Best practicse for collecting data — Tom Treanor // Treasure Data

Quotes

• “I think a lot of companies are struggling right now with how they collect and manage customer data. They often don’t have a full picture of their customers and each marketing function basically have a different view because they are working with different sets of data.” -Tom “Companies basically don’t have one single view of their customers as each department has a different view. In answering questions about how many customers we have, who are our best customers, who are the customers that are likely to churn and things like thatare really hard for people to get a handle on it.” -Tom“As a marketer, you, of course, want to market it differently to one, existing customers, two, customers that you are likely to churn or your best customers. Getting all that data into one place isthe best way for a marketer to be most effective.” -Tom“When you analyze in that data, I think the experts will have to weigh in on what’s the importance of things like the click and things like that in different platforms. I don’t think that it is something that can necessarily be changed but that can be factored into the algorithms behind the scenes to determine what is a very engaged customer or company.” -Tom “What companies who are more on the leading edge are doing is taking all of their first-party data and putting it into one place. What they are doing with third-party data is often enriching it.” -Tom “When you are trying to unify your data and you are thinking about the actual collection process, having a place to put all of that data isvery important.” -Ben “Some systems are harder than others to connect with and to get regular feeds of data either on streaming or a batch basis. There’s always a challenge with certain systems and that is where companies doing CDPs on a regular basis will have some experience so that it is reliable.” -Tom“The other thing is a couple of different types of customer data platform. Some are Schema full and some are Schema list. In Treasure Data, we are on the Schema list which means that when you extract the data from various systems, normally you would transform it into the Schema, and then you would load it in. What we do is we extract it first, and then we load it and then we transform it once it is in the system so that saves some of that Schema set up steps.” -Tom“When you are starting to think about finding a place to aggregate all of your data, there is some expertise as this is a complex process. Aggregating data is not something that only helps you unify it so your entire marketing team is looking at the same data set but also, it can help you validate that the data is actually accurate and correct.” -Ben “There are customer data platforms that are more suitable for SMBs. But even with the biggest, hairiest CDP implementations, it is not a ‘rip and replace project’, now it is basically an adjacent database that is additive and does not take away something else. Of course, you can take away something else later when it is ready but what that means is you can implement something and start to run it to do the unification and also a couple of various specific use cases that you want to target.” -Tom “It is not necessarily two parallel processes. You might do your programmatic advertising but once you start using the CDP data more and more, you will do better programmatic advertising.” -Tom “There is a strategic decision in having that data-driven mindset that we are going to unify our data and we are going to make the best decision with the data that goes from end-to-end. Understanding what that pain point is, which is basically making the decision to aggregate data into one source is the first step into being a data-driven marketer.” -Ben “I think it is when the level of maturity where they see a lot of the problem comes from everything being siloed. Now they are looking for a step-change in how effective they are as marketers because there are certain problems you can’t solve until you see the full customer picture. They hit that wall.” -Tom