Need to Develop New Customer Data Marketing Apps Faster? Check Out These New Treasure Boxes

For most businesses, understanding what each and every customer wants has gone from being a long-term goal to an emergency in 2020. In-person retail channels disappeared or became unreliable, taking with them in-store upselling, impulse buys, and the opportunity to win a loyal customer from such sales.

How fast you can gather customer data and insights—and react to them—now not only helps sort out winners and losers. In many cases, it even determines who can keep playing the marketing game. Many retailers and brand managers are finding themselves either accelerating their previous plans, or under the gun to come up with new ways to acquire and retain customers, and to increase customer lifetime value (CLTV).

The recent introduction of new Treasure Boxes and Treasure Insights by Treasure Data—a leading Customer Data Platform (CDP) provider—helps deal with the urgency of knowing your customers, finding new ones, and personalizing user experiences across channels. That’s because Treasure Boxes accelerate development, compressing the time it takes to get actionable insights from customer data. They also help to handle many of the issues that data-driven companies have to address: data cleansing, identity unification, and privacy preferences and regulations.

“By enriching the customer profiles in your CDP, you not only understand how your customers and potential customers interact with you; you understand how they interact with the world,” says Jason Skelton, Head of Platform Alliances, EU, for Acxiom, a global marketing services company that has used Treasure Data’s Treasure Boxes to develop its customer-data projects, particularly services that handle data enrichment and identity management. Acxiom recently used Treasure Boxes and Treasure Data CDP to create Acxiom Data Services’ Profile Enrichment and Real Identity.™

“By enriching the customer profiles in your CDP, you not only understand how your customers and potential customers interact with you; you understand how they interact with the world” —Jason Skelton, Head of Platform Alliances, EU, for Acxiom

And Treasure Boxes has cut development time significantly, particularly when it comes to reusing or modifying code that is common to many businesses and projects.

“Before Treasure Boxes, we would have been doing a lot of custom work, client by client. Now, it’s a few clicks to set up the data enrichment process. We want to enable a variety of use cases for our clients,” says Simon Roach, Product Director at Acxiom.

“And of course in order to enrich data, you need to have data in the first place, so it’s critical to start thinking about your data collection strategies now,” says Skelton. “Acxiom spends a lot of time working with clients on this, and things like having pre-built connectors such as the Treasure Boxes we have with Treasure Data, allow people to focus on adding business value rather than spending time worrying about how systems connect together.“

Both Treasure Data and several of its partners are introducing new Treasure Boxes, including:

• Multi-touch Attribution: What closed the sale? Unlike traditional rule-based MTA solutions such as first-touch and last-touch models, the multi-touch attribution template takes an advanced machine learning-based approach to accurately model customers’ paths to conversion and to help marketers understand better about which marketing touchpoints bring your customers closer to buying—and why. These insights help to effectively and efficiently optimize the marketing campaigns with optimal budget allocation. The template also ultimately generates deeper insights about conversion histories and allows you to build the following dashboard, for example:

• Real-time Next Best Action: What should each customer’s next touch be—where, which channel, and when? Real-time Next Best Action dynamically optimizes the customer experience and gives real-time predictions of the Next Best Action (NBA) for each individual identity, based on previous behavior and demographics. This Treasure Box identifies the correct Next Best Product, Channel, and Time—to dramatically improve the odds of making new sales.
• Predict Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Who are your best customers? Are they prospects for clienteling or special offers or experiences? Treasure Data’s Predict CLTV Treasure Box helps efficiently identify high-value customers and understand their behavior. Eventually, you can effectively optimize your day-to-day marketing activities without missing important highly-engaged customers. For online retailers, the Treasure Box for CLTV Prediction shows how to create a CLTV prediction model based on customer’s order histories.
• Insights: What are the most important things you can see in your data? Treasure Insights is an interactive web application that provides the user interface in which your customers can view and explore dashboards. Marketers don’t have to be data scientists to understand their own data with Treasure Data Insights. And making new dashboards is a snap.

Already, early Treasure Boxes adopters are getting the results they’ve always dreamed of. The bottom line, for many businesses, is that they have new ways to reach customers and entice them to buy with tailored customer journeys that are as unique as they are.

“At BoxyCharm, understanding our customer is our biggest priority because it enables us to accurately recommend products they will love,” says Charles Pich, VP of Business Intelligence at BoxyCharm. “Treasure Data’s new advanced analytics capabilities give us the deep insights we need to serve our customers’ needs and provide personalized experiences.“

“At BoxyCharm, understanding our customer is our biggest priority because it enables us to accurately recommend products they will love” —Charles Pich, VP of Business Intelligence at BoxyCharm

Changing Buying Patterns and Channel Disruption Require Faster Responses—and Treasure Boxes

If your business is scrambling to understand your customers’ changing buying habits—or even if you’re just looking for new, profitable opportunities to interact with your customers—you might be considering what better customer data and insights could do for your business. You might also be wondering how to cope with the impending “demise of the cookie,” the expected result of new regulation and the announced intentions of large tech companies such as Google to phase out cookie support.

