firsthive

“We were at Shoptalk 2024”

“We were at Shoptalk 2024”

Guess what? We just got back from an amazing experience at Shoptalk 2024 in Las Vegas, and boy, was it a blast! Our team, including yours truly, Aditya Bhamidipaty, Founder & CEO, along with Rajendra Penna, Head of Business Development – USA, and Hal Bishop, our account executive, had an incredible time mingling with industry experts, thought leaders, and fellow enthusiasts. The event kicked off with a bang as we sponsored the welcome reception at TopGolf, Las Vegas. It was fantastic to see so many faces from top brands in attendance, all eager to share insights, discuss trends, and build connections. FirstHive at Shoptalk: (L-R) Hal Bishop AE, FirstHive and Aditya Bhamidipaty, CEO, FirstHiVE Day 1 wrapped up with an epic evening of food, drinks, and golf, setting the tone for the exciting days ahead. And let me tell you, the next two days were nothing short of exhilarating. We dove headfirst into knowledge sessions, discussions, and meetings, soaking in every bit of information and inspiration. One highlight was Aditya’s deep dive into topics like omnichannel experience delivery and the importance of keyword-based optimization. His insights sparked engaging conversations and added valuable perspectives to the mix. We’re thrilled to have been part of such an iconic event, and we’re already looking forward to next year. Until then, here’s to continued growth, learning, and making meaningful connections!

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In Spotlight: FirstHive Communication Threshold

In Spotlight: FirstHive Communication Threshold

“Welcome to ‘In Spotlight,’ an exclusive section of our newsletter dedicated to exploring the diverse range of feature sets offered by FirstHive. Join us as we delve into the innovative tools and functionalities that empower businesses to unleash the full potential of their customer data and marketing strategies.” What is FirstHive Communication Threshold? The FirstHive Communication Threshold feature empowers marketers to establish limits on the number of communications that an individual, whether a prospect or customer, receives from the brand within a specified timeframe. This functionality provides a crucial mechanism for managing and optimizing communication strategies, ensuring that recipients do not experience communication fatigue or overload. Why Do You Need It? Prevent Over-Communication Fatigue: Over-communication fatigue occurs when individuals receive an excessive volume of messages from a brand, leading to disengagement, annoyance, and ultimately, a negative impact on brand perception. By implementing communication thresholds, marketers can mitigate this risk by setting reasonable limits on the frequency of communications, thereby maintaining audience interest and receptivity.Enhanced Control and Coordination: In organizations with multiple brand teams or departments, there is a heightened risk of inadvertently bombarding individuals with redundant or conflicting messages. The Communication Threshold feature provides centralized control at the organizational level, allowing for better coordination and alignment of communication efforts. By establishing clear limits on the number of communications each individual receives, brands can optimize message impact and avoid diluting their messaging effectiveness. Overall, the FirstHive Communication Threshold feature empowers marketers to strike a balance between engagement and restraint, ensuring that communication efforts are targeted, impactful, and conducive to building positive customer relationships. Fig. 1: FirstHive communication Threshold feature How to set-up FirstHive communication Threshold feature? To Set Up Communication Threshold: Go to Admin >> Click Communication Settings Enter the Communiation Frequency >> Select Day/Month from the drop-down >> Select Channel from the drop-down, whether SMS/Email/WhatsApp >> Select the Sender Id from the drop-down >> Click Save Click on the plus icon to set more Communication Frequencies

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Celebrating 5 Years of FirstHive: A Journey of Growth, Resilience, and Success

