Squeezing serious competitive advantage from your first-party data
Your first-party data is your single greatest asset for driving growth — but only if you know how to unify it and activate it, everywhere you interact with customers.
We call that Customer Data Leverage, and it’s behind the fastest-growing brands in every consumer market — from retail to hospitality and beyond.
What is Customer Data Leverage?
For every consumer brand, first-party data is the key to understanding your customers and creating long-term, profitable relationships. But data alone is only the start.
The brands that consistently resonate with their customers aren’t just the ones with the most data, they’re the ones that know what data to collect and how to use it to drive loyalty, retention and revenue.
But…
The Data Leverage Gap
- 87% of companies plan to use or use a CDP, but only 14% have a Single Customer View, according to Gartner.
- Clearly, the promise of hyper-resonance and revenue from customer data hasn’t come true for many, leaving many disillusioned.
- The big CDPs and marketing clouds haven’t delivered, and there’s confusion about what a CDP should actually be doing for them.
This gap is actually a massive opportunity in disguise. The brands that get it right are running circles around the brands still struggling to up their competitive edge.
The 6 essentials of Customer Data Leverage: your roadmap
Before you can create real Customer Data Leverage, you need to get the foundations in place:
You need to connect all your siloed customer data. That means collecting and connecting everything — millions of customers and billions of interactions. It all starts here.
Marketers and analysts alike need unrestricted access to advanced, easy-to-use data tools that can extract accurate, predictive and action-ready insights.
Data and insights don’t win customers. You need to be able to use your data for smarter audience building, automated reporting, advanced campaign management, predictive targeting, lifetime value modelling and real-time recommendations. Then the fun begins.
With data streaming in from multiple sources (on- and offline), you need a platform that can integrate anything. Pre-built connectors to all the common sources are key — but you also need to be able to snap on custom connections, too.
A composable platform (and mindset)
Once you have a Single Customer View, new opportunities to leverage it pop up all the time. A ‘composable’ approach means you’re not locked into hard-coded tactics and earlier decisions. So you can seize those now-low-hanging opportunities (think personalisation in any channel…or a predictive model that tells you which customers should get which campaigns…or…the sky’s the limit).
Getting the tech is one thing — to get the most out of it, you need an experienced team to deal with technical issues, customer strategy, planning and continual campaign support. Beware of vendors who give you a ‘magic platform’ then run away. This stuff can be a bit tricky until you get the hang of it.
Across the whole company: you need a platform
- Step 1: Realise you have a lot of customer data, but a messy (or non-existent) Single Customer View
- Step 2: Unify and integrate all your customer data — from all sources — into a real-time, easy-to-use platform for a Single Customer View. Here’s one we prepared earlier.
- Step 3: Put the data to work across your company, using AI to generate insights and activate them everywhere.
For specific use cases: you need cutting-edge solutions
- Step 1: You already have a Single Customer View but you know you could be doing more to extract value from it.
- Step 2: Identify a snap-on solution to add to your martech stack (like these snazzy solutions) that solves specific use cases you may have (things like pre- and post-purchase optimisation or predictive analytics).
- Step 3: Activate your data through these snap-on solutions to drive new revenue, grow basket size and increase channel engagement.
Customer Data Leverage in action:
Halfords connects customer data to promote loyalty
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M&S International use Future Value Model for promotional segmentation
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Crew Clothing get real-time insights in their Black Friday war room
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