When it comes to CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) there’s a lot of confusion and fragmented information out there about which one to use and the use cases that they support. We’re settling on 3-4 options for all of our clients, as we did with e-commerce platforms. We are comfortable with this approach because it affords us the opportunity to get incredibly knowledgeable and experienced with those technologies we believe are best positioned to help our clients across a range of sizes and industries. They are Adobe, Bloomreach, Klaviyo and DotDigital. We are going to start “in the middle” and discuss in this post the reasons why we are making the commitment to become a leading solution provider for Bloomreach.
Bloomreach is a marketing technology stack with a focus on 3 products for 3 categories of digital marketing tasks:
- Engagement (CDP and personalization of marketing events)
- Discovery (merchandising, search)
- Content (CMS with headless-friendly architecture).
The below product architecture diagram helps to make sense of their products for first time viewers. They bill themselves as “a single flexible platform for customer data, marketing, AI, and analytics”. From our perspective, as a solution provider they are flexible, relatively easy to integrate, yet powerful and scalable for SMB and enterprises. While “Discovery” and “Content” are important products, we are focusing our description of the platform on “Engagement”, which lets merchants ingest, manage, and work with customer data so that the customer experience is personalized and relevant (as most consumers expect these days!)
Bloomreach: Easy to Use Yet Powerful.
We believe our merchant clients will be able to adopt the technology relatively quickly and get up to speed leveraging Bloomreach Engage to personalize their customer experiences relatively quickly. Bloomreach has a great balance of “ease of integration” and “powerful features.” The ease of use really stems from the admin GUI which, allows lightly trained (yes, you need to spend a few hours being trained first at Bloomreach Academy) marketers to begin working with customer data, creating segments and personalized events for customers quickly.
Like any other marketing technology that allows a marketer to control events, there’s a specific vocabulary and nomenclature that the user needs to get used to, but after they are familiar with that and the structure of the WYSIWYG data manipulator and filter creator, you can get very powerful queries and experiences structured very quickly.
How powerful? The system is very comfortable handling many millions of records in data sets for enterprises.
The Power of an API-Centric Architecture
The architecture of Bloomreach will enable us to easily integrate the platform across the many e-commerce and digital marketing architectures that we see on a daily basis across Wasserman clients. While some of our clients may prefer to stay a part of an integrated “suite” of products, we have evaluated and confirmed that the API-centric nature of Bloomreach will enable us to “plug in” the technology to composable and hybrid architectures alike with relative ease.
Furthermore given the infrastructure behind Bloomreach, we’re confident that we can use it to support the omnichannel customer management efforts of large global companies, including sports leagues and teams that are a large focus of Wasserman’s global engagements.
The Importance of Omnichannel to Wasserman and Our Clients
Bloomreach is our selected mid-tier technology partner for CDP / CXP solutions, and it will be especially powerful for Wasserman’s omni-channel clients including sports teams and leagues. Why? We will be able to instantaneously connect “live” and “digital” data together so we can achieve a 360 degree view of customers for these organizations; as well as manage their customer experiences in a relevant and personalized way via:
- Automated SMS
- Emailing
- Weblayers
- Product Recommendations
- Predictive Analytics, and more methods too.
Customers will be able to control their level of engagement and marketer clients will be able to customize powerful, relevant experiences across all the most important channels.
The Bottom Line
We are excited to be onboarding with Bloomreach as a certified solution partner (adding to a list of best in class partners that we’re very proud of), and we anticipate being completely trained and ready to integrate and work with the product on behalf of our clients by July 1, 2023.
It’s always been our way to identify common challenges and build custom solutions that can be scaled and leveraged by many of our clients – saving them time and money. With Bloomreach, we are already architecting a reference app that works for a number of our e-commerce merchant clients and we will be able to offer the technology to all types of clients at that point.
If you’d like to learn more about Bloomreach or CDPs in general, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
