Implementing a CDP? Have use cases ready for a smooth transition

M&T Bank is a regional Mid-Atlantic financial institution with over 700 branches and 18,000 employees and prides itself on customer engagement. To continue to grow the company’s marketing efforts, they needed a larger number of people to have the ability to access and use customer data to keep campaigns streamlined and personalized.

“We have these really deep data scientists and data engineers that build our campaigns with data,” said Mike Bastedo, M&T Bank’s product owner, omnichannel personalization. “We wanted to take that data and expand the number of people that have access to it, within a reasonable level.”

Ahead of implementation, Bastedo and his team came up with over 300 use cases where the CDP could be used across the organization. This helped refine the functions the new CDP would serve and got team members familiar with how it could help them.

Here are some of their top cases, which other B2B and consumer companies should also consider ahead of their CDP implementation.

Segmentation. One of the major uses for the CDP was assembling customer segments. For smaller orgs, including regional banks, marketers need to know quickly if the contact is a B2C or B2B customer. Having everything centralized and easily accessible enabled M&T Bank marketers to identify B2B individuals and their roles, paving the way for account-based marketing. On the consumer side, they could contextualize and speak to customers in a way that was appropriate to their place in the funnel.

Scalability. As M&T Bank acquired more customers, they wanted a platform that could allow marketing campaigns to continue to grow at the same pace. As a regional bank acquiring other smaller businesses, they also needed the ability to plug new customer files into their efforts to create a seamless transition for customers.

Omnichannel. For Bastedo, omnichannel means being able to orchestrate campaigns for individual customers and segments, no matter where they are in the funnel. So that means that regardless of the channel or touchpoint, the message is relevant. Bastedo calls this a “hypersensitive” approach: “Blasting across all channels can work in some cases, depending on what you’re doing, but it tends to get a lower response rate and feels a lot less relevant.”

Media optimization. As part of omnichannel orchestration, thanks to centralized customer data, marketers can suppress messages where they wouldn’t be appropriate or would in fact be wasteful. The result is an optimized media spend and more efficient campaigns that deliver on ROI.

Experimentation. Having data more accessible to a larger number of people throughout the organization allows for more experimentation and problem solving. “It’s opening up across the channels, creating the capacity so that people [who aren’t] deep data practitioners [are] able to do those things and kind of play in that sandbox and learn and explore,” said Bastedo.

Brainstorming use cases helps refine the functions that the new CDP will serve. It also prepares the individual team members for the change to their work habits.

The result? Everyone across the organization was better prepared for the implementation. They could hit the ground running with their new CDP.

“Organizational alignment and internal socialization is key, and I think we learned that the earlier you do that in the process the better,” said Bastedo.

Laying out the individual and organizational benefits of the new technology will get everybody aligned and ready for the CDP implementation.

Read next: What is a CDP?

How M&T Bank successfully implemented a CDP from Third Door Media on Vimeo.

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.