How Data Orchestration Helps Marketers Create Holiday Magic

How Data Orchestration Helps Marketers Create Holiday Magic

It’s a myth that success in retail starts and ends during the holidays. The truth is that marketers are most successful when they capture customer attention well before the holiday-rush, and then use personalized campaigns to keep their brands top of mind for all of the holiday shoppers. Without the right tools and strategy, this process could turn any marketer into a grinch (we’re going heavy-handed on the holiday words, forgive us), but fortunately, data orchestration can help!

As a refresher, Data Orchestration is the process by which brands can:

1. Merge all of their data sources and marketing platforms
2. Uncover 360 customer views by using audience ID matching to link anonymous third-party data to first- and second-party data.
3. Activate those insights to create targeted campaigns across every channel
4. Enrich audience segments automatically by feeding data collected from campaigns back into the platform
5. Execute the first four steps in one seamless interface.

The difference between CDPs and data orchestration platforms

Data orchestration platforms can be quite similar to customer data platforms, with one key difference: consistency. According to Gartner, a customer data platform is “a marketing system that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels to enable customer modeling, and optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers.”

That said, many of these technologies overlap and even within certain categories, there isn’t much consistency from platform to platform. For example, not all data management platforms process personally identifiable information, though some do. And not all customer data platforms activate your audience segments across every marketing channel.

Data orchestration, however, does all of the key things the best CDP should do as well as:

1. Identity resolution: Data orchestration uses audience ID matching to integrate disparate audience touchpoints, solving who customers are across different channels and devices and merging that information into holistic audience profiles. Then, those holistic audience profiles can be used to create more accurate segments across all channels.
2. Segment enrichment: By running campaigns in a data orchestration platform, you’ll collect deeper insights on your customers which will automatically feed back into your segments to improve audience understanding over time. And with more accurate audience insights, you can easily identify your highest value segments and which aspects of your campaigns are attracting your “best” customers
3. Automated budget optimization: With marketers using different segments to run their campaigns on each channel, it can be hard to determine why some efforts perform and others fail. By launching your campaigns using standardized segments across all channels, data orchestration can help determine what’s causing success and in turn, dynamically allocate your budget to support it.

The importance of multi-channel holiday marketing

A study by Google on holiday shopping behavior illustrates just how difficult it can be to conduct a successful campaign that puts your product in a customer’s stocking. Over 75% of adults in the US use three or more channels when researching their holiday shopping. Without a system in place, retailers can’t put together that the person who went to the retailer website on a smart-phone is the same person that signed up for email alerts on a work computer. Data orchestration connects the dots.

According to Salesforce, 84 percent of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business long-term. And it makes sense that most people feel this way. Reza Kadjavi, from the retargeting specialist Shoelace gives this advice:

“During the rush, consumers are going to be bombarded with repetitive retargeting ads. Stand out from the crowd by making your ad experiences engaging and relevant to each customer based on where they are in their buying journey with your brand.

This means segmenting messages based on demographics, geolocation, and engagement. Plus, data orchestration also makes it easy to create rules around retargeting to ensure you aren’t one of the many bombarding customers with repetitive holiday display ads.

By connecting who customers are (through email, IP Address, etc.) with how they behave (cross-channel ads clicked, time on site), you’ll be able to personalize campaigns better than ever before. So, while you may have known a customer clicked on an email and went to an article before, data orchestration can enrich that insight with the customer’s past behavior on your site, ads they’ve clicked via their mobile device, and more.

A best-in-class data example: Amazon

Amazon is one company that uses data to provide customers with experiences more tailored to their interests and purchase behavior. And while, yes, Amazon has more data than most companies combined, it’s not really about that. It’s about what you do to make sense of your first-party data and how you take back control of previously dark, 3rd party data. In addition to shedding light on dark data, some orchestration platforms like Lineate’s DataSwitch incorporate predictive analytics that use past behavior and in-store shopping patterns to determine when people are more likely to make a purchase.

The simple way Blenders Eyewear delighted holiday shoppers

And it’s not just industry giants that can take advantage of data integration. Blenders Eyewear saw a 1000% Black Friday bump from the year before using email segmentation and highly strategized social media campaign. As CEO and founder Chase Fisher states, “As you grow, and your audience grows, they shouldn’t be getting the same messages as everybody else. You should segment certain messages to your VIP customers that are spending more each year. You should be segmenting messages differently to men and women.” This is possible no matter how large or small your company may be.

Next steps

Building lasting engagement starts with treating customers as people. It’s not enough to collect data to see if they’re naughty or nice (last one, promise). Instead, you must use customer data in a way that provides value based on their needs. And by uncovering more of your data using orchestration, you’ll have the insights you need to connect with customers before, during, and after the most wonderful time of the year.