How You Implement a Single Customer View for Your Marketing Automation

1. What is a Single Customer View?
2. These are the advantages of a Single Customer View
3. How to implement the Single Customer View
4. These softwares support you in implementing the SCV
5. Conclusion

A good customer experience is essential for brands and online stores nowadays. Customers no longer just decide for a product, but often also for the brand behind it and the emotions they associate with it. Where just a few decades ago the goods were the focus, today Customer Centricity is the highest good.

Therefore, it is all the more important to know your customers and their preferences inside out and to give them the kind of communication they expect. A so-called Single Customer View (SCV) can help you achieve exactly this. How? You'll find out in this article.

What is a Single Customer View?

The Single Customer View, also known as a 360-degree customer view or unified customer profile, is a holistic overview of all customer data. With it, you can create unified profiles of your customers and capture all touchpoints of your brand (both online and offline). This comprehensive overview of all interactions, communication channels and processes allows targeted and consistent addressing of your customers.

The SCV is the basis for creating detailed segmentations and effective marketing automations. This allows you to optimize your customer dialogue along the customer journey and improve the Customer Experience. This in turn has a positive effect on metrics like ROI, CLV or Conversions.

These are the advantages of a Single Customer View

With the Single Customer View, you have personal data like names, email addresses, demographic information, but also usage and transaction data like conversions, clicks, or purchased products of your customers at a glance. Assuming that this data is updated automatically and constantly, the SCV has several advantages for your business.

A well-managed Single Customer View primarily ensures the quality of your customer data. This is particularly helpful when the data comes from many different sources, such as online and offline channels. Aggregating these data in one central location gives all departments in your company the same detailed and up-to-date overview.

In addition, an SCV offers you, among other things, the following advantages:

• Improved customer service
• Better Targeting
• Personalized marketing across all channels
• Finer segmentation
• Improved customer experience thanks to tailored communication

The Single Customer View helps you consolidate and improve interaction with your customers. This way, you can precisely target their needs with your marketing, service and sales initiatives. In the end, this increases the satisfaction of your customers, which can be seen, for example, in ROI or conversions.

How to implement the Single Customer View

To create a Single Customer View, you first need to do some preliminary work. Immerse yourself in your brand and its touchpoints along the customer journey. Then you will know which data might already be available to you and which additional data you can still collect.

These are points you should consider when you want to implement an SCV:

1. Deal with your Customer Journey

First of all, you should know the customer journey of your customers. By defining your end-to-end customer journey, you get an overview of all touchpoints that your customers encounter. This way you know which channels they interact with. In the next step, you can then determine which data are already available for the different touchpoints and where there are still gaps.

Only if you know your customer journey, can you offer your customers the best possible customer experience.

2. Capture relevant data for your Single Customer View

To implement a Single Customer View, you primarily need up-to-date data from your customers. These data must be kept up-to-date at all times, which helps you avoid communication errors. Data that you can use to create a Single Customer View include, for example:

• Behavioral data: e.g. clicks, histories, dwell times and information about order value, favorite and purchased products, preferred product categories, search histories and products added to the shopping cart
• Marketing data: e.g. interactions with social media accounts, SEO data, email marketing communication, Marketing Automations
• CRM and offline data: e.g. names, address, telephone number, email address and social media channels (in our article about CRM data you can find more information)
• Demographic data: e.g. age, gender, marital status, income, and education level
• Transaction data: All purchases made by customers from you (e.g. products, quantities, frequency of purchases and returns)
• Interactions with customer support and sales: e.g. support tickets, emails, pre-sales and consulting talks
• DSGVO consent: Consent management for your customers and users

There are many ways to gather customer data for your Single Customer View. In addition to traditional data from analytics tools, you can also gather additional details - so-called zero-party data - about your customers via pop-ups on your website or surveys.

Important: Be sure to pay attention to GDPR-compliant tracking to be on the safe side legally. So-called Consent Management Platforms (CMP) can help you with this.

3. Combine the data using identity matching

Your company collects a lot of useful customer data across its touchpoints. However, these data usually flow into several departments and via different channels. This means that details about a customer are stored on different platforms, such as CRM tools or Social media suites, for example. The goal of the Single Customer View is to give you a unified overview of these data. This works best using identity matching, i.e., by combining the available data from different sources at one point.

For example, if a user logs into your online shop both mobile and via desktop, you can link these two data points via the email address. And the contact with customer service and the purchasing behavior in your shop can also be linked, for example, via names and email addresses.

Identity matching thus helps you identify individual customers across a variety of different channels and merge these first-party data into a user profile. Helpful for this are, for example, login data such as username or email address, birth date, phone number, or address.

These softwares support you in implementing the SCV

Creating a Single Customer View is no easy task. To unify the many data from different sources, you should do good strategic pre-work. Fortunately, you don't have to manually compile all details and transfer them into complicated tables. Instead, so-called Customer Data Platforms (CDP) help and support you with identity matching - and thus ultimately with creating unified customer profiles.

Creation of an SCV using a Customer Data Platform

A CDP consolidates all data from different tools and sources at one point and creates a clear Single Customer View from them. You can then use this consolidated information for creating campaigns or marketing automations.

With the information from your CDP, you can accomplish a variety of tasks. Examples are:

• Linking of online and offline activities
• Customer segmentation
• Predictive analytics ERP
• Retargeting
• Product recommendations
• Conversion rate optimization
• A/B tests
• Omnichannel communication
• Email marketing

Examples of CDP tools

Bloomreach

BSI Customer Suite

Tealium

Segment

In the following section, we present the CDXP tool Bloomreach in more detail and show how it can help you create a Single Customer View.

Bloomreach is a so-called Customer Data & Experience Platform (CDXP). Unlike a simple CDP, the tool allows you to create an effective customer experience directly from the software. For this, it can be integrated flexibly into your tool stack, offering you, among other things, the following advantages:

1. Setting up marketing campaigns

With Bloomreach you can set up a variety of different marketing campaigns and reach your customers directly from the tool. Simultaneous access to all important customer details simplifies targeted communication with your target groups.

2. Easy to use without IT skills

Implementing Bloomreach requires some technical know-how, but the tool itself is designed for the people who will ultimately use it. With Bloomreach, for example, you can easily create reports or segmentations.

3. Creation of scenarios

Bloomreach allows you to create scenarios to reach your customers at every touchpoint of the customer journey. In addition, you can subject your measures to A/B testing.

The following are some advantages offered by the CDXP platform from Bloomreach:

• Creation of a Single Customer View
• Stronger customer retention
• More precise targeting and improved interaction with customers
• Targeted communication with key customers

Conclusion

A Single Customer View (SCV) consists of a variety of customer data that are bundled in one location. This gives you a comprehensive overview of each individual customer. Using an SCV also ensures that all departments of your company have the same insight into customer data. This facilitates the communication along the customer journey and offers your customers an improved customer experience.

Some advantages include:

• Determination of optimal email send times
• Personalized Customer Journeys
• Simplified A/B Testing
• Detailed Segmentations
• Predictive Analytics

Creating a Single Customer View requires some preliminary work and assumes that your data set is broadly based. So-called Customer Data Platforms help you bundle these data from different sources, such as CRM or analytics tools. This process is called identity matching and is an important basis for the subsequent creation of detailed customer profiles, the so-called SCVs. On OMR Reviews you will get an overview of Customer Data Platforms (CDP) and what possibilities the respective tools offer you.