Celebrating 5 Years of FirstHive: A Journey of Growth, Resilience, and Success

Early this year, on February 8th, 2024, we celebrated a significant milestone at FirstHive – our 5-year anniversary. In the unpredictable landscape of startups, reaching such a mark is indeed special, as it signifies overcoming numerous “Growing Pains.” According to research by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 70% of new businesses fail to reach this milestone. Reaching this stage is a testament to the hard work and perseverance behind closed doors. What has sustained our growth over the past 5 years is a product – our Customer Data Platform – that remains relevant in today’s marketplace, with its demand growing among businesses of all sizes. Additionally, we have a team of passionate individuals, seasoned operators, and supportive customers who collectively propel the company forward. Throughout our journey, we’ve been supported by individuals and organizations who believed in our vision and were willing to invest in our capabilities. As we prepared for the event to celebrate this milestone, the office and teams buzzed with an extra dose of energy. Volunteers and collaborators from all teams came together to organize an event of scale, with over 100 attendees, including employees, customers, investors, partners, and members of the FirstHive community. The event kicked off with a CEO address by Aditya Bhamidipaty. During his speech, he walked us through our humble beginnings to our current scale, expressing gratitude to all who contributed to our success over the past 5 years. We took the opportunity to recognize members who have been part of the FirstHive journey since its inception. For a hyper-scaler startup like ours, it’s rare to have such a large share of the founding team continue their journey with the company. We are lucky to have so many team members who have shown passion and perseverance towards FirstHive’s growth. Additionally, we presented value awards to individuals who have championed our company’s values over the past year. The award ceremony concluded with “Fun Awards,” with winners voted by popular choice. From the “social addict” award to the “human megaphone” award, laughter filled the room as we celebrated the unique quirks and talents of our team members. During the celebration, we hosted several exciting sessions. We were joined by Neetan Chopra, Chief Digital Officer of Indigo Airlines, for an interactive session delving into the transformation of the Martech space, the central role of CDPs driving this change, and the future of our partnership in delivering exceptional customer service. Another highlight was a panel session featuring key team members from different departments, sharing their personal journeys and highlighting the impact FirstHive has had on their growth. The day ended with cocktails and dinner, where team members and stakeholders mingled and networked. At FirstHive, we are overwhelmed with the support and love we have received along our journey. We remain committed to growing and being partners in our customers’ growth and success stories.

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Introducing Future of Marketing!

Introducing Future of Marketing!

Years back, marketers would run a campaign, and pray. Pray that the media mix chosen would work, Pray that the optimal set of consumers would see the ad, and Pray that a few of them would be compelled to initiate the action envisioned in the ad. Digital heralded new channels, platforms, and solutions but still 2% – 8% conversions on campaigns remained the norm. Cut to 2016 and we wonder how much things have really changed. Marketing, as we fundamentally know it, is broken. Marketing is perhaps the only field where a 90% failure rate is acceptable. Think about it. Where else have you come across a scenario where spending money and getting a 10% conversion was acceptable? Doesn’t this mean that 90% of the money we spend goes wasted? Skeptics may be quick to point that this is only because they cannot predict which are the 10% that will lead to a conversion, at the start of a campaign. Ever pondered, why this is accepted as the status quo? This was among the questions keeping us up during the nights, and our clients today tell us that we have the solution. FirstHive was born of this desire to enable the evolution of marketing and make marketing accessible and relevant to our users. Our proprietary algorithms enable brands to create better and more impactful campaigns, which resonate with their consumers resulting in more likes, shares, click-throughs, walk-ins, and ultimately sales. This is why some of the largest brands in the world, across multiple sectors, are today using FirstHive to forward their marketing and business objectives across millions of shoppers and customers. So, come! Experience the difference. We welcome you to the future, today!

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How FirstHive Big Data Integration Will Help Marketing, Customer Retention & Loyalty

How FirstHive Big Data Integration Will Help Marketing, Customer Retention & Loyalty

