CDP and CEP: Winning Formula for Meaningful Customer Engagement

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to Growth Maestros by moengage. In this podcast series, we'll be speaking to industry leaders from various business verticals and understand their approach towards marketing and growth. We'll be focusing on aspects like customer acquisition, retention, engagement, and personalization, among others, and provide key insights to a community of product owners. This is your opportunity to learn and emulate these learning earnings in your campaigns and marketing initiatives to churn exceptional results. According to a recent study, 72% of consumers engage with messages that are personalized and tailored to their interests. In a future where customer data will be a growing source of competitive advantage and multiple tools are offering you the piece of the puzzle, it may get a little overwhelming to combine all this data and bring forth a coherent, seamless customer experience. In the latest edition of Moengage's Personalization Pulse Check report, we found that 38% of the surveyed consumers said they'd visit a brand website app, uh, or any other channel of the brand at least five times before buying from them. Now, each of these touch points is a treasure trove of customer data and insights. However, there are instances where marketers struggle to leverage this available data because it's from multiple different sources. One of the common reasons why personalization doesn't work for most brands is due to a lack of unified data. Now, you may gather a lot of data from various channels, but hit a roadblock while combining these channels. These data points that you receive from channels to see the complete picture and derive actionable insights from it. The lack of enriched data surely has a huge impact on the brand's personalization strategy. But the speaker joining the podcast today will cover how a CDP and a CEP combined could help marketers tackle these problems and personalize better. I'm really happy to welcome Matt Mongs, the Vice President of International customer success at mParticle. Welcome to the MoEngage Catalyst Growth Maestros podcast. Matt, how are you today?

Speaker A: Doing good, doing good. I'm really excited, uh, to be on this podcast talking about, um, ceps and C and the part they play together.

Speaker B: We're delighted to have you on the podcast. So, before we get started with discussing the topic for today's podcast, I'm sure the listeners would love to hear about you as well as your role at mparticle and what your day to day looks like so they can get to know you better.

Speaker A: Yeah, perfect, perfect. So, hey everyone, I'm Matt. Uh, I lead our, uh, international customer teams at mParticle. So really a focus on, uh, EMEA and APJ region as well I've been at mParticle now for just over six years so was one of the, the first on the ground as we started building out our international presence um, to the point today where we're working with just over a hundred different international brands across our ah, EMEA and APJ region as well. Um, in terms of past experience I've been in um, the digital space for about 13 years so. So um, I started off in a very early CDP before CDPs were a thing. Um, I moved across to actually a CRM or CEP provider called Locallytics prior to joining mparticle M. So spent about three years in the CRM side of things. Um and then obviously the last six years as I mentioned have been at mparticle M in terms of a bit more about myself hobbies, um, I think uh, being sun to us, being a father to a 14 year old son, um, very much my hobbies are his hobbies at the moment. So for me um, a lot around his football that he's, he's big into. So the weekends are very much filled with football and when I'm, I'm not watching my son, I'm definitely watching sports on the TV as well. So a big football fan.

Speaker B: Thanks for giving us a glimpse into who you are Matt. With such a varied profile I think there's a lot that our audience can learn from you as well as your experience. Now without further ado, let's kick off into the podcast topic with talking about the increasing importance of customer insights and insights led data analysis and what role they play in offering seamless customer experiences that the consumer today has come to expect. Also if we could cover a little bit about what the CDP CEP combination can bring to the table here, that would be amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think if we draw back to your opening statement, um, you're at a stat. Around 72% of consumers are engaging um, with personalized messages and I think it's what every brand at this point are really um, targeting. Um, I think as, as the world goes more digital, um, it's getting more and more competitive for brands in the market. So definitely the, the shift that we're seeing is um, not only brands want to deliver but customers expect personalized experience across every engagement or interaction with a brand. Now whether that's on um, the app, ah, the website, maybe that's in store in a brick and mortar store or even on social platforms, they want a hyper personalized experience across there. That's how they engage and that's really how you build customer Loyalty um, and I think with the increasing shift away from things like third party cookies, um, there is a bigger and bigger um, kind of emphasis on brands owning cookies, their own data, collecting more data and understanding more about their customers, learning from their customers from the insights. But also then obviously there is a big shift in the world at the moment in terms of the AI side of things. So using that data to understand segment and cohort um users based on maybe what they would do in the future, um, so that really doubles down underpinning this all is really around the customer loyalty. Right. I think uh, a customer is much more likely to make a purchase, make a repeat purchase and uh, continue to engage in a brand if they felt valued and that their, their loyalty is um, understood from, from the brand level as well.

