As a BlueConic customer, you’ll immediately learn the benefits of building personalized use cases to make the most of your CDP experience. A CDP use case, as outlined in the article What is a CDP use case?, describes the current state, target outcome, supporting activities, and relative complexity required to successfully reach your business goal.
For example, a publisher might implement a use case to increase the number of known profiles using targeted newsletter signups. Or a retailer might want to increase addressable audiences through data gathering and opt-ins.
Discovering what use cases to pursue and how to pursue them is not always an easy task—especially if your business has a multitude of goals—but it is much more attainable by using the guidelines and information below.
Planning your use cases
Successful use case discovery always begins with YOU. No matter if you’re just starting out with BlueConic or have been using it for a while, you should continually evaluate what you want to get out of your CDP and what is and isn’t possible based on the personnel and resources at your disposal.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you plan out your use cases:
- In plain language, what do we want to achieve?
- Who at our organization would be impacted?
- Are we looking to replace another system/method or do something brand-new?
- Do we have the right business stakeholders and technical people for this?
- Are there any roadblocks we’d have to overcome first?
It’s ok if you can’t answer all these questions at first, but with guidance from BlueConic, you’ll have a better idea of how to proceed based on business requirements and available resources.
Prepare
You are never alone in your use case discovery. To ensure that you're well-prepared for use case discovery, check out these BlueConic resources:
- The BlueConic CDP Readiness Assessment
- The webinar Top 5 CDP Use Cases to Drive Growth and Revenue in 2024
- Guides on CDP Use Cases in Retail, CDP Use Cases in Consumer Goods, CDP Use Cases in Financial Services, and CDP Use Cases in Media & Publishing
- The Top 12 CDP Use Cases guide
- The CDP Use Cases section of the BlueConic Knowledge Base
- The training course Maximizing CDP Value in BlueConic University
In addition, your BlueConic Customer Success Manager (CSM) specifically can help you plan out, identify, and/or refine the CDP use cases that are suited to your business goals.
Start simple and prioritize
When planning your use cases, always start simple. This isn’t a race, and you don’t need to have everything ready at once. Using a crawl-walk-run approach, begin with just a couple of ideas, then learn quickly, iterate, and replicate.
For example, you might start small with the simple goal of smarter customer engagement. This might lead to a broader use case to drive personalization on your website, which ultimately might lead to the specific use case of setting customized home pages for different users.
Tip: If you're beginning your journey with several potential use cases but don’t know where to start, prioritize your list based on urgency, business needs, and your ability to execute. Select two or three top-priority use cases and save the rest for later. What you'll learn from implementing those first few use cases will make any future implementations faster and easier.
Embrace practicality
Always gravitate toward use cases that support your organization's growth initiatives and overall strategic vision. Be wary of pursuing use cases that are:
- Oversized: You may have grand visions of a particular use case, but larger endeavors often take weeks of planning and building, and you may find after all that time and effort that it’s too complicated to pull off.
- Fun: You may push for use cases that sound fun and exciting, but there’s no guarantee these will move the needle when it comes to your business success.
Ensure alignment
Make sure your organization is aligned internally about particular use cases, and always have the right people in the room to offer insight. This can include:
- Project sponsors who can offer a high-level, strategic vision.
- Business stakeholders who can disclose untapped opportunities or pain points to resolve.
- Analytics team members who can assist with use case measurement.
- IT team members who can weigh in from a technical perspective.
Learn more about change management for your CDP implementation.
Workshopping your use cases
The following information will help you workshop your use cases and determine what is most practical and impactful.
Work through the BlueConic Use Case Framework
To more closely evaluate your use cases, fill out the BlueConic Use Case Consideration Worksheet. This document includes detailed questions for you to address–all pertaining to the BlueConic Use Case Framework, a series of eight components for successful use case discovery:
1. Objective
This section of the worksheet helps you narrow down what specifically you are trying to achieve, whom it will benefit, and how it aligns with a larger corporate objective. Questions include:
- What are you specifically trying to achieve with this use case (e.g., speed up a data process, improve your customer data quality, launch a new data-driven program)?
- Are there multiple components to this use case and/or adjacencies into new use cases?
- What are the short- or long-term goals for this use case (e.g., expected change for a critical KPI, revenue impact, operational benefit)?
- Who will this use case benefit (e.g., certain customer type, internal stakeholders, both)?
- Does this objective align with a larger transformational corporate objective (e.g., direct to-consumer revenue diversification, digital transformation, audience monetization)?
- Where is your organization today in terms of achieving this objective (e.g., starting from scratch; personnel, technology and/or processes already in place)?
2. Target audience
This section helps you better understand your audiences and personas and how and where you interact with them. Questions include:
- Who are you trying to market to? (The more specific you can be, the better.)
- Are there different levels or segments to this audience?
- What information is needed in order to consider an individual qualified for this audience? Or, how do you differentiate target audience from non-target audience?
- Where do you interact with this audience? What are all the customer touchpoints?