Big data is often considered to be something that is mystical, magical and indeed esoteric that only tech geeks understand. Do you also think so? Are you too struggling to get a sense of big data and what it has in store for you? Big Data, though complex when you actually want to make the best use of it; but is easy to understand. It is mountains, waterfalls, oceans of data. Big data in a real sense is just data referenced to in ‘big’ amounts. On the contrary, flipping and seeing the complex side of it, the term “big data” also refers to the challenges, capabilities, and competencies associated with storing and analyzing such huge data sets to support a level of decision making that is more accurate and timely than anything previously attempted. It inspires big-data-driven decision making. While capturing and collecting data is one side of the story, it is the insights derived from big data, the decisions you make and the actions you take that make all the difference. Historically, there were people with very specific skill sets, called data scientists, who could interpret big data to convert it into useful marketing information. Only large enterprises could afford services of these data scientists. But, with development in technology, growing reach of the internet and more and more enterprises making ‘digital’ as their core; things have changed. These developments have provided an effective environment for building our big data analytics product, FirstHive. Big Data for everyone FirstHive, our SaaS based technology products platform, works with big data and brings substantial impact in the key area of integrated marketing management strategy. With FirstHive, it is possible for the enterprises of all sizes, across all sectors, to reap the benefits of big data. FirstHive is using the high invention to provide Big data analytics for its customers. FirstHive Big Data Power The ultimate goal of FirstHive is to utilize the power of big data to help enterprises achieve business objectives. FirstHive integration empowers the brands to engage better with its customers, retain its customers, convert customers into brand advocates, optimize the marketing processes, and manage their multi channel marketing campaigns. Customer engagement FirstHive with big data can deliver insights into not just who your customers are, but where they are, what they want, how they want you to contact them and when they want to be contacted. Customer retention and loyalty FirstHive with big data can help you discover what influences customer loyalty and what keeps them coming back again and again. Marketing optimization/performance FirstHive with big data can help you determine the optimal marketing spend across multiple channels, as well as continuously optimize marketing programs through testing, measurement and analysis. Multichannel campaign management FirstHive enables you to define, orchestrate and communicate offers to customers across websites, mobile, social, direct mail, call centers, and email. Digital marketing, which continues to be integrated with campaign management, includes addressable branding/advertising, contextual marketing, and transactional marketing. Digital marketing extends the marketing process through channels such as the Web, video, mobile and social applications, point-of-sale terminals, digital signage, and kiosks. Bigger marketing with FirstHive FirstHive’s goal is to allow its customers to quickly visualize key patterns and behaviors so they can better anticipate and refine strategies in real-time. Aimed at marketers and business analysts, FirstHive is designed to process large volumes of unstructured and structured data from varied sources and deliver meaningful information.

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FirstHive Cross-Channel Marketing Platform is now Live!

FirstHive Cross-Channel Marketing Platform is now Live!

The way consumers and brands interact with each other is evolving. While a large brand would try and achieve the capability to track and analyse the data generated across the multitude of touchpoints, smaller brands and businesses struggle with far more basic concerns. The SMEs are not typically involved in tracking millions of consumer transactions but are more involved in how to have a more meaningful engagement with the set of prospects or customer leads that they possess. Optimising their Marketing ROI is of prime focus while higher conversions and retentions are obviously the goal. This is where a platform like FirstHive DIY comes into play. While this technology was currently exclusive to the domain of very large global brands, with the launch of the Beta of the FirstHive DIY product, the same technology is now available for SMEs globally. This  means that a small or medium business owner or marketer, be it across retail, hospitality, or professional services, can utilize this product. The marketers can now leverage the power of cross-channel marketing to improve their customer experience, and in turn, improve their top and bottom lines.   What does this mean for Email marketing?  Remember the time that you would send out bulk mails to your entire prospect list and pray for a conversion. This was independent of whether the prospect was interested in your product, whether the prospect had ever engaged with you on this channel, when was the best time to send someone a mail, or thinking about if there was a better way to nudge this user towards your business objective. FirstHive enables actionable dashboards and intelligence pulled out across channels to enable you to get the optimal target list to send a campaign.  The built-in segmentation tool ensures that you send out the communication only to the relevant recipients, who may have a higher propensity to convert as compared to others. What does this mean for SMS marketing? In a nutshell, it implies that a global reseller sitting in Jakarta can engage with his customers using multiple local long codes and still ensure complete control over the communication going out to his customers, while receiving comprehensive dashboards and reports. Or that a UK-based travel business will coordinate with all their US partners, using a local US long code, while viewing all interactions in a consolidated dashboard. SMS marketing has never been simpler.   What does this mean for social media channels management? Simple, single interface management of all your social conversations – this is what FirstHive means for social channel management. Use FirstHive for engaging with your customers and followers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, while maintaining a unified dashboard view to help you gauge the most effective channel, depending on your objectives. We have just unveiled the first curtain of many. The woods are lovely, dark and deep,. But we have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep. So, have you thought about setting up your FirstHive?

