With the rapid evolution of big tech and the evolving emphasis on the customer journey, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) has never been more important to your business. Marketing trends and consumer behavior make it clear that traditional marketing strategies and tactics will not be nearly as effective as they once were. Home Services brands service a wide range of customers, and each customer interaction is a unique, valuable data point to your business. So, what can a Home Services company do to maximize customer loyalty, personalize brand interactions, and increase revenue opportunities? The answer to this and more lie within the capabilities and value a CDP offers to the Home Services industry.
Why you are behind if you aren’t using a CDP
It’s no secret you can learn a lot from how and when a customer interacts with different components of your business. If you are not centralizing this rich data to act on in all your marketing efforts, you are likely missing out on revenue opportunities. The Home Services industry serves a wide customer base that may have a plumbing issue one week and an HVAC issue the next. The truth is these customers may interact and find your business in a variety of ways. Some prefer submitting contact information online, some prefer calling your number listed on your website, some might use a Google Ads call extension to get in touch with you, the list goes on. By definition, a CDP is software that aggregates and organizes data across various customer touchpoints, creating a centralized API hup to pass real-time data to all marketing related vendors. Customers expect personalized interactions with your brand, and you expect healthy revenue growth, a CDP sits at the intersection of these two expectations.
Unification of Customer Data
There are numerous ways customers find and interact with your brand. Your website analytics and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) house a ton of granular data that can tell you a lot about the how, what, and when customers found your brand and engaged with you. The inherent challenge many Home Services companies face is keeping a singular view of customer data that is understandable, actionable, and reliable. A website and CRM are both critical elements of any successful Home Services company and they both offer incredible insights into your customers. These rich data sources are almost meaningless if you cannot understand and action on that customer data. Again, this is where a CDP comes in, by centralization and democratization of all your customer data and acting as an API hub to pass customer segments to a variety of vendors and platforms in real-time.
The key to data unification in any CDP platform is a Visitor ID. A primary Visitor ID is usually an email address, secondary Visitor IDs can include names, phone numbers, customer IDs, etc. The key to selecting a primary Visitor ID is ensuring it is strong and not likely to change over time, an email address is a perfect example of a strong Visitor ID. The Visitor ID is key to unifying your data and tying it back to a single customer. The Visitor ID allows a CDP to append behavioral insights like website interactions, lifetime customer value, time since last service, product offering affinities, etc.
Understanding your Customer’s Journey
Once your unique customer data is ingested and unified in a CDP you can begin to understand how, where, and when customers find your brand and what types of actions they have taken to become a customer. The key to mapping and acting on these journeys are setting up the required data capture building blocks within your CDP. For example, in Tealium’s platform, an ‘Attribute’ can record a unique event level action like a purchase or number of times a person visited a schedule appointment page. There are likely hundreds of event level signals that can tell you a lot of valuable information about your customers.
While there are almost endless variations, twists and turns customers may take on their journey to scheduling an appointment or making a purchase. Your configured data sources will allow access for a CDP solution to tap into this data. The beauty of a CDP is that it allows us to track and record these journeys in a singular location. Both internal and external data visualization tools will help unlock valuable insights on what your top converting customer’s behavior looks like and where you are losing customers. These customer journey insights will allow your brand to personalize messaging based on where they are at in their path to conversion, and in turn boost media spend efficiency and drive incremental revenue for your brand. Below is an example of a full illustration of just one customer journey, and how a market leading CDP solution tracks and acts on these touchpoints.
Maximizing Revenue Opportunities
What do you wish you knew about your customers? How would you change your messaging and interactions with customers if you knew exactly where they where at in their purchase journey? A CDP can unlock this insight and allow your brand to speak to your customers on a much more personalized level. As mentioned above, a CDP acts as a non-biased and democratized data source to pass audience segments to all your marketing vendors. This means you can act on highly valuable audience segments across your entire marketing stack, in real-time. As marketers, we have to ask “what does this mean for revenue generation”? This approach increases cost savings with ad spend efficiency by suppressing both existing and engaged customers. This strategic targeting alone will prove invaluable savings to your bottom line.
In addition to efficiencies, CDPs offer the ability of real-time, personalized messaging across all your marketing vendors tailored specifically to where your prospect is at in their journey. This can boost customer retention by creating meaningful, relevant interactions with your brand. An effective CDP implementation for a Home Services company can also help your business be proactive in your customer communication and engagement efforts. For example: your customer bought an A/C unit 3 years ago, did not sign up for a maintenance plan, and has had issues with the unit. The customer profile in your CDP illustrates that this customer has visited a maintenance plan page 4 times in the last month, they have looked at an A/C unit information page on your website, and even clicked a “schedule consultation” button but abandoned the form. Your CDP can not only pass this information back to your CRM for a sales rep follow up, but it can activate automated, scalable ads on a variety of marketing platforms in real-time.
Tying It All Together
As a Home Services business, what are you doing to maximize customer loyalty, personalize brand interactions, and increase revenue opportunities? The answer to this question lies within deploying a well-planned, industry tailored CDP solution. A customer journey in the Home Services industry is as unique as each customer interaction with your brand, and should be treated as such. A CDP will allow you to not only create meaningful brand interactions with your customers, but it will also have a positive impact on your revenue and position your brand well in a customer privacy centric marketing environment.