3 Leading Brand Execs on Using CDPs to Boost Marketing Performance

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are technology solutions that combine data from multiple tools to create a single centralized customer database containing data on all touchpoints and interactions with your product or service. With that data in hand, marketers are able to create the personalized experiences that consumers have come to expect and in many cases demand.

This topic was addressed during a session at last week's eTail West conference in Palm Springs, CA. Stephanie Johns, director, digital product and programs, TaylorMade Golf Company; Ted Silverman, director, e-commerce and DTC marketing, data and analytics, Mattel; and Scott Perry, vice president of strategic marketing, Worldwide Golf Shops, shared their experiences, insights and advice for using a CDP to improve marketing performance.

Tips for Implementing a CDP

Johns: For TaylorMade, we contemplated a crawl vs. a commit approach to adopting a CDP. The crawl approach aligned nicely with smaller companies, would be quicker to market, require less capital, but the return on investment wasn't what we wanted. The commit approach we believed aligned better with enterprise brands. A major benefit we felt was that we wouldn’t need to re-platform in a couple of years. So we went with the commit approach. As a global brand, TaylorMade has lots of data channels. Therefore, we opted to roll out the CDP just to the North America business first; Japan and Korea is phase two and will follow. We're hoping to cut down the implementation timeline by a month or two by having been through it one time already [the North American rollout].

Perry: I previously worked at organizations that had a CDP and knew what it could do for the business. We needed it at Worldwide Golf because there wasn’t one. Organized and structured data is a priority for the brand in 2024. We need a single customer identifier to understand how our customers flow between our brands (The Golf Mart, Golfers Warehouse, Edwin Watts Golf, etc.). A CDP was an investment to better understand the customer (e.g., left-handed vs. right-handed, sizing, etc.)

Silverman: Mattel has had a CDP for about a year and a half. While explaining use cases can help people get on board, we didn’t roll out many of those use cases. We've been rather elementary in our usage of the CDP to date. It has been a phased rollout. In terms of resources and staffing, we began by asking employees to take part of their hours and work on CDP use cases. This added an additional project work to their busy workloads. While that approach worked well to start, it wasn’t scalable and sustainable. I've found that you need champions across the various business units to understand all the different things we can use the CDP for and then evangelize that information.

Use Cases

Johns: We started in Q4 with elementary-level campaigns such as pop-ups and triggers based on CDP segmentation, and have since been getting more complex in nature. For example, club trade-in messaging for product detail pages — moved that messaging up front and center. We've seen a big gain in AOV there. Another example is we've changed header banners on product listing pages based upon the visitor. Lastly, we've added a content slot in the account section to message promo-based customers — e.g., driving them to last year’s clearance products.

Silverman: We wanted to ensure first that the CDP is working — the data flowing appropriately, for example. It was less about incrementality within our marketing efforts. Since then we've used customer data from the CDP in paid campaigns to find similar audiences and then began targeting those audiences. This has led to improved ROAS for performance marketing.

Perry: We're using our CDP to be more personalized in our marketing — e.g., club preferences for customers that are fans of a particular brand. That's resulted in higher clickthrough and conversion rates. And we plan to do more complex segments. Print [campaigns], OTT, next logical purchase flows all have had higher ROAS since we implemented the CDP. If you’re not using customer data, start organizing and start small. Then you can bolt on more complex data points (e.g., credit rating, last visit to a store, etc.). You’ll start to see results and then it will help get business buy-in.