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FirstHive @ PNGrowth2016

FirstHive @ PNGrowth2016

‘Omwana ni wa bhone’ – a famous African proverb meaning: “ Regardless of a child’s biological parents, its upbringing belongs to the community” A cold November morning, we drove down to Devanhalli on the outskirts of Bangalore, having blocked three days to be a part of PNGrowth2016. Reading about the previous version of PNGrowth & the regular updates  coming in from Avinash, we could not wait to be there. We were hungry to learn from the journeys of other Indian products that traversed the same path successfully. We reached the venue around 9 am and it could not have been a better start – a cup of hot tea, networking with the other founders from across the sub continent and some french cricket to break the ice (more so when we won our match! :)). The formal sessions kicked off with Shankar / Aneesh / Pallav / Shekhar / Girish setting up the context and inspiring to see the passion from Sharad for achieving iSpirit’s vision. It was already clear what mammoth effort must have gone into bringing together such stellar leaders from the the Indian Product startup space in a single room. I realised that while our asses might get kicked in these three days by this group, we were definitely going back with actionable learnings to help us grow 10X! FirstHive was part of the Global SMB cohort with 12 other founders. With Girish (FreshDesk) and Suresh (KissFlow) as our coaches, we could not have asked for anyone better! Shankar and Aneesh took us through this session by filling in the framework for their business with generous inputs from Girish. “Bullshit!” – this word resonated many a times in the conference room that first session in various cohorts but it was accompanied by sharp inputs & perspective by the respective cohort mentors! I loved this concept so much, we are using it @FirstHive in our meetings 🙂 (hopefully we will slowly not have to use it that often!).  The frameworks given to succinctly define our value prop stumped many of us, led to much introspection among most founders. As we got past the critical “Who Am I?” question, Girish and Aneesh took to the stage and walked us through what does 10X scale look like. They challenged us to imagine and define this for our respective products. Metrics and mistakes shared with respect to their growth stories made this session very relatable and actionable. The insights on the Top of the Funnel drops (TOFU), Middle of Funnel leakages (MOFU), and closure challenges, including delving into sales challenges, team structures, compensation best practices were invaluable. For us at FirstHive, this session could not have come at a better time as our internal goal was to scale 3X in 2017! Manav and Shekhar sessions following this on sizing your market was interesting, because it gave us two different ways to look at the market, product expansion, TAM and how success can be achieved. The impact of market size on the size of your business was a recurring lesson and the important of defensibility forced us to evaluate the ‘hard to replicate’ levers for our business. There was also the quintessential point on timing that Shekhar went into and how different companies dealt with this. The learnings from Aneesh on how he created his sales plan and achieved success in new markets with Capillary, Girish speaking of the challenges faced in scaling Freshdesk, and Suresh sharing the sales process that worked for him at KissFlow, Shekhar walking us through how a VC potentially looks at businesses or sectors, Pallav walking us through everything including factors that aid the result oriented culture at FusionCharts were invaluable. Nags (24/7) and Raghu (Taxi4Sure) walked us through their respective successes and a good glimpse into what rapid scaling could mean. Phani (RedBus) spoke to culture, defensibility of a low margin business, speaking of how and his team travelled in buses (to ensure they eat their own dog food at RedBus) and Sanjay Anandram’s story of passion to coming back to India to ignite the nascent startup industry and Sanjay Deshpande’s journey in deep tech were inspirational. Mohit’s story of how Carwale happened and culture was absolutely amazing and how important culture was to building an organisation from an idea. Pallav helped our cohort with his examples of product / market choices and culture and we found comfort in his point that sometimes good choices are retrospectively self-evident. But most founders were probably in a similar state as us – optimistic, a little confused but above all, very hungry to succeed that led to innovation & jugaad. The whole event was wrapped up with each of the founders presenting a curated pitch to their respective cohorts which was followed by a peer review. Some of us including FirstHive were given the opportunity to  present in front of all the cohorts which helped us get some more feedback. But my note will be incomplete without a mention of the fantastic after event party where everyone hung out, loads of informal interaction & some collaboration opportunities were identified. It also would not have been easy for everyone to take three days off from their businesses & families to  spend time grooming potential future success stories like FirstHive and for this we shall remain indebted to them. Growth Hacking after PNgrowth We left the venue very very tired (less than 8 hours of sleep in 3 days) but our hearts were pounding & our minds were brimming with ideas – thanks to a wealth of new information, learnings that we had to internalise and apply to our business. We had to put together a 45 day GrowthHack plan for FirstHive incorporating as many ideas as we could from PNGrowth! So we set out three days of sessions with our leadership – our VP Engineering, VP Products and our VP Sales. We did similar exercises, used the frameworks, shouted out BullShit many times and eventually got to a plan for FirstHive! We are now pursuing a master list of 8 initiatives across the company: Our singular goal – get ready for 3X growth in 2017! iSPIRT’s  mission is to transform India into a nation where the best of breed global products will germinate from and with PNGrowth they have truly provided us at FirstHive and all the others who were there, with the tools to go ahead & take “ pandas  in the global marketplace. We  hope to say our thanks by making FirstHive a leader in the B2C Cross Channel Marketing space. If there is one thing that was exceptional about PNGrowth, to me it was True learning – No halos, no facades, no bullshit! Honest dialogues with real examples from folks who traversed the same path which were are on today. The willingness of these founders to openly share their internal growth numbers and metrics that can help us benchmark our business, sharing with us mistakes made to ensure that we do not repeat those – this was truly ‘Omwana ni wa bhone’ in practice.

