BlueConic: Empowering Marketers through Unified and Actionable Data

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Cory Munchbach, COO, BlueConicCory Munchbach, COO
With consumer data being captured across multiple systems and consumers moving faster than ever, it’s essential for marketers to consolidate that data and use it to transform their relationships with customers. While CRMs, data management platforms, marketing automation systems, and other tools can collect data from disparate sources, these systems fail to account for the volume, velocity, and variety that make up consumer data profiles in the digital era. For instance, creating rich customer segments and deploying models can be inordinately complicated for not-so-tech-savvy marketers, leading to time delays and heavy dependency on agencies, internal IT resources, and/or data scientists. With data locked in inflexible systems or in painful request backlogs, marketers can’t work efficiently or engage their customers effectively.

BlueConic is the pure-play customer data platform (CDP) that helps marketers liberate their first-party data and establish a comprehensive single customer view for use when and where they need it. Founded in 2010, the company provides marketers and their activation tools with access to first-party customer data that is both unified and actionable, so marketers can effectively orchestrate individualized experiences across channels. “Our focus is on empowering marketers to liberate the data stored in systems that they were not able to access before,” says Cory Munchbach, COO of BlueConic. “Marketers want to make their marketing better in a way that doesn’t come at the time and resource expense of relying on IT teams or external agencies. This is a huge benefit of using CDPs like BlueConic.”

In an interview with CIOApplications Magazine, Cory shares insights about the company and how its CDP makes it easier for marketers todeliver bespoke experiences in every customer lifecycle stage.

How does the BlueConic platform help marketers in leveraging meaningful and actionable data?

The very existence of a CDP like BlueConic is predicated on the idea of liberating customer data from systems that marketers previously didn’t have access to and unifying it in one place. The rich, actionable data that’s captured is stored in the form of a customer record, or profile, for each individual and their various attributes. This profile-centric approach enables marketers to tailor their tactics around customers themselves, versus traditional campaign- or system-based approaches. The profile data not only updates in real time, but it’s accessible in a way that makes sense to marketers so they can work more efficiently and ultimately, drive better outcomes. For instance, marketers can quickly and confidently query the data to buildmulti-dimensional segments, run predictive models to update customer scores (e.g. CLV, propensity to buy), and control where and how data is used by their marketing tools to orchestrate cross-channel experiences.

Could you elaborate more on how the BlueConic platform helps in personalizing the customer journey?

We firmly believe customers are in charge of their own journeys. A marketer’s primary role is to help facilitate these journeys and deliver an outcome that’s mutually beneficial to both the business and the consumer. To make these journeys seamless, marketers need to dynamically respond to where each individual customer or prospect is on their unique journey.

For example, let’s say a customer orders a piece of furniture, but it’s damaged when it’s delivered eight weeks later.

Our focus is on empowering marketers to liberate their customer data and transform their customer relationships

Marketers need to be sensitive to what happened and send an email or other communication that recognizes the customer’s frustration. If they don’t have access to this data, however, then they can’t take a more constructive role in building customer relationships or fostering loyalty outside of the immediate transaction window.

With BlueConic, marketers not only have a real-time, single customer view, but the ability to send that data across marketing systems so they can ensure all marketing interactions used to capture customers’ attention are relevant and timely — no matter where they are in their journey.

What are the features and functionalities of the BlueConic platform?

The platform is an integrated set of four core capabilities on top of a Cassandra database. Everything starts with the aforementioned unified profile that provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date record of what marketers know about their customers — both known and anonymous. The platform builds these profiles progressively in real
time using pre-built integrations with all the system in a modern martech stack.

From there, marketers can activate their profile data in a number of ways. For instance, marketers can define segments based on any combination of profile attributes and behaviors, and activate these segments across multiple channels to deliver the right messages to the right person at the right time based on their preferences and marketing’s priorities.

Marketers can also use the data to orchestrate their activities in a more coordinated fashion. To deliver the best experience, marketers need to sequence their messaging across all channels in a buyer’s journey — something other systems can’t do because of the limited data they store. By using the platform to orchestrate touchpoints across-channel in the context of lifecycle stages rather than channel-specific tactics, marketers can engage with customers in new and unique ways.

Lastly, marketers can use the platform’s user-friendly predictive models and analytics, powered by AI, toenrich profiles with customer scores, build smarter segments, and create new data visualizations.

Could you please cite a case study on how BlueConic helped its client overcome hurdles and attain the desired outcome?

Many of our customers use BlueConic for the operational efficiencies it enables – beyond just improved marketing outcomes. For instance, one of our entertainment customers had a large customer service team that handled questions from customers. Operationally, this was costing them a lot of man hours. With BlueConic, they are able to test specific messaging on their site that addressed many of these questions — ultimately reducing the number of calls to customer service and the company’s overhead costs related to customer service management.

This same company also previously relied on IT to make adjustments to the messaging on their site, which took a long time. Moreover, marketers at the company had to collect and send feedback back to IT to implement, creating even further delays. With BlueConic, the marketing team can now quickly update their site and messaging based on customer behaviors and preferences and measure the success of those changes without any help from IT.

How did BlueConic help marketers when in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Many of our customers had to make dramatic adjustments to their marketing programs when the pandemic hit. With BlueConic at the center of their martech stack, many were able to make sweeping changes to their entire web experience and email campaigns in a matter of days. It’s this flexibility that we’re most proud of. Modern marketing organizations need to be agile. With our platform, customers can make decisions that won’t lock them in. In other words, they won’t have to unwind months of work to be successful. We’re a true partner to our customers because we’re able to help them scale for today’s goals and tomorrow’s ambitions.

How is BlueConic aligning current strategies to build a comprehensive roadmap?

Our goal is to making marketers’ jobs easier while improving their results at the same time. Going forward, we will increase our focus on customer lifecycle orchestration, modeling, and all other aspects that liberate marketers from the captivity of old thinking, old process, and old technology and usher in new ways of operating that puts them in control of their most transformative asset: unified, actionable first-party data.

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