In our previous post, we talked about how a CDP can help give you a better understanding of who your audience is and tailor their experience to match the stage of their journey with your organization. In this article we’ll show a few examples of how this works in practice.
The screenshots below are from a demo that we built out in just a few days using Lytics CDP focusing on the most common journey for new supporters.
1. From signing up to emails
When a potential supporter first comes to the website, typically the first thing we want them to do is to sign up for email. In the image below of the homepage of a fictional cat shelter, on the left side is what a potential supporter sees when they arrive at the page for the first time, with the signup CTA prominently positioned up at the top. That panel is controlled by a personalization module in the CMS, and the CDP is telling that module that the visitor is in the anonymous segment – meaning not identified as a known supporter – and therefore should see the email signup form.
Once the visitor submits the form with their name and email address – sharing first party data – they are no longer anonymous. The CDP instantly moves them out of the anonymous segment which signals to the personalization module to show a donation CTA in that block at the top of the page. Going forward, whenever this supporter returns to site, they will never see the email signup form again because the CDP knows they are already on the list. We expect this smarter use of the valuable homepage real estate will result in more donations, but it also signals to the supporter that the organization appreciates that they’ve signed up and is using their personal information in a respectful manner.
2. …to making their first donation…
Moving on in this journey, after submitting the email signup form, the supporter receives the first email in the welcome series. Our fictional cat shelter is in New York City, so perhaps this new supporter signed up on their laptop while at work, and now they are reading emails on their phone while on the subway home, seen on the left in the image below. When they click on the link in the email and return to the website, it will be their first time visiting the page from the browser on their phone. However, the CDP recognizes from a parameter in the email link that this is a known user and tells the CMS to show the donation CTA instead of the email signup CTA. The CTA even includes a personalized welcome message.
We often see these types of personalization when a supporter is linking from an email to a donation landing page because the platform serving the donation page is tightly integrated with the email sender. With a CDP, we can now coordinate the experience between email and the entire website.
Next, let’s look at what happens when the supporter gives their first donation.
3. …to taking the next step.
The CDP logs and time stamps the donation event, adding the donor profile to a “last donated within 90 days” segment. This allows the CDP to immediately tell the CMS to replace the CTA with the next level ask on the ladder of engagement. This could be a request for a larger donation – as seen below, the donation CTA now offers $15 as the lowest amount when previously it was $5. Alternatively, we could make a request to make the donation monthly. And if the supporter does not take another donation action within 90 days, the CDP can trigger the CMS to show a re-engagement CTA in this panel instead.
For email signup and donation use cases there are two important points to emphasize:
- The CDP orchestrates the website personalizations in real time, it does not need to wait to hear from the CRM to make a decision about the appropriate next step. This is important because typically CRM data syncs happen just once per day.
- The CDP can also share its profiles and segmentation data with other systems in real time, which can speed up the process for sending an email or retargeting ads. CDP-driven automations can replace manual workflows such as getting a supporter volunteering record from the CRM, pushing that audience to ads platforms, aligning it with email, and so on.
How to get started
A CDP can be a powerful addition to your organization’s martech stack, but one obstacle that we’ve heard from many clients is budget. Many of our clients have invested heavily in CRM and marketing platforms like Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud already, and an additional tool that starts at $60-90k per year simply puts adding a CDP to the platform out of reach.
In Q2 of 2024 we started a partnership with Lytics, a CDP built on Google Cloud Platform powering enterprise brands like Live Nation, Nestlé Purina and Tableau. To provide an affordable solution for the middle market, Lytics has launched a very robust free tier – providing 5 million tracked events per month – that takes the barrier of upfront cost off the table.
This has enabled Blue State to get started piloting CDP programs for our clients that are coordinated with our email campaign and paid media strategies. With turnkey integrations between Lytics and BigQuery, we’re excited to get started bringing web traffic data from Lytics into our analytics workflows. We’re also using Lytics to add lightweight personalization to WordPress and Drupal websites.
We’re also using Lytics to add lightweight personalization to WordPress and Drupal websites. Lytics has provided free personalization plugins for both Drupal and WordPress that let you quickly create the types of personalizations in the example above where the personalized content is authored directly in the CMS (most personalization tools require managing personalizations in an external platform).
We’re excited to partner with Blue State to bring the Lytics Personalization Engine built on Lytics Real-Time CDP to open source web platforms like WordPress and Drupal. This freemium offering is intended to help smaller enterprises – including nonprofits – transform their web CMS into Digital Experience Platforms, with easy access to real-time customer data, insights and personalization.
James McDermott, CEO, Lytics
If you’re looking to get started then please do reach out, we’d love to hear from you.