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Marketing Technology: 2016 in Review and what to focus on in 2017

Marketing Technology: 2016 in Review and what to focus on in 2017

It’s that time of year again when brands and marketers dust off their crystal balls and try to predict the coming year. Yes, this is one such blog too. But we have a different methodology: we are not putting out our opinion but our customer’s data to back our claims. We spoke to our customers to find out their area of focus in marketing technology in the year of 2017. And the results were interesting, to say the least. First, let me give you the profile of our customers. They belong to Small and Medium sized business category, having employee strength of around 500-3500 and having annual revenues between $25 Mn – $500 Mn. Most of them are located in United States, Australia, Canada and UK. We spoke to 452 such businesses to find out what was the concern when they started the new year and what will they focus on going into 2017, with respect to marketing technology, of course. Here is a quick snapshot of their two answers: When SMB marketers started 2016, they were pretty focused on exploring mobile platform to reach out to their customers and be heard. In one of our blogs earlier this year, we have mentioned that a person checks his phone 85 times a day, on average. That is what was most intriguing for the marketers. The second area of focus was to use technology in automating marketing for their customers. This is interesting as we have seen our customers getting surprising results in winning new customers as well as gaining repeat customers, just by personalizing messages and sending them at the right time. Marketing automation offers tremendous opportunities when done right, maybe that is why it is the most focused area for marketers for the coming new year. Let’s check out their shift in focus for the new year: Customer experience and personalization are the two most important focus points with all the marketers. That was redundant to be given as an option choice. Rather, we asked them what technologies are they focusing on to design amazing personalized experience for their customers. Here is a snapshot of the survey result: Marketing Automation: Learned from the past, good marketing automation can create seamless and personalized customer experience by letting a platform deal with new and returning visitors. If you set your rules right, there’s no loopholes and your customers are entertained individually, one-to-one (which is the best experience your customers are looking for). So, the marketing automation technology will the primary focus of marketers going into 2017. Mobile Marketing: Although slipped to the second spot as their focus, marketers just cannot put the mobile phones away. Well, who can? There’s a lot lot of opportunities for a marketers to reach its audience over the small screen device. Beside the traditional text SMS (which is still the most profitable way), they are taking on social media. Even social media companies are constantly updating their apps with new features that creates a good advertising platform. Did you think ‘Live’ feature on Facebook was introduced for the muggles like you and me? Big Data: Isn’t it odd that we are still talking about big data in 2017? I guess, no. Still there’s a need to shake and filter customer’s behavior data to squeeze out most critical and actionable information. Marketers don’t want to lose out on any vital information about their customer that might cost them a deal. So, they turn to technology. Applications like FirstHive collect customer data and present most relevant information so that marketers can talk to customers with a right message at a right time. Content Marketing: Marketers are ready to take content marketing more seriously in the coming year. As one of them said, “Just content cannot be the king, but a content in right context is the new king”, they know how important it is to create relevant content and share it with the prospects. Also, the form in which the content is served is important. Like going forward, videos will be the major form of content consumption. Videos have worked extremely well in the past for our customer, mainly because it’s more engaging, explanatory, fast and easy to consume. Internet of Things: Imagine a world where everything in your view is connected to a single network. You will have single point of command over your stuffs. But that’s not the point. IoT brings tremendous marketing opportunity. If you are milk seller, and your customer’s refrigerator notifies you every time that they are running out of milk, won’t you love that. IoT, of course, is the next big thing, but still very nascent today. I expect marketers put more focus on this amazing technology next year. AI and Chatbots: Very similar to marketing automation, artificial intelligence is gaining the limelight slowly. AI has a huge potential in terms of creating real-time customer experience. Take chatbots for example. Chatbots can talk to your customers as a real person and address to their queries quite fine. Again, Facebook messenger has this feature to provide you AI power. I can’t resist mentioning the Jarvis, the AI personal assistant, developed by Mark Zuckerberg, which takes the AI technology to another level and will be in the mainstream in next couple of years. Feels like Tony Stark already? Search Engine Optimization: Talking about future, let’s not leave the past behind. SEO is still in the focus list of marketers and the fight to rank first continues. Getting visitors organically is good, both cost-wise and quality-wise. So, SEO thingy is not going to get off the list pretty soon. In 2017, try to keep your content relevant and use keywords which you think your customers use. Don’t flood your website with keywords and irrelevant content. That’s counter-productive since the search engines are getting smarter. Do you agree with the views or have something else as your focus point in marketing? Let us know in the comments below.

