Introducing the Optimizely Data Platform (ODP): All your data in one place

According to Forbes and KPMG, 84% of CEOs are concerned about the quality of their data. Some of the most common problems include missing key data or dealing with out-of-date information, incorrect or unverified data, and a lack of insights garnered from the data. One way of solving these problems is to have dedicated resources for data management, or a Customer Data Platform (CDP) – a packaged software that allows you to create a single view of your customers and prospects. 

One of the major players in the CDP industry until very recently was Zaius, Optimizely’s newest acquisition in 2021. The company integrated Zaius’ product into the Optimizely platform and rebranded it as the Optimizely Data Platform to further reinforce its digital experience platform capabilities. In this article, we’re going to explain what the Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) is and how this platform can transform your data as well as your business. 

1. What is the ODP? 

ODP stands for Optimizely Data Platform. It’s a CDP, a tool that stores and creates unified customer profiles. With the ODP, companies can see what users are doing on multiple platforms - including their websites and apps - in a holistic, single view. 

With this platform, you can boost customer experience by adding layers of content and insights to data instead of wasting hours on data pulls and custom data integration. 

2. So, what can you do with the ODP? 

With the Optimizely Data Platform, you and your team can automate your tasks with 4 processes: 

• Collecting data: The ODP collects data from almost any programs including CRM (customer relationship management) tools, payment systems as well as email campaigns.  
• Governing data: The ODP can evaluate and categorize the reliability of incoming data by ensuring the data collected is legitimate using open-source and propriety data standards. Based on customer privacy rules, the platform can be used to set up restricted access to certain data. 
• Synthesizing data: The platform will segment data into groups for easy access and assessment. Customer segmentation allows you to create and update customer profiles in real time as the ODP constantly synthesizes data. Besides, with a capability to search for different shopping patterns, the ODP can identify existing customers in anonymous profiles. Anonymous profiles can be made use of by being seamlessly integrated with existing data, which creates a more complete customer profile. 
• Activating data: The ODP can be connected to all software involved with customer communication, sales, and analysis, such as CRMs, social media accounts, website and landing pages, as well as data analysis and visualization tools. You can work with the everyday software your team uses in a direct and immediate manner. 

To find out more about what a customer data platform can do for you, read our article on How You Can Double Website Conversion Using a CDP. 

3. What are the advantages of ODP? 

Build unified customer profiles 

The ODP is essentially a central hub to unify data from your entire data ecosystem. It first ingests first-party data and then standardizes and transforms it by matching individual customer IDs from different systems and combining them into a single consistent and accurate customer profile.  

But it doesn’t stop there.  

The platform has over 50 pre-built connectors for easier integration, among them Optimizely DXP, Magento, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Mailchimp. Data obtained from visitor search or page navigation can then be combined with this data to gain much deeper insights into how your customers prefer to interact with your brand. In the case of anonymous IDs, ODP can leverage identity stitching to match unique IDs in different systems so you can see customer profiles in a single view.  

What’s more, the platform continues to collect new data and maintain a continually evolving, up-to-date history of customer interactions. You can be sure data is instantly being harmonized and unified. 

Having data in one place means saving time and effort to pull information together. With your customer profiles being gathered in one place, you will be able to have a more holistic view and understanding of your customers’ journey as well as be able to act on opportunities that deliver bigger impact and ROI. 

Deliver personalized experiences 

With AI and machine learning having been woven into the fabric of our everyday lives, personalization has become the baseline service of the digital economy. 

A core feature of the ODP is AI and machine learning. With this functionality, data is constantly being collected from a wide range of data channels, organized, and updated in real time, increasing the visibility of your customer profiles. 

This constant data collecting and updating allows for a more dynamic personalization of the web experience based on your customers’ behavior. Leaving behind manual setups or guesswork, you can further drive personalization strategies with personalized messages, content, and product recommendations for customers.  

Not sure where to begin? You may consider getting started with a personalized abandoned cart email. ODP offers 125 pre-configured recipes with which you can create an email campaign that targets shoppers whose order likelihood is determined by the ODP to be “Likely”, “Very Likely”, or “Extremely Likely”. You and your team can also create a modal popup to add users to your email list and put limits on it to keep users from seeing the campaign too often. 

Besides, you can easily generate omnichannel campaigns with journey orchestration as an add-on that includes both email campaigns and SMS campaigns – that way, you can meet your customers where they are, with the right message at the right time. 

And with analytics enhanced by AI and machine learning-driven predictions, it’s going to be easier to predict customer behaviors. You can easily anticipate each customer’s real-time intent to create more relevant messaging to your campaigns and transform data into valuable customer engagement. 

Enable you to provide more actionable insights 

After collecting and organizing data, the ODP will reformat customer profile data to support a variety of marketing processes and systems, which include CRM, analytics, marketing automation, A/B testing, content creation, and social media outreach, to name a few. You and your team can then create different segments based on different customer behaviors and preferences, and take advantage of these segments by:  

• Diversifying and displaying different content on your website. 
• Sending different abandoned cart emails based on each segment to bring customers back into the buying journey. 
• Running targeted omnichannel campaigns (emails, SMS). 
• Running different social media ads based on the segments. 
• Displaying personalized exit pop-ups. 

With data being shared in a harmonized way, you are provided with data science-driven insights through the lens of the customer. This allows you to have a better understanding of each customer’s lifetime value and average order value as well as to act on opportunities to increase customer satisfaction. 

4. The Data Core Service 

Data Core Service is a free service that provides Optimizely cloud customers (content, commerce, B2B or experimentation) with a pathway to transition into using a Customer Data Platform and start centralizing and understanding their data. Some of the key differences between DCS and the ODP are: 

• DCS harmonizes data from Optimizely products only and provides access to view-only analytics. 
• DCS ingests data from external systems via REST APIs only. 
• DCS service doesn’t offer any data activation features. 

The Data Core Service has been available since Q1 2022 and is subject to a limit of 250,000 monthly active users. When your user base grows beyond this limit or if you want to get access to more features such as segmentation and machine learning-driven predictions, you can easily upgrade to ODP. 

For more information about the Optimizely Data Platform or how to contextualize customer data to provide more actionable insights, talk to our ODP experts today!