.
First let’s agree that Customer 360 is an aspirational term. We will always have empty cells associated with different attributes and events. What we want to aim for is understanding a single customer’s behavior and transactions across as many dimensions as possible. This can be time, channels, goods & services or any event that is instrumental to the customer experience. Not being able to aggregate this data has been the #1 blind spot for marketers since the beginning of time.
The good news is you’re probably already collecting data about your customer behaviors and transactions. Most everyone has site and app analytics for behaviors and a CRM of some sort for transactions. You might have surveys and loyalty or promotional data at the customer level too. So you have the big unlock sitting there already. Instant magic happens by joining these tables together and resolving all these data points from different data stores to one person, in one row in one table. Steak and potatoes. So here’s the recipe…
Easy C360:
Step 1. Join your Behavioral and Transactional data together in a pan. Saute until IDs are reduced.
It’s not that difficult. There are a whole bunch of tools that do Identity/Entity resolution using all different kinds of methodologies. Find the one you like and that fits your budget and company DNA. Keep in mind this will remain a core part of your marketing tech stack since the need for this resolution is persistent over time.
80% of the value from your 1st party data will come from joining these two datasets together and deduping them, and creating a global ID for all your first party joins (which will include email address and other identifiers). You will use this table to activate certain IDs in every channel. This is truly table stakes. If you have not done this or are not actively doing you are losing.
Step 2: Add Formulas and KPIs. Mix until a strong aroma of customers is present.
Once your IDs are deduped you get clear vision on what your real metrics and KPIs are. Instantly your measurement is more accurate. HUGE!
Trust in your data has a huge impact on your internal teams and operational metrics as well. You now understand what is going on with your business and you have a source of truth. All your customer scoring , tiering, banding and modeling is improved. Every KPI and RFM analysis you want and need to measure operational success and efficiency are more precise with unified identity.
Step 3: Season with data enrichments until customer intelligence is sweet and savory.
Once you have joins from different datasets deduplicated and you have built your formulas to keep track of your KPIs and tiered/segmented your customers based on different attributes you are ready to enrich your data from other sources. Adding attributes and features increases the value your customer data even more.
This includes data you typically get from the big data providers like credit and financial services. It also includes Zero-party data that is growing in popularity especially in areas like CPG where first party data is more sparse. And of course this is the best use case for Clean Rooms where valuable first-party data sharing and collaboration partnerships can be transacted in a privacy compliant manner. In fact, the richer your underlying data table the more valuable your brand is a partner. Data scale is what this is all about. The most data usually wins.
As mentioned, there are a plethora of tools and solutions and code available to do enrichments and collaborations. They are all basically doing the same thing. Identity/Entity matching using various privacy preserving technologies. The only differences are the amount of work you do yourself and where it takes place. Go find the one that’s right for your business.
Just Desserts
AI is the sweet dessert here. AI is great at finding patterns in datasets so large no human could possibly find them. This is how the platforms are doing their lookalike modeling. it’s core to Google’s and Meta’s AI offerings. Brands are buying more and more on platforms exactly because of their reach to find other customers that look like (data match) theirs.
This means the more precise these custom audiences are to an affinity the better the platforms will model their own lookalikes against them. This increases your ability to find high-performing audiences in customer acquisition and retention in the essential growth channels of Google, Meta and Amazon. This also means your Customer 360 is the most important asset to your business.
This is another reason to own your data and your measurement and your analytics. Only you can instrument your data to conform with your business and your operational KPIs. It is the core of not just targeting and personalization but understanding what drives your customers and your business so you can set those targeting and personalization strategies.
Epilogue
When I first fell in love with CDPs ….six years ago,I found the most compelling thing was the breadth of operational use cases for unified identity of a brand’s first party data. Merchandising R&D, finance are all areas that can benefit greatly from segmentation, strategies, insights and measurement that comes with a Customer 360. It’s transformative as a method of business operations, not just a method of marketing.
Lastly and selfishly it is worth mentioning that AI is what will truly unlock the value in these higher fidelity customer datasets.
Also it’s worth noting that if it wasn’t for privacy legislation this probably would not be happening at all. Privacy means platforming your first party data. Brands now take their IDs and use them to match against. This is a 180 turn-around from brands turning over their data to agencies that used 3rd party data for matching and then targeting on their behalf.
Death of the cookie is the death of many current data reliant businesses. But that has always been very low fidelity data anyway. The inefficiencies of 3rd party data are what have driven profits for the marketing and advertising ecosystem instead of for brands. First party data and the ability to create customer 360s are flipping advertising and marketing on its head. We are now competing on who understands their customers better. That’s a good thing. Get cooking!
Optimize & Prophesize 
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