Five Questions for a MarTech Consultant about the Bloomreach Customer Data Platform

The Customer Data Platform as a clearing in the MarTech jungle?

In the field of marketing technologies (MarTech), we like to speak metaphorically of a jungle, because the topic proves to be a multifaceted landscape with different terrains and disciplines. Due to the sheer mass, one easily runs the risk of losing the overview.

In the context of this metaphor, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can be described as green clearings from which the majority of the terrain can be accessed. One of these clearings may be the Bloomreach Engagement Platform.

To give a better perspective on the topic and the tool, we asked our colleague and MarTech Consultant David five questions about the Bloomreach Engagement Platform. David has been working for many years not only in the MarTech environment but also with Bloomreach as a tool and is therefore an absolute expert in the field. He knows the features inside out and knows exactly what marketing automation and data-driven marketing is all about.

What is Bloomreach Engagement and what can the tool do?

First of all, let’s clarify some MarTech terminology: In the Marketing Automation context, we work with two basic systems: CDP and CXP. The Customer Data Platform (also called CDP) focuses as a tool on the preparation, transformation and aggregation of customer data. A Customer Experience Platform (CXP) focuses on the omnichannel customer experience. It enables omnichannel delivery of relevant marketing messages to the target audience. Bloomreach Engagement (formerly known as Exponea) brings these two tools together and offers a combination of functionalities.

Bloomreach enables its’ users to create highly personalized marketing campaigns, omnichannel targeting and customer journey mapping – all in real time. Machine learning can also be used to predict customer behavior and determine ideal shipping/playout times for each and every customer.

Which business problem does Bloomreach solve?

Many companies face the challenge of not being able to provide their customers with a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints. Often, this is due to a non-uniform approach across the company’s various channels (such as email, push or in-app messages). This is where Bloomreach comes in: Customers can be addressed consistently across all channels – ensuring a one-size-fits-all customer experience.

In addition, marketers often lack the data to address these customers precisely, in a personalized way. Bloomreach can bring together customer data from different sources, aggregate it, and add it to the individual 360-degree customer profile. This eliminates data silos and gives marketing access to important data to which access was previously denied. This creates the optimal foundation for personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns.

Some marketing teams also complain about their high dependency on the IT department. They can hardly work with data without their support. Bloomreach’s low-code or no-code features give marketing teams, independent of IT, full control over the data for their campaigns. This means they can always ensure in real time that customers enjoy relevant content with appropriate offers at the right time.

What makes the tool special?

Bloomreach really has an answer to every major challenge in online marketing. This is thanks to the modular structure of the tool:

The CDP module, for example, has a segmentation builder that serves as a tool for marketeers to create their ideal target group based on real-time data. He can then address this target group consistently across all desired channels. These channels can include, for example, email, app push, onsite personalization, or even Facebook and Google.

I also like the user interface of the tool, which is designed very intuitively and is particularly easy to use by the end user.

What development potential do you see?

Due to the fact that CDPs and CXPs are still comparatively young tools on the market, there is still development potential in some points, which will be implemented in the near future.

If there is one feature that would make Bloomreach even more well-rounded for me, it would be the enterprise capability in the area of data organization. That means: For different business units that want to work in the same instance, there is still no function to control different data views on individual data fields. However, it can still be solved at the moment: The whole thing can be defused through workarounds and well-defined organizational processes.

What advice do you have for others who are considering using this tool?

As an implementation partner of Bloomreach, we have had particularly good experiences with approaching the tool from the direction of the marketing use cases at the beginning. This is an excellent way to derive data needs and identify source systems, which can then be used as a foundation for implementation.

It’s also very important to do some reengineering of the organizational processes within a company. It makes little sense to introduce a very good tool, but which is not perceived internally as profitable and useful. New tools always require some internal organizational re-alignment.

Thanks for sharing your valuable experience with us, David!