The Future of Personalization in Marketing Starts with Customer Data Management

What if you could automate the ability to interact with an individual customer in a way that’s completely personalized? And what if the automation did not require millions of dollars and years to build?
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Help companies with digital and business transformation via process optimisation and system design, especially in the areas of bringing everything together for increased productivity and revenue growth.
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<p>THE FUTURE OF PERSONALIZATION 
IN MARKETING STARTS WITH 
CUSTOMER DATA MANAGEMENT
UNIFY AND TRANSFORM CUSTOMER DATA INTO MARKETING ROI
1  ∙  The Future of Personalization in Marketing Starts with Customer Data Management
Good news: Customer data platforms (CDPs) have 
emerged to make personalized marketing possible for 
companies large and small. 
The early days of mass marketing involved conveying a 
generic message to a wide variety of audiences. These 
mass-marketing techniques often fell on deaf ears, 
because consumers have individual needs not met with 
one-to-many communication approaches.
For many marketers, the ability to personalize the mes-
sage to each individual has long been the holy grail. 
Imagine automatically greeting each person visiting your 
web site with a specific message and imagery based on 
whether they’re a long-time customer versus a prospect. 
Or, what about automatically not emailing promotions 
to those with open (and negative) customer-service 
tickets? And wouldn’t it be helpful to advertise online 
-- based on purchasing data -- only to those customers 
who haven’t bought the product?
The challenge is that personalization without sophisticat-
ed customer data platform technology is a drain on any 
marketers’ time and resources.
What if you could automate the ability 
to interact with an individual customer 
in a way that’s completely personal-
ized? And what if the automation did 
not require millions of dollars and years 
to build?
PERSONALIZATION IN MARKETING: THE HOLY GRAIL
2  ∙  The Future of Personalization in Marketing Starts with Customer Data Management
THE INDUSTRY’S MISSTEPS ON THE PATH TO PERSONALIZATION 
Brands and vendors alike have made attempts to use technology to automate personalization. Yet, few 
companies have created something that is easy to use, integrates all types of customer data (known, 
anonymous) across marketing platforms (email, web, social, mobile, CRM, offline transactions, etc.), use 
sophisticated matching logic to unify customer profiles across systems, or formed integrations with the 
vendors behind those marketing platforms.
Over the last several years, so-called marketing automation technologies have emerged, promising 
to personalize the message for each customer. Instead, these largely email-based, point tools take a 
half-baked, superficial approach to personalization to “check the box” for their customers. Rather than 
personalizing the experience with real-time data about the customer, they ask marketers to create 
pre-defined journeys. 
Problem is, customers rarely interact with brands in rigid, pre-defined ways. 
Customers engage with brands in a manner that yields data about who they are, how they purchase, 
and with which marketing channels they interact.
Unfortunately, these customer data sources emerging from various marketing platforms do not readily 
integrate well together, resulting in silos of disjointed customer records owned -- or overlooked -- by 
various marketers leaders in an organization.
3  ∙  The Future of Personalization in Marketing Starts with Customer Data Management
Looking to create a “golden record” about customers, marketers have also turned to their colleagues in 
IT, requesting help with integrating disparate databases. Yet, IT finds integrating customer data proves 
more difficult than it appears, leaving these data dumps to wither, without use, in an expensive and 
bloated storage container.
A handful of do-it-yourself marketers in the world’s most respected companies have convinced their 
employers to make large investments in budget and time to painstakingly build in-house, customer data 
platforms for personalizing interactions with customers. Think: the popular online video streaming ser-
vice that makes eerily accurate movie suggestions. Or the world-leading e-commerce site that some-
how sends the perfect email promotion based on the products you’ve browsed. But these expensive, 
hand-crafted customer data platforms have proven out of reach for most companies.
PERSONALIZATION TECHNOLOGY FOR THE REST OF US
Fortunately, ready-to-deploy, customer data platforms such as Lytics have emerged for the rest of us. 
Now, a brand can quickly integrate all of their customer data -- no matter how disorganized and dispa-
rate -- use sophisticated matching logic to unify customer profiles across systems, and deploy it through 
all of their communications channels with customers. 