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Power of Single Customer View and How to Achieve It!

Power of Single Customer View and How to Achieve It!

According to IBM, every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data in any language. That’s a lot of data. I actually had to look up quintillions in Google.This one challenge with the data is the scale and the volume. The other issue is the rate at which we’re creating data. Over ninety percent of the world’s data has really been created in the last two years, so it’s explosive in terms of growth and that’s why Big Data has hit us hard and it will be a  challenge for all of us to keep track of where does it come from. Well, it’s a whole host of different channels from a marketing perspective and one of the key growth areas is social media. Every tweet, every post on Facebook, every like, every interaction on linkedin is creating some form of data that is stored somewhere. Another source of data could be communications. So for example, any text you send, any email you send,  any electronic communication you make is creating data that’s going to be stored somewhere. The source could also be something like pictures or videos. For example, those of us who take pictures and upload them to flickr or other social networks to show our friends and family, again it’s creating data and it’s being stored somewhere. The source could be traditional things like purchase transactions. For instance, you go to Walmart and buy your groceries. That information is captured and put into a database. It could be some our GPS signals and geolocation. It is relevant for marketers to work out where people are and delivering communications to them based upon where they are at that moment in time. So we’ve got a whole host of different sources. It’s important to learn the source because as a marketer if you’re going to do something with the data you need to understand how it’s actually coming at you. Digital app, social media, mobile and tablets – this is where most of the data, in terms of the marketing function, has come from and it’s got to the point now where we have got masses of data available to us and it presents an opportunity for marketers. If we can basically take this data and harness and do something with it, it has got some opportunities. What is Single Customer View? Single customer view  is a holistic view of your customer and prospect and it’s being able to look at them in their entirety. I might go into a shop and buy something, and what I do in that shop could be put in a database somewhere. I might interact with that organization via my mobile phone or smartphone in some ways, perhaps with an App. I might interact with them online. I might email them a query. I might send them a letter (people still send letters) or I ring them up. All the ways I interact could be recorded in different databases. For a business to get that single holistic view of me, they need to tie that all together and put into one place. That will give them a single customer view. Tesco is a good example of an organization that really has gone some way to achieving that by using their loyalty card. So if you interact with them using your loyalty card, they can tie it all back. You’ll read more about it a bit later. Benefits of Single Customer View Customers can be managed better and it can increase brand loyalty: Say I bank with Barclays. If they have have a single view of me, that personally enhances my customer service levels because essentially they’re going to manage me better and I’m gonna get better customer service. So there are business benefits and there are customer benefits. Cost reductions: I may be receiving communications from the same business but in different places. I may be getting duplicated communications. By reducing the number of communications, there’s a cost saving for the business because they’re not having to spend so much on contacting me for the same things. And I don’t keep getting confusing offers. More accurate campaign execution: If you’ve got that single view of the customer, you understand them better. You can then start to target them more effectively, and the message is more relevant. For example, a bank sends a different sorts of offers on loans to a customer over multiple channels. Finally, when the customer rings up Bank, Bank turns him down due to his low credit score. Beside the embarrassment, there’s so much cost involved by Bank in communicating to that customer without knowing that he is not credit-worthy. A single customer view helps there. Challenges with big data and creating Single Customer View There’s a recent survey conducted by the US marketing association where top 1000 CMOs were interviewed to find out what their thoughts were and how big data could be a benefit to marketing. The largest benefit they said, which is fairly obvious, is gaining better insights of customer behaviour. The benefit that CMOs