- Do you use metrics like recognition ratio or addressability to understand your audience?
3. Existing customer data
This section helps you look more closely at the customer data you use today that you can leverage for your use case. Questions include:
- What customer data do you utilize today to accomplish this goal? What are the quality, quantity, formats, and sources of this existing data?
- What is the current process, if any, you have to get this data into the right systems? Also, please list the systems/technology where this data is stored.
4. Customer data gaps
This section helps you uncover what data is missing to achieve this goal, why it's missing, and what you can do to fill those gaps. Questions include:
- What data are you missing that you need to execute your use case? For example, would you market to customers differently if you had frequent updates of order data or Salesforce data or if you could easily create custom audiences in Facebook?
- Is it missing because it’s non-existent or because it’s simply inaccessible for activation?
- To fill in any customer data gaps, what new data collection process, sources, scoring, and/or transformation is needed?
5. Segment definitions
This section helps you define the customer segments you use today and then refine those definitions if your customer data gaps were to close. Questions include:
- What customer segments do you use today, and how are they defined?
- Do you have an understanding of how those segment definitions might change if you were able to close customer data gaps or group data in new ways?
6. Marketing program scope
This section helps you evaluate any internal and external factors that might impact how you plan and manage your use case. Questions include:
- In what ways will this use case impact processes, resources, and planning?
- How are your data teams currently structured, and how do they interact? What teams own your existing customer data, and who is in charge of activation?
- What external constraints or considerations apply? For example, how will consumers’ consent preferences, data laws, and browser changes affect customer engagement?
- What does your legal team need to ensure compliance with any company policies and/or regional laws?
- What team will own or project-manage this use case?
7. Activation
This section helps you better assess where and how the use case will be activated and its fit into your overall customer engagement strategy. Questions include:
- Where and how will you activate this use case using CDP functionalities and/or other functionality in your technology stack?
- Will any third-party programs need to be connected? If so, what data should be shared with BlueConic?
- How will this use case fit into your overall customer engagement strategy?
8. Measurement
This section helps you determine how you will measure success, including the KPIs you'll use and your method for reporting results. Questions include:
- How will you measure success for this use case? What are your success metrics/KPIs?
- Are there base-level metrics you need to beat? If so, how do you achieve them today?
- Where and how will you report your results?
- What role does time play in determining success?
Workshopping example
As an example, an online publisher is looking to increase the number of subscribers to their arts and entertainment newsletter. For this newsletter acquisition use case, the publisher completes the eight sections of the Use Case Framework as such:
| Section | Publisher's tasks |
| Objective |
The use case goal is to increase the number of subscribers to an arts & entertainment newsletter by targeting highly anonymous readers who consume a lot of arts & entertainment content. The goal is to increase the number of subscribers to this newsletter by 10% this year. You can target these individuals with a lightbox that loads on the page after 30 seconds. Currently, ad overlays appear on page load, and you want to avoid having lightboxes covering up these overlays. You want to show this dialogue no more than once per week. Once the reader has subscribed to the newsletter, don't show the dialogue to them again. |
| Target audience |
Visitors who fit the following criteria:
|
| Existing customer data |
Your ESP stores all newsletter subscription data. In the ESP, you have email addresses, opt status, and the newsletters that they've subscribed to. When a newsletter subscriber clicks on an article in an email, the website link includes UTM parameters. You can use these UTM parameters to see which visitors are coming to the site from email marketing campaigns. Your ESP also includes a query string parameter in the URLs that includes a UUID for each subscriber. This UUID is generated by the ESP and can be used to match data between BlueConic and the ESP. |
| Customer data gaps |
The following data gaps currently exist:
|
| Segment definitions |
You're not currently defining this cohort. Here is how you can define this segment:
|
| Marketing program scope |
|
| Activation |
You will need to configure a BlueConic lightbox dialogue to target arts & entertainment visitors. You will also need to set up a connection to push new subscribers from BlueConic to your ESP. This data push will need to include both the email address and the newsletter that they subscribed to. |
| Measurement |
This use case will be successfully stood up when you can target anonymous readers who are interested in arts & entertainment with a targeted newsletter signup and can push their new subscriptions to the ESP. To measure the success of this use case, track the following:
You can measure these KPIs using BlueConic Insights. |
Collecting relevant data
If you are just starting out with a CDP, make sure to only collect and store data in BlueConic that you will use for your use case. You may be apt to collect every possible data point, but this can delay use case activation and increase time-to value.
As you continue to use BlueConic, you will undoubtedly bring in data over time, and you may even want to incorporate more data points into your use case once it's tested and live. (The flexibility of a CDP allows you to do this.) As a result, focus on bringing in a representative set of essential data to work with so you can shorten time-to-value and adapt how you proceed with your CDP.
Looking for inspiring CDP use cases?
See examples of how BlueConic customers use first-party data to power their CDP use cases. See the top CDP Use Cases for media and publishing, retailers, telecom, and financial services.