Speaker B: No question there. I mean I completely agree and I'm sure you'd agree, I think you mentioned this as well, that omnichannel and personalization have become cornerstones to brands ensuring their success and survival in a highly, highly competitive world. And um, for this purpose tools like CDPs and CEPS have become invaluable. We did speak a little bit about how a ah, CDP and CEP together adds value. But before we delve deeper into the details and intricacies of what these two tools could offer, could we touch a little bit upon how a CDP and the CEP are different and what they add to the overall engagement engine as well as how they complement each other when they're working together?

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. And I think looking from the outside in there are definitely some similarities between the two tools. I um, think CEPS and CDPs are fantastic. Collecting data from various different sources, whether that be online or offline behavioral information. Um, there is also tools from a personalization site so things like an audience builder, um, is something that both a CDP and a CEP, um, deliver an offer to its customers. Um, most CEPs nowadays also offer um, a concept of AI so the ability to take data and understand predict um, what a user may do in the future. Very similar to a CDP as well. So there are definitely some, some similarities between the two tools but I think there's some important differences as well. When I think about the differences for a cdp, it's all about um, the data foundations. So really um, a big focus on things like data quality. How do we ensure that um, the CDP is viewed as the single source of truth across the marketing stack. How do we ensure things like data schemas are the same um, and consistent across my analytics, my cep, my Attribution vendors for example. I think on the flip side to that um, CEPs are great at the activation of the data, the ability to produce things like emails, push campaigns in app messaging as well. Those tools are fantastic and offer great um, user experience um, and uis around building these, making these super easy to deliver the right message to users at the right time. I think another big difference for me um, is around the identity as well. So I think a CDP at its core needs to have a flexible and really robust, sorry, robust and mature identity management system in place. I think cep, um, is a great uh, targeting users where it has maybe a first party identifier, it might be a phone number or email address. I think really where CDP's complement that is the ability to track across all identifiers that a brand is working with that may be anomalous identifiers like a device id, um, or some kind of social ID for example. But also the CDP is great at consolidating the anomalous to known journey as well. Um, especially when you've got users browsing anomalously on various different sources and at some point in the future become known um, at different times on those sources as well. We've got key features like aliasing that allows us to identify and stitch all of these profiles together at the point a consumer becomes known.

Speaker B: Hearing this definitely makes us feel that the CDP CEP combination sounds like the dream team that all marketers need in their life. Now, uh, the benefits you spoke about, I'm sure convinced a lot of listeners on the power couple that these two platforms make. But I'm sure that the next question that pops in the minds of marketers and brand leaders listening to this would be how do we know that this is the combination for us? Uh, so could you shed some light on the possible indicators that tell brands that they're meant to use this combination? And just so our listeners from different industries could relate a bit more, if we could talk about specific use cases on how it has helped different brands in different industries achieve more value, I think that would be a huge takeaway for everyone.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely, definitely. And when I think about some of the, some of the things that the brand should be looking out for at this point, um, in terms of whether they need um, the CDP plus CEP combination, I think there's a few things that we can look out for. Um, I think the first is around the data quality. Knowing that the CDP and the CEP is only um, a part of a wider mark tech setup or marketing Stack for um, the brands out there today. Um, I definitely feel that without the CDP in the middle sometimes data quality can um, be an issue. So if you've got maybe a analytics platform stood up natively managed by a data team, if you've got a CRM platform stood up by a marketing team along with attribution as well, um, and they're all stood up on their own natively using SDKs, I think you're going to be hitting issues at this point with consistent data quality. Ensuring that a metric in your analytics tool ties very closely um, to the metric or the data that you're using in the CRM tool as well. So I definitely think data quality is a big focus moving forward. Um, this will often lead to issues with measuring campaign performance as well. Um, if you've not got the right data and the right systems and those interlinking together I definitely think that you're going to have issues both personalizing understanding your users but also then understanding how well they are reacting to the campaigns that you're running. Um, and I think uh, on top of that in terms of the cep, the CEP is super powerful in terms of the targeting of uh, the users. But certainly based on the experience from working with, with some of the brands, personalization is only as good as the data who have access to. So it's crucial as we move forward as brands try and find a way to separate themselves from competitors to have the stable data foundations. Um, and that may be data quality that is also going to be uh, the identity resolution. Um, I think brands today still suffer from data silos, silos of data across the business that don't talk to each other and therefore it makes it very, very difficult to analyze or personalize to users from maybe an offline and an online data perspective as well. Um, for me I think some examples certainly from being in the field working with customers here, um, I think where we've really seen some really good use cases and value driven. I know that we work with a big retailer in, in the uk um who have a big brick and mortar presence. Um, they also have a loyalty program as well that can be used both online and offline. But I think prior to working with mparticle when they were working with their uh, their CRM, um stack CRM was mainly and predominantly targeting online behavior. It had no concept of what users were doing inside a store. I think where the CDP really helped them was combining now the online and offline behavior and very quickly they were able to understand that a user would Typically browse some of the clothing items on their website but would actually go in store to try them on, um, and purchase. So they were doing a lot of marketing or remarketing around a user that they had assumed heard abandoned cart, had not made a purchase but been looking at items of clothing whereas that user was ah, engaging with the brand but they were encouraging um, in the brick and mortar store which was an easier buying experience for them. They were able to go in, try the clothes on, um, make sure they got the right size and purchase in store. Now obviously when you've got an online and offline loyalty program, it becomes almost a uh, given and an expectation from your customers that you should understand what they're doing inside the stores online and then use that data, uh, to personalize your experience to them. I think similarly with the media companies that we work with, um, it may be cases of using the information that a CDP is, is capturing, feeding into the, the CRM tools around um, content. So I know that some of our media companies now are running content through their CRM vendors around up and coming shows. Um, and it may be that you engage with season one of a show and season two is very close to being launched. Um, you may be interacting with that across various different devices. Um, and the ability to build that single customer view which is then federated out to the cep, um, really helps the brand to understand how you've engaged but also target you in the right way as well.