To be considered part of the movement, a Customer Data Platform must be:
• Holistic: The new CDP must consume any 
data from anywhere a customer is interact-
ing. If there is a footprint, online or offline, 
customer data must be captured. 
• Cross-Channel: The new CDP is a hub that 
supports the journey of a customer as they 
engage with a brand across the products, 
web sites, email, apps, social presences, 
customer service representation and more. 
Historically, marketing automation tools 
have chosen one customer touchpoint (e.g., 
email) on which to focus. The new CDP 
understands the customer across all chan-
nels including their content preferences and 
behaviors.
• Interoperable: The new CDP works seamlessly with your existing marketing tools and does not mandate change 
from any product that a marketer has chosen.
4  ∙  The Future of Personalization in Marketing Starts with Customer Data Management
IS YOUR MARKETING TEAM THERE YET?
Gartner predicts nearly seven of 10 marketers will make all marketing decisions based on data by 2017. 
And, according to the Digital Marketing Association, 77 percent of brands believe real-time personaliza-
tion of their marketing is crucial, yet 60 percent of marketers still struggle to personalize content in real 
time.
• Intelligent: The new CDP can work with a marketer-defined segments of customers (e.g., fathers who play 
soccer, female IT professionals in healthcare) or use complex machine learning to help uncover segments that are 
valuable yet you have never thought of (e.g., binge customers who are not engaging with your brand frequently, or 
at-risk users who show signs of becoming inactive).
• Actionable: The new CDP can automatically create customer segments from data collected anywhere and allow 
marketers to create true, cross-channel marketing programs.
Lytics and many forward-looking companies believe customer data platforms will support the move 
to personalization through the one component that matters most: understanding of individual people 
through technology.
WHO USES CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORMS?
MINICABSTER, MOBILE CAB BOOKING SERVICE, LONDON, UK.
By connecting mobile app, email, web, and social data together, Minicabster could 
create personalized ad campaigns to drive conversions and revenue. Using Lytics 
led to an 83 percent increase in cab bookings.
5  ∙  The Future of Personalization in Marketing Starts with Customer Data Management
“By allowing us to use data to drive better marketing decisions, Lytics has 
given us a competitive edge. Having Lytics is like having a data scientist on our 
team. I have two words to describe Lytics: amazing stuff.”
- Luiz Albuquerque, former digital marketing manager, Minicabster.
THE CLYMB, E-COMMERCE FLASH SALE RETAILER, PORTLAND, OR
By unifying customer behavior, like web interactions, purchase behavior, and cus-
tomer lifetime value, The Clymb could improve their personalization efforts on their 
website. Simple Lytics insights and segments led to a 12 percent increase in sales 
and a $500,000 savings in marketing in the first three months.
TRUE PERSONALIZED MARKETING STARTS WITH LYTICS
Lytics helps enterprises automate personalized marketing through the industry’s most ad-
vanced customer data platform (CDP). Popular retailing, media, consumer goods, banking, and 
tech brands use Lytics to execute one-to-one marketing programs their customers welcome.
The Lytics Customer Data (CDP) platform, the company’s flagship product, was launched in 
October 2014. The Lytics CDP connects a company’s marketing data about customers from 
multiple sources (e.g., structured, unstructured, anonymous and known profiles) and creates 
behavior-rich user segments (e.g., likely to churn, most active on mobile, coupon lover). These 
customer segments then sync with a company’s marketing tools -- from web-site personaliza-
tion and ad retargeting to email marketing and content optimization -- to improve marketing 
campaign results and reduce inefficiencies.
Many marketing technology vendors claim “customer data management,” yet in reality deal 
with only one or two types of data (such as those customers who’ve signed in via a social me-
dia tool or provided an email address). Lytics builds a profile based on any fragment of custom-
er information using sophisticated data science and conducts probabilistic matching to merge 
identities. The result: a 360-view of each consumer.
Lytics is led by marketing-technology veterans who’ve held leadership positions at Webtrends, 
Urban Airship, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Our customers include DirectTV, Conde Nast, 
and Nestle. We are headquartered in Portland, Oregon, a hotbed of marketing technologies 
and agencies. 
© 2015 Lytics
720 NW Davis St #400
Portland, OR 97209
The Future of Personalization in Marketing Starts With Customer 
Data Management. For more, see www.getlytics.com
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