How to make your CDP faster and your marketing smarter

It’s Thursday afternoon at your sporting goods company and your product team just announced they’re running a flash sale on surfboards—starting Saturday. While your designers scramble to build ads, you’re wondering who to target with paid media over the weekend in order to make this sale a success. Your agency needs the audiences by 4 pm today.

Sound familiar?

You’ve got a few options.

Obviously, you could blast your surfboard campaign blindly to your entire database of existing customers. But are the customers who’ve only ever bought pickleball gear interested in surfboards? Maybe some of them, but you’d definitely be wasting ad spend.

As an alternative, you could target every customer who’s already purchased a surfboard from you in the past 90 days. Of course that assumes they’re ready for another board. Sounds like a stretch.

Or, you could always take a wild guess and target customers who recently bought swimsuits, assuming they might enjoy surfing. Could be true, but, again, it’s a gamble.

The upside is that any of these options can be executed quickly with a traditional customer data platform (CDP)—and speed here is key. The downside is that none of them would be very efficient, or effective.

So is there a better way to build an audience?

The answer is yes. The secret to predicting which of your customers are most likely to purchase a surfboard is to identify what your actual surfboard customers looked like before they purchased a surfboard.

Here’s how to do it:

1. First, analyze the customers who’ve purchased surfboards from you in the past, and identify exactly which ways they were interacting with your brand leading up to their purchase. For example, what did your surfboard customers buy from you before they purchased the board? What ads or emails had they interacted with? What other products had they been browsing or buying on your site? How many times had they visited your surfboard pages? What else was in their cart when they purchased the board? What other actions, behaviors, and characteristics defined them in the moments just before they hit “Buy”?
2. Once you know all of those answers, figure out which of those behaviors your surfboard customers had in common, and which of those were most likely to lead to a purchase. Then target the customers who are interacting with you in those same ways right now.

When you build an audience based on what’s proven effective in the past, you’ll have an audience that’s as accurate as possible.

Unfortunately, most CDPs aren’t built for this.

Why? Because what you really need is a snapshot of every surfboard customer the moment before they hit “buy”—but most CDPs only provide a snapshot of your surfboard customers as they look today, which won’t tell you what you need to know.

Now, to be fair, most CDP providers can compile information for you about past customer behaviors—but only if you initiate a service order, pay a fee, and wait a few weeks for their data analysts to pull it together.

This does nothing for your Saturday flash sale.

What you need is a hyper-targeted audience by 4 pm today, and the only way to achieve that is with a solution that’s built for machine-learning, AI-driven insights, and predictive analytics.

That’s why you need the Clario Automated Audience Builder.

Clario creates hyper-accurate, one-click predictive models in under an hour and is built to deliver what most CDPs can’t, including this:

• Clario can instantly access every characteristic of every customer you have, not just from the past few minutes but from anytime in the past several years. This means you can create an accurate snapshot of your surfboard customers from any moment in time, including the moment right before they purchased.
• Clario uses machine learning to hone in on which characteristics and behaviors were most influential in a customer’s decision to purchase. Perhaps the analytics will show the behavior most likely to predict a surfboard purchase is a recent purchase of a wetsuit. Or maybe it’s at least three visits to your surfboard page and a recent purchase of board shorts. Clario quickly identifies which combination of customer characteristics are predictive of a surfboard purchase and finds the customers who match that profile.
• Most importantly, Clario pulls all of this together into a hyper-accurate, highly effective customer audience within minutes. No service orders. No long delays. No wasted marketing budget.

In other words, with Clario, you can confidently build an audience for your Saturday surfboard flash sale by 4 pm on Thursday, knowing that you’ll be putting your ads in front of the right people at just the right time. Your product team will be thrilled, and so will your customers.