Speaker B: Oh no, no, I think I completely agree. Um, and like you're saying, without, without good data I think personalization is absolutely pointless. And like you gave us a lot of examples, it restored faith in this combination and the real world impact that this dream team has. Now that we've looked at examples on how well CDPs and CEPS can work together, maybe we can talk a little bit about best practices that uh, our listeners that'll help our listeners choose the best CEP CDP combo that fits their need and their brand.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. And I think when you're, when you're looking at uh, a CDP CEP combo, you're definitely looking, there's a few things out there that brands should be looking at. And I think it all starts with uh, the level of integration that the CEP and CDP has today. So when I think about the, the types of integrations that we work with, with the ceps, we offer both the, the event forwarding, um, the audience forwarding as well. But crucially, um, I think it's, it's important as well that there's a 360 loop, so the CEP should be passing information back to your CDP around engagement. You're going to want to understand based on the campaigns that you're running, whether that's a push, whether that's an email, you're going to want to understand the engagement metrics off the back of it, but also push that downstream to other tools within your, your mark text stack. And it may be as simple as if somebody is engaging with an email or push notification. I actually want to suppress them from any social campaigns. I want to make sure that if a user is actively engaged with email or push, it's typically a cheaper channel than possibly a Facebook campaign for retargeting as well. So I have a, an option there to actually suppress users. And I think that all comes down to the level of integration between your CP and your CDP vendor. Uh, I think the, the other thing that we're seeing in the market, just to follow on from that is brands more shifting to focusing on, on M journeys a user take and no longer really having separate teams that run CRM campaigns, social and ad techs, but you've actually got teams that are focused across all of those, um, all of those different areas and therefore you can streamline those journeys based on that. Example I just given, if a user maybe is not engaging with the emails that you're sending them, you want to push that to a social campaign, for example. It's key within any of these that data is shared, um, in real time for activation purposes. I definitely think the first thing any brand should do when they're looking at a CP CDP combination is actually understand how well they work together, what data is shared, how quickly that data is shared, um, and what level of data is shared as well.

