In the business world, marketers need to know who their visitors are. The Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (Real-Time CDP) lets you “know your visitor.” But you cannot implement Real-Time CDP until you overcome critical technical and business challenges.

What is Adobe Real-Time CDP?

The Real-Time CDP is one of the essential applications in the Adobe Experience Cloud, along with other data insight and customer journey applications such as Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target.

Adobe Real-Time CDP is part of the Adobe Experience Cloud.
From “Real-Time Customer Data Platform overview.”

Together, these applications let marketers combine two types of data:

  • Anonymous data from website visitor browsing activities, and from other sources.
  • Known data from customer records.

This combination of data lets you personalize your prospect experience at scale and truly know your visitor.

Know your visitor: a personalization example

Take the example of Luma, an athletic apparel company that doesn’t want to subject customers to ads for products they will never purchase. To show the right ads, Luma needs to unify data from multiple sources.

  • They must work with all the different teams that control data sources, including the teams managing data from the website, mobile app, loyalty systems, and CRM.
  • In addition, they must obtain data at the person level, not the channel level.
  • Finally, they must have data that is up-to-date.

Data unification begins at the first touchpoint, when a prospect first visits the website. As the unknown visitor scans website pages, Adobe Analytics collects data and sends it to Adobe Experience Platform.

At some point a prospect may choose to place an item in their shopping cart. To achieve this, they must log in to their existing account.

Merging anonymous and known data to know your visitor

At the moment the prospect logs in, Adobe merges the two identities so you can know your visitor:

  • the anonymous browsing data, plus
  • the existing data associated with the visitor’s account
Data from the Luma website lets you know your visitor.
From “Getting Started with Real-Time Customer Data Platform.”

After this merge, the marketers at Luma now have a unified view of the customer, and more complete customer information governs future interactions.

  • The visitor may have been looking at men’s shoes.
  • Login data shows the visitor is female.
  • Past purchase history shows that she previously bought shoes as gifts for her husband.

The new information controls the visitor’s future interactions on the website, in the loyalty app, and elsewhere.

And if she leaves the website without purchasing, she could even receive an app alert or email asking if her husband needs new running shoes.

How much personalization do your visitors want?

How will prospects and customers respond to such personalization?

It depends.

  • Some customers may welcome a personalized experience, and will appreciate the reminders that their husband’s running shoes may be due for replacement.
  • Other customers may consider such personalization “creepy” and will react negatively. You can “know your visitor” TOO well.

In effect, the level of personalization with each visitor is itself a form of personalization. Based upon each person’s data, Adobe Real-Time CDP can adjust the experience to the visitor’s preferences and level of comfort, thus ensuring an optimum browsing experience—and increased sales.

Adobe Real-Time CDP challenges

There are two major challenges to achieving this level of personalization.

First, there is the technical challenge of gathering the data from disparate information sources so that Adobe Experience Cloud can access and process it.

Second, there is the business challenge of establishing how this data will be treated for each individual visitor.

  • Will the marketers implement a rule-based approach to determine how data should be treated?
  • Or will marketers implement a more flexible risk-based approach to make these determinations?

While the rule-based vs. risk-based decision is often found in applications such as anti-money laundering (AML), it can just as easily be applied to other types of decision-making.

Overcoming Adobe Real-Time CDP challenges

If your company does not have the in-house resources to overcome both the technical challenges and the business challenges, expert coaching from KBWEB Consult may provide the solution you need.

We offer you our knowledge of Adobe Experience Manager and related tools, and our in-depth experience from supporting other customers in the past.

If you truly want to “know your visitor” through the use of Adobe Real-Time CDP, schedule a free, confidential 30-minute consultation with KBWEB Consult. You can book a meeting on our Let’s Talk page.