Follow the Data Through Acquia Marketing Cloud
The customer journey is rarely ever a straight line. People are complex and even a basic task, like purchasing a new jacket, can involve multitudes of touchpoints as they navigate through brick-and-mortar and online retail shops, browse catalogs and social media feeds, search for deals and promotions, and add different colors and styles to their online shopping cart. Acquia Marketing Cloud connects all of these individual moments into a single, comprehensive view of the customer that makes it easier than ever for marketers to understand how to best engage with customers and tap into every potential opportunity.
How can Acquia Marketing Cloud unify all of this data into seamless customer experiences that drive revenue and deliver lifetime value? It’s the only marketing cloud that is founded in data and completely open. Teams can now bring together the power of a customer data platform (CDP), cross-channel campaign management and website personalization through bidirectional, real-time, API-based integrations between Acquia Customer Data Platform and Acquia Campaign Studio and Acquia Personalization.
To demonstrate the value of connected data in action, let's follow an example of a luxury outerwear brand as they use open, data-driven technology to break free from marketing silos and increase their engagement, lifetime value and revenue.
From Customer Data Platform to Campaign Studio
This luxury outerwear brand struggled to engage buyers over digital channels like email. Their highest value shoppers tended to be brand loyalists who engaged frequently with the brand’s web or mobile site whenever a new collection was released. Yet, their most active email subscribers were more casual customers, motivated by a seasonal sale or emailed discount codes. When the company noticed a dip in overall sales, they responded by blasting out more frequent email promotions, hoping to lure back those fickle shoppers. However, this meant they were hurting their margins and diluting their brand reputation while spending the bulk of their marketing efforts on campaigns that saw little return. Instead, the retailer needed to refine and personalize their email methods to prevent over-discounting while also growing and nurturing their core audience on non-email channels through more relevant content experiences.
To better understand which customers were most likely to be high converters, the marketing team would first view their 360-degree customer profiles in Acquia Customer Data Platform. As the foundation of Acquia Marketing Cloud, Acquia’s enterprise CDP gives the entire organization deep omnichannel insights into customer behavior informed by cleansed, deduped, validated data. The luxury outerwear brand’s marketing team created behavior-based clusters to understand different customers’ engagement levels based on factors like frequency of opened emails, web browsing patterns and average transaction value.
This information is available in Campaign Studio via Acquia Marketing Cloud’s integrated connectors where marketers can build segments to target specific members of their audience. Here, the brand built an email campaign reminding Email Enthusiasts and Discount Buyers of an upcoming 40% off sale. By creating a campaign personalized to those audience members who demonstrated a pattern for email engagement and sale-driven conversions, the brand avoided offering unnecessary discounts to their entire customer database while still appealing to people who would find this content relevant.
From Campaign Studio to Customer Data Platform
By orchestrating and delivering these campaigns, Acquia Campaign Studio, in turn, gains important insights into customer behaviors, such as who is opening, clicking and engaging with campaigns. The connector between Campaign Studio and the Acquia Customer Data Platform shares these details to the CDP, where they become part of the unified customer profile upon which applies intelligence, machine learning, and segmentation.
From Acquia Customer Data Platform to Acquia Personalization
And for the customers who showed that they were non-engaged via email, the brand then shifted their focus to connecting with these customers on other channels. Their goal was to use content personalization on their webpages to collect the phone numbers of these users so they could engage with them more frequently through SMS reminders. Data from the customer data platform is pushed to Acquia Personalization. Then, Acquia Personalization leverages the behavioral cluster data from the CDP (such as browsing activity, purchase frequency and device type) to create a segment of their most-active web and mobile shoppers. In Acquia Personalization, the outerwear brand sets up a campaign called “Collect Phone Numbers” to target, track and provide personalized experiences to that specific segment. Here they created a customized homepage contact form that was displayed to the predetermined users when they visited the brand’s website.
Now, these high-value customers had greater opportunities to interact with the company on the platform of their choice and the brand no longer needed to spend additional effort on irrelevant communication channels.
From Acquia Personalization to Acquia Customer Data Platform
As users engage with different blocks of personalized content, the CDP webtag in Acquia Personalization relays this engagement data back to the Acquia CDP where it can further expand each unified customer profile and maintain a persistent customer record to inform future business intelligence and segmentation efforts.
All together, Acquia’s Marketing Cloud gives marketers a completely transparent and unified view of their customers so that they can orchestrate exceptional and intuitive experiences across every point of their journey. By taking an open and data-first approach to digital experience, businesses have the flexibility to adapt to any new changes and trends in customer behavior and intelligently respond and adapt to new opportunities the moment they arise. This knowledge and agility will be the critical advantage for every business looking to get ahead of the competition.
Learn more about how Acquia Marketing Cloud empowers brands to deliver data-driven customer experiences in our new e-book: A New Kind of Marketing Cloud: Where Data Takes Center Stage.
SVP and GM, Marketing Cloud Acquia