Speaker B: I think those are some great points for our listeners to kind of even start making a checklist when they're evaluating such a combination. But now that we've spoken about benefits we've covered use cases, examples, uh, I think another hugely important aspect for any marketer looking to go forward with seriously evaluating this combination is to know how they can justify this investment and build a business case around this. If you could also cover and tell us about what are the possible potential blockers or objections that you've seen marketeers get when they're pitching this kind of combination to their, um, to their C suite or managers, I think possibly covering those blockers and how to tackle them would be hugely helpful for our listeners today.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think certainly based on what we're seeing in in the industry over maybe the last year. What we're seeing in the, in the financial markets as well. Um, budget is always going to be something that is under consideration for any new tools that are being purchased by, by a brand. Um and not necessarily um the the cost of a tool but what value is this going to bring to, to us as an organization? Um I think when, when people are talking about these investments internally I think rather than talking about cost I think um the talk track should be shifted more towards the value that it brings. We spent a lot of time talking on this podcast around the value that a CDP combo can bring. It's going to be things like the marketing efficiency quicker um time to data value as we call it so you can stand up things quicker but then also around the engineering efficiencies that can be made with this combination. Um the fact that these integrations make it very easy to get data from your CRM um back into the CDP and out to an analytics tool out to the social platforms. So both you're saving engineering uh resource at that point which is ah a huge cost to most organizations. But importantly those engineers rather than spending time on building data pipelines they can spend it on building cool new features for the website or the app. Um so I think around the efficiencies and the value that can be generated off the back of these um I also sometimes think um just to follow on from that that resource can be a blocker. Um when you're going to your senior leadership team and asking to onboard any tool, often you're being asked to um estimate how long it's going to onboard um these tools. I think in, in an ideal world with the uh, the CDP in place, with a CRM in place, if you're building a marketing tech around that it's going to make it very very easy and simplify the the ability to build additional tools on top as well. So you may want a social platform to, to complement what you're doing on CRM. It may be that you have no analytics strategy today and actually an analytics tool is on the roadmap in six months. All of these things can be used as, as ways to justify the, the additional spend. I um, think for me um, the the big value app when we have these conversations is the time to value that a combination of a CEP and CRM can have. But also then if you pick the right combination the additional um value that it's bring from a marketing efficiency perspective the ability for your CRM to talk with any tool within your stack but also using additional data to analyze performance, um, to consumers as well.

Speaker B: So what I'm taking from this and which is a huge thing is that value efficiency and effectiveness over cost is what they should look at building.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, exactly, exactly that.

Speaker B: And I'm sure our uh, listeners really benefited from this and now know where they can start for this project. While they deeply think and ponder on this, I'm sure the next question that will pop in their mind is I do have a couple of tools in my martech stack. I think you covered a little bit about that in the previous answers as well. They might have a CRM, they might have email or push notifications as point platforms that they're using. How well would this combination work with my pre existing stack?

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. It's a great question and I think it's often one um, that can confuse the process as well. Um, I think from, from my point of view there's, there's a couple of takes on this right when, when you implement the cdp, when you implement ah, a cep, it does not mean that you've committed to a huge digital transformation and you need uh, to rip out all of the work that the team has already done to implement a cdp. I think there are um, definitely a phased approach that can be taken here. Um, I think having a CDP in place with the data foundations, um, privacy controls, the identity resolution, forwarding to a CEP can offer significant value outside of maybe the initial stack that you've got. And then over time, and we've seen a lot of brands do this, they start bringing in those additional tools into the cdp. Um, it may be that you already have an attribution vendor and uh, maybe some analytics as well moving forward. Um, there are brands that will maybe want to change those up over time, but brands that are very committed to the tools that they're using and we can start off small by simply sharing some additional data points with these tools. Um, it doesn't always necessarily need to be done all at the same time. So certainly from the customers that I'm working with, um, when they embark on a journey and maybe it's a cep, maybe it's a CDP project as well and they're implementing to um, both of those products at the same time. They'll also have a, a pretty good um, marketing stack in place already, um, and then slowly over time as they're making significant changes, maybe it's deployment of new SDKs, um, maybe new product features that require additional data points to be tracked. It can be planned in, within that. So it can definitely be done with a phased approach but it also out of the box can complement the existence stack, even if it's just sending some additional data points. So if I go back to the uh, the example I gave in the, in the last question, it may be that my analytics platform today does not know the performance of my CEP campaigns. I have the ability very quickly to do that once this project is stood up to send email, sends email, opens the bounce rates, the engagement rates of my email campaigns and pull that in to my analytics platform. So not only can I extend the performance of those campaigns, I can actually understand the impact they're driving away from the campaign. So once the users opened an email, opened the app, what are they doing at that point? So I think it can complement an existing stack, um, as well as helping customers that are maybe halfway through or thinking about a full tech transformation where they uh, want to evaluate all tools within their stack as well.

Speaker B: So what I'm taking away from this is marketeers need to pace and phase this plan so that it works effectively for them and it's not really overwhelming. Plus it works really well with their pre existing Martech stack, right?

