Post CDP deployment timeline: What changes can you expect with a CDP?

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are transformative tools. After CDP deployment, you can expect faster data processes, more impactful marketing, easier cross-functional collaboration, and substantial improvements to the customer experience. Here’s a timeline of the changes your company can expect following launch.

Thinking about adding a CDP to your business’s customer-centric toolbox?

Good choice.

Acting as your all-in-one hub for insight-driven marketing, sales, and service, CDPs act as your all-in-in-one hub for insight-driven marketing, sales, and service, helping you genuinely understand your customers and engage them with the personalized experiences that they expect .

The positive impact of a CDP can be far-reaching, and these benefits will come in waves as your business adopts this new tool.

These are some of the things you can expect within 24 months of CDP deployment:

• 3 months: CDP is fully deployed. A single view of the customer provides meaningful insights and strategies to grow sales.
• 6 months: Sophisticated personalization and segmentation reduces costs and drives higher returns.
• 12 months: Democratized access to data leads to new cost-saving and value-generating initiatives for every team.
• 24 months: Increased agility, efficiency, and effectiveness has created a data-first culture that unites your business around the customer.

Below you'll find a detailed timeline of the short and long-term benefits you can expect following a CDP deployment. Note that some CDP vendors take many months to deploy, whereas Lexer’s CDP deployment is known as one of the smoothest, simplest, and quickest in the industry. This timeline is based on Lexer’s deployment process, which can take as little as five weeks.

3 Months

In the first three months, your CDP is fully deployed and integrated with in- and out-bound feeds of data. Customer demographics, purchase histories, email engagement rates, web behaviors, channel preferences, and other data enrichment from third-party sources like Experian's Mosaic are combined into a single customer view.

This data feeds rich customer profiles accessible within Lexer’s CDP and provides deep insights into the underlying drivers of sales performance—from the buying motivations of newly-acquired customers to the attitudes and lifestyles of loyal, long-term brand advocates.

Informed by these insights and backed by robust audience segmentation and activation capabilities, you’ll be able to go live with your first CDP-powered campaigns on both paid and owned channels. These initial campaigns are focused on the lowest-hanging fruit that makes the biggest impact on sales; depending on your business’s starting point, you might choose to focus on acquisition, growth, or retention. Additionally, these campaigns provide a benchmark for future performance goals and measurements.

6 Months

At this point in CDP deployment, highly-targeted marketing is now operational.

Stakeholders from every team are empowered to self-serve insight and execute personalized campaigns impacting acquisition, growth and retention, all in significantly reduced timeframes.

Democratized access to customer data means that every campaign is preceded by insight, informing how, why, and when campaigns are run. Instead of building campaigns based on guesswork about what will resonate with customers, you can use real-time data to understand who your best audiences are and then build bespoke campaigns to target them directly.

High-impact campaigns are now running at every lifecycle stage:

1. Prospecting and Acquisition

By building lookalike audiences around your highest-value customers and targeting them with relevant products in paid media, you significantly reduce cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and improve return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).

Here's an example of personalized acquisition campaigns Spyder built to target their three highest-value customer segments:

2. Growth and Retention

Following these high-performance prospecting and acquisition campaigns, you can intelligently re-engage customers on both paid and owned channels to boost lifetime value. Advanced customer segmentation tools allow you to segment lapsed customers by channel addressability and target them in channels they’re paying attention to to increase reach. Low-value or churned customers are suppressed from audiences to reduce media waste and increase overall effectiveness.

For example, Village Entertainment used the Lexer CDP to understand and grow the lifetime value of their active loyalty base:

“The implementation of an LTV strategy has enabled us to develop an understanding of our customers beyond their current transaction history,” says Stacey Kwijas, Marketing Manager at Village Entertainment. “The ability to predict the annual value of individual customers allows us to identify gaps and reduce the risk of customer churn, as well as gives us the ability to recognize and reward our highest value members.”

Click here to read more about Village Entertainment’s experience with Lexer.

Additionally, operational measurement at the segment level has become the norm. Teams are able to track the impact of their activities on specific customer segments by changes in purchasing behavior, engagement, lifetime value, and more. As the business becomes more trained and aware of omnichannel, segment-level metrics, teams are better equipped to demonstrate the value of their activities to leadership teams.

12 Months

A year into CDP deployment, improved operational efficiencies create opportunities for cost-saving initiatives and new value-generating activities across the entire business.

Your increased focus on the customer enables the development of rich, data-defined personas. Marketers are more agile, testing and learning in each campaign with increased campaign volume and audience sizes.

Automation has become a key strategy to free up your team’s bandwidth for further innovation and development. Insight-driven customer journeys have been set up to trigger personalized, multi-channel engagement at critical touchpoints.

The high-impact acquisition, cross-sell, and upsell activities have led to accelerated lifetime value growth, so the business can make smarter acquisition investment decisions that are not solely reliant on ROAS. By taking a longer view and assigning a CPA cap optimized to each customer segment, you significantly increase acquisition volume and revenue growth.

Your high-value customer personas also lead to differentiated products and services tailored to those customers. For example, the Lexer CDP has generated actionable insights for both the marketing and the product team at Rip Curl:

“We see a lot of questions starting to come from the product managers,” says Sam Hopgood, Digital Marketing Manager at Rip Curl. “What are certain demographics purchasing? How often do we see swimwear purchases? What color? What size? What’s the average order value? Ultimately, this is playing a key part in the seasons to come in what our product managers are creating for the consumers.”

Along with these customer-led developments for product teams, data science and analytics teams spend less time on low-value list queries and are able to perform more sophisticated customer analytics.

24 Months

Your company is now more creative and adventurous with customer data. Culturally, you’ve seen a business-wide shift to data-driven, customer-first thinking, as the apparel group Brand Collective did when they used the Lexer CDP to understand and respond to change.

You’re capturing additional information from customers earlier in their engagement through CDP-powered surveys and proactive in-store outreach. Access to detailed purchase histories and preferences enables your associates to tailor the in-store experience to the individual. The ability to record visits, recommend next best products and actions for sales associates, and re-target retail customers online drives material increases in revenue.

Customer service teams are providing exceptional omnichannel service with access to detailed information about the person behind each service request—including recent purchases, loyalty membership details, contact history, broader interests, and demographics. This data-driven approach to customer service streamlines ticket resolution and identity verification and improves the customer experience in retail.

Second-party data exchange becomes a viable strategy to drive additional growth and deepen customer insights. As your database continues to grow, you have more fuel to inform the differentiated, omnichannel experiences you offer to your customers.

With real-time customer analytics, predictive insights, and straightforward tools for sophisticated reporting, you have effectively future-proofed your business. The agility, ease, and confidence with which you can respond to market changes and evolving consumer needs have given you a remarkable edge against your competitors.

Quick customer insights for long-term strategic direction

A CD(X)P like Lexer can add value to your company in as little as three months—but its true value lies in the long-term strategic, structural, and cultural changes it can drive throughout your business.

With one of the fastest and easiest deployment processes in the industry, Lexer can have your CDP up and running in less than 5 weeks with very little heavy-lifting required by your team. Our talented success team provides strategic guidance and ongoing technical support to ensure you’re achieving your goals from the moment you sign on to years after you’ve integrated the platform into your day-to-day work.

By choosing Lexer as your CD(X)P partner, you’ll gain access to more than an enriched single customer view with tools to support every team—you’ll also gain access to an experienced and flexible team of retail experts who will help you maximize your success from day one.

Interested in driving customer-led innovation with a CDP? Use the calendar below to book a demo of the Lexer platform today.