Or maybe you’ve already invested in customer data management technology such as a customer data platform (CDP), and wonder if you could use it to capture new business amid all the brand and retail channel chaos, if only you could shorten development time for new marketing and data initiatives.

If so, you’re in good company. Leaders in many industries, such as CPG and retail, already had long-term plans to understand each individual customer’s changing needs. Often, these were part of broader digital transformation plans. These companies were already investing accordingly in customer data and personalization technology. Others relied on physical stores and were just starting to understand customer behavior on other channels. But now, most are rushing to develop new ways of reaching customers, and either building new relationships or enhancing old ones on new channels or new terms.

“Our customers want to do a wide variety of things with their customer data, and they have a lot of use cases they want to take live, in an ever changing landscape,” says Skelton.

“Some want to do suppression from paid advertising. Others want to improve lookalike modeling or smarter media buying. And of course the hot topic right now is how to operate in a cookieless world as we head to 2022,” says Skelton.

“This all starts with knowing your customer, which means understanding and resolving all customer generated data signals to a unified profile which becomes the springboard for all of your marketing efforts,” he says. Get this right, and you’re setting yourself on the journey to future-proofing your marketing activities by having a strong data layer to work from.”

Skelton says one use case garnering intense interest is “first-visit personalization”—when a customer engages a brand or retailer’s store, website, social media, or ads for the first time.

“Some of our customers want to start personalizing CX from the get-go, from first interaction, rather than wait to build up personal and behavioral data over time. They want accelerated first-visit personalization capabilities,” he says. “By using the Acxiom treasure box, you’re able to enrich your 1st party data very early in your relationship with your customers. You’re building a much more detailed persona, faster,” he explains.

Treasure Boxes Make New Development Easier—and Much Faster

To deliver first-touch data enrichment and other customer-data-oriented capabilities, Acxiom used Treasure Boxes—which consist of pre-built code, visualizations, and applications that solve common problems for Treasure Data CDP users—to create its own service, which leverages Acxiom’s extensive data resources. This frees up the time of it’s Professional Services practice to focus on business value add services, rather than functional connectivity to APIs.

Acxiom has access to a global data asset, which consists of more than 2.5 billion records under Acxiom management, with data coming from more than 60 countries. Treasure Data’s CDP regularly handles about 100 billion events daily for its more than 400 customers, most of which are Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. That scale of data—and the needs of such global companies—make both processing speed and development time critical. The prebuilt nature of Treasure Boxes helps accelerate such development.

Rapid Development Helps Companies Cope with Channel and Sales Disruption

One of the use cases that many companies need right now is dealing with shifting customer shopping patterns due to COVID.

“We did a lot of custom research on consumer attitudes, both pre- and post-COVID, and with the additional customer data sources that TD enables us to easily connect, we can now help our clients understand what needs to change,” says Skelton.

And interestingly, previous results indicate that it doesn’t take an all-out segmentation effort to see large improvements.

“We’ve seen companies get a lot out of adding just a few new segments, five or six, and now we now have 55,” says Skelton. “This helps to give our customers global segmentation and global consistency in their regions—with one entry point, to the Acxiom world.”

“What the CDP, Treasure Boxes, and the Acxiom technology is giving Acxiom is visibility of their data assets within the system. Now, in seconds, Clients are able to bring Acxiom insight data back and build it into the decision making process of which assets/offers to best serve each customer,” says Roach.

“CDPs—and the data capabilities that Treasure Boxes and our services enable—give customers consistent, transparent control about how they want their data to be used,” he says.

CDPs Put Companies Back in Charge of Their Own Data

Plus, as Roach points out, one of the most game-changing aspects of CDPs is the ability to make it easy for organizations to use their data in-house, particularly within their own marketing departments, and resolved to the same person level identity rather than relying on downstream integrations and outside vendors.

“As a brand, you’re losing control if you’re relying on someone else for interpretation and recommendations. This is putting data in the hands of the brand manager that makes the decisions,” says Roach.

Roach also says that CDPs are an excellent way to help companies doing development to use customer data more effectively, because the CDP itself can be configured to handle issues of consistent identity resolution and improved privacy and consent management, which are often major hurdles for new development.

Want to see how Treasure Boxes can make your company more agile and data driven? Check out Treasure Boxes. And to see how companies like yours are using data to turbocharge their operations—in marketing and beyond—visit Treasure Data.