Speaker A: Correct, Correct. I think exactly. Speaking from the mparticle side, I think we have um, over 250 integrations with all of the main marketing tools that we've seen in the market as well. So out of the box we can complement your existing stack without creating additional work to maybe integrate that stack with the CDP straight away.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Um, I think another aspect that you've touched upon a little bit in one of your previous answers that could make or break such a project, um, is the team that works on this platform, both these platforms combined. In fact, what would your advice be to build the right team or even hire the right personnel to take care of this CDP CEP project. And how do you enable this team to make the best use of this combination?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a great question and I think it's often something um, that buyers are considering whilst they're evaluating the tool set but also then once they're onboarding as well, trying to understand exactly how to manage this um, CDP plus CEP combination, um, as well as the rest of the marketing stack as well. And I think from what I've seen in the market there's a few ways that brands are managing the CDP at the core of the marketing stack. Um, I think typically we see even the CDP owned by a uh, product team and that product team are really responsible for the growth of the organization or the personalization of the organization and they are really in charge on defining the roadmap, the cdp whilst also taking in um, insight from the rest of the organization that are using some of the tools that are consuming data from a cdp. That may be the CRM team, it may be your social team data teams for analytics reasons as well. I think the, what I've seen work really well is where that central team are uh, owning a cdp. Um, they're doing a lot of work internally to enable the right teams. Um, I think the, the goal of bringing a CDP in is really to democratize the, the data usage across the organization and really you achieve that by fantastic enablement for the team. Um, ensuring that they're using best practices, working um, with the, the partner teams, the vendor teams to understand what that looks like as well. Um, and then always making sure you've got to focus maybe six to 12 months out on the, the Martech roadmap as well. Whether that's upcoming events, personalization, um, needs of the business, whether that's new tools or vendors that are coming up in, in the future as well

Speaker B: makes sense. I think you've left our listeners with a lot of, lot of valuable insights and a lot of thoughts and questions to ponder over. But most of all I think you've left them with a sort of a framework that they can adhere to when they're thinking about or uh, even before thinking about a project like this. But before we call it a day, I'm sure our listeners would love to know what are your go to resources when you want to stay current on Martech trends or customer engagement trends or even marketing in general.

Speaker A: Yeah, so for me my primary source if I'm honest is um, both the mparticle and the partner blogs as well. Um, and the reason for that is they often come along with customer proof points or customer stories that, that speak to uh, the value or actual use cases as well. So I do love to from time to time to check out um, the ecosystem, some of the, the blogs that they're producing. Um, often they are um, they are um, very insightful. Um, they're they're certainly not, not used to sell a product but to educate the audience as well. Um, so I think ah, that's a big thing from my side is using the blogs from the Martech industry is a big way that I learn and keep my finger at the pulse.

Speaker B: Oh, I agree And I think your point on focusing on customer stories, I think that makes a lot of sense because these are real world brands and possibly your peers who've tackled a problem similar to yours. It gives you a lot of insight and it gives you a lot of inspiration as well. Definitely agree with you there, 100%. All right, so I think the next question, and possibly one of the last ones for today's podcast would be, what's one of the biggest lessons you've learned? Um, when you look at your past experience, your present experience, is there one lesson that you live by that our brand leaders and marketers could benefit from?

Speaker A: Yeah, for me it's Martech moves very quickly. I mean, if we take a look maybe five or six years ago, the number of marctech, um, vendors or partners that were out there and compare that to today, things move very quickly. And with that, so do, um, marketing teams. KPI's objectives, um, they are constantly changing. So I think from, from our side, it's our job as partners to really ensure that we truly understand, um, our customers, the things that are important to them, but also not be afraid to work with them, to challenge them, to bring some of the insights that we know about and trends that we're seeing to them as well. So that's definitely something that is important to me, but also working with the teams to consistently understand, monitor the marctech ecosystem, um, and all of the new trends that we're seeing as well.

Speaker B: Thank you so much, Matt. I think those were one of the last questions we had. We were delighted to host you on today's podcast. Thank you for taking time out and joining us today to share such deep insights on how a CDP CEP combination helps brands drive unmatched personalized experience and ultimately leads to revenue success. Right. Uh, I'm sure our listeners will greatly appreciate and benefit from the valuable insights they've got gotten from today's podcast. Thank you for listening in folks. That's all for today's episode. Catch you all in the next one.