212: CDP Basics: online vs. offline data

Here’s a tricky thing about Customer Data Platforms.

On the one hand, you want to import all your customer data. That’s the point, right? You want one place where you can have all your customer data – where you can clean things up, create activations, do analysis, run reports, and so on.

On the other hand, CDPs are often tied very closely to website campaigns, and that can create a problem because some people have a hard time remembering the distinction between offline and online data.

Let me explain it with my experience regarding beer supplies.

I’m a homebrewer. I make beer, but I’ve also made wine, mead, cider, sake, kombucha – basically every fermented beverage I’ve ever heard of. I get my supplies at Maryland Homebrew, and I’m friends with Chris, who’s the owner.

I have an account in their point of sale system, so they have data on all my purchases. I also visit their website. But I haven’t created an account on their website. As far as the website knows, I’m anonymous.

Chris doesn't have a CDP, but let’s pretend she does. That CDP would have a record for me – for my online activity. But it’s an anonymous record. it can’t link that online activity to their point of sale information for me because the website doesn’t know that it’s me – because I haven’t logged in.

Importing the point of sale data – with my name and address all that – won’t solve that problem because there’s nothing to connect the point of sale data to the online data.

There are other ways to establish identity than logins, but that’s beyond our scope for today.

The question for today is this. Should my friend Chris import all her point of sale information into her pretend CDP if she can’t correlate the point of sale data to the online record? It depends, of course. Here are some questions to ask to decide what to do.

Question 1 – What – specifically – do you hope to accomplish by importing those records? Something vague like “I want all my customer information in one place” isn’t an adequate answer. You have to be able to say why you want all your customer information in one place. What will you be able to do that you can’t do now?

Question 2 – Will importing that data change how much you’re paying for your CDP? Some CDPs charge based on the number of records under management, so importing a lot of data can cost you money.

Question 3 – Will having that data in your CDP confuse you when it comes time to create a marketing effort? For example, Chris might want to find all her customers within 25 miles of Columbia Maryland and advertise to that audience online. If she imports all her point of sale information into the CDP, she’d have lots of records for customers in the right geography, but those records from point of sale wouldn’t have an online component. That would just be name and address. In some cases you can use name and address to create an audience in an online platform. I believe you can do that with Facebook. But in other cases you can’t. You have to have an email address, or some online identifier.

Are you, and your marketing staff, and the agency you hire to do social media for you, going to be able to keep that straight?

This whole online vs. offline data thing is somewhat like swimming butterfly. One day it clicks and you get it – the rhythm of the stroke makes sense to your body – but until that point it’s a struggle, and it’s a bit awkward.

I hope I’ve made it click for you, but if it’s still unclear give me a call. It’s one of the fundamental things you need to understand if you’re going to work in a CDP.