Client
Our client is an agency that provides full-cycle marketing automation, Martech stack building, and strategic marketing consulting to major US newspapers. Their entire clientele constitutes 60% media market share.
Challenge
The client utilized a multi-level customer engagement system, which consisted of multiple interconnected modules (paywall, checkout panel, self-service portal, campaign management module, etc). Each module collected restricted sets of a newspaper website user data. To adjust engagement strategies for each concrete user with high accuracy, all the data should have been centralized and organized within unified customer profiles.
Project Description
We developed a Cusomer Data Platform (CDP) that performs customer data aggregation from the following engagement system components:
- Paywall (an engine that restricts free content for a user)
- Self-service portal (that allows subscribers to autonomously resolve their subscription issues)
- Customer Service Portal (that allows subscribers to get guided support of a newspaper customer service team)
- Campaign Management Module (that enables ad campaigns management)
- Analytics module (that produced insights based on transactional and subscriptions data)
Additionally, CDP collected data from external services like authentication providers, email campaign service providers, payment providers, newspaper manufacturing and delivery processors (circ systems).
The CDP standardized a wide range of data from these modules (for both anonymous and authorized users), then merged it under single user ID to build a unified customer profile that allows for deep, individually tailored personalization.
The CDP works with diverse sets of data – the key of them you can explore below:
- Demographic data (e.g.age, location, gender, etc)
- Behavior data (activity on the newspaper website, such as clicks, pageviews, etc)
- Contacts (email, telephone, etc)
- Payment data and history (successful and failed payments, timely and missed payments, etc)
- Subscription history (subscription purchases, upgrades, downgrades, pauses, terminations, etc)
- Service delivery history
- Service issues and complaints history
- Emails within marketing campaigns send history
The consumer of the data aggregated within CDP is another module of the system – an Engagement Module (they communicate through an API). It works out a data-driven engagement strategy for a concrete user, based on all available data for it. For example, Engagement module can provide customized incentive, make a decision when to paywall a user, adjust subscription pricing and package, show personalized offers, and many more.
Key Features
Aggregation of visitor and subscriber data from 5+ data sources
Merging of anonymous (when using VPN, incognito, etc) and authorized data pieces per each user
Customer data centralization, creating a unified customer profile
Communication with Engagement module to enable personalization of customer experience, subscription offers, and promotions
Team & Time Frame
The project was successfully accomplished within a span of 12 months, with a team consisting of:
Front-end developer
Data engineers
Data scientist
Major Tech Stack
Google BigQuery, Mongo, Go, Python, TypeScript, Google Cloud
Results
The Customer Data Platform that we developed enables advanced personalization by aggregating and unifying visitor and subscriber data (including both anonymous and authorized activity) from various sources: internal martech ecosystem and external ones. The comprehensive customer profiles allow our client to deliver highly targeted and relevant content, offers, and experiences to each newspaper website visitor, facilitating conversions and subscriber loyalty.