perceive in terms of harnessing big data is to drive better campaign response and conversion rates because if you’ve got data and you can do something with that you can actually influence the performance of your campaigns and that obviously gives you more ROI. It all sounds great but there are some challenges as well in terms of harnessing what we can do. So the same group of people were surveyed to see what they thought the biggest challenges were and one of the biggest challenges was being able to analyze and mine and gain that insight into the data. Another survey that’s done by the Columbia Business School found that over ninety percent of corporate marketers believe that successful brands uses data effectively. They also found that there’s a desire out there to be data driven but when it actually comes to practice, there’s a massive gap. The study also found out that marketers are collecting traditional data like demographics and transaction data. The challenge for marketers is how to collect digital data such as social media content. Digital data is difficult to link back to customer. In digital perspective, you can identify people in three ways – you’ve got login processes, you can use personalized URLs, and you can use cookies. That’s the traditional way of identifying people who interact with you online. Anonymous data: These are people who are coming to our websites. We can’t identify them. Apps like Google Analytics rely on the IP address to basically identify visitors coming into our websites and it’s still fairly anonymous. Google Analytics gives us good feedback but it’s still anonymous so it’s hard to build a relationship with people you don’t know. It’s impossible. Recognized data: These are people who might interact as log in user and we can identify who they are. The depths of the relationship that we have with them is greater because we know who they are, but again it’s not as deep as it could be. The challenge for digital data is really to look at this anonymous group and essentially generate data connectivity. If you’re from UK, you are familiar with Tesco’s loyalty card. They use their club card loyalty program to help identify who we are. If we go into Tesco and pay cash, they can’t tie that transaction to us or if we use credit card they’re not allowed to do that. But as soon as we apply a loyalty card they tie the transaction to us as an individual and they can start to build up a transactional history as to what we’re buying as individuals. That works great if we go online to buy from them again. They can link us back and put it in the database. But if I tweet something about Tesco or stick something on Facebook, they can track that but they can’t link it back to me as an individual. For example, like on twitter, my twitter name is not easily identifiable to them and no one can actually link that back. So there’s a big gap between between the digital space and the data that’s being collected. In the social media space, it’s much harder to tie customer data back and get a whole picture of of your customers and prospects. There’s a certain lack of data connectivity when it comes to a single customer view. FirstHive shifting the marketing paradigm There are very very few platforms in the world today that carries intelligence to integrate data collected over multiple channels and give you a single window view of your customers. FirstHive is one of them. FirstHive’s proprietary algorithm collects all the available data and personas about your customer from multiple touchpoints and creates a unified view of your customer. FirstHive has already helped big B2C brands to learn actionable insights about their customers. Marketers use FirstHive to create customer identities and run personalized cross-channel automation campaigns. FirstHive has also launched its SaaS-based DIY platform, and is helping  mid-size businesses too to get control over their customer data, together with large enterprises. TL;DR Use the single customer view effectively to get a competitive advantage over those that don’t. If you have multiple channels, you’re gonna be collecting lots of different data in lots of different places and if you can put all that data together into one place, your marketing will be more effective.

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CDP VS DMP, What Should I use?

CDP VS DMP, What Should I use?

CDP VS DMP, what should I use? A question all Marketers ask. With CDP evolving, Marketers using DMP are not sure whether they now need a CDP and if CDP is any different than DMP. We get this questions a lot and we hope by the end of this read you will be able to make that wise decision Note: This is a very generalized view of DMP and CDP (from FirstHive perspective). Since not all DMPs are created equal, if you have specific questions about a particular DMP, we can go deeper based on our clients’ experiences.

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