Are these problems familiar?

“Our Facebook Advertising costs are skyrocketing because we can’t target the right potential customers.”

“We have a dozen different apps for tracking sales attribution — and they all give me conflicting reports.”

“We lack a singular view of our customer journeys and funnels.”

“We’re constantly building emails and other marketing campaigns based upon manual spreadsheet exports.”

If so, you might want to consider a CDP

A customer data platform (CDP) is a collection of software which creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems.[1]

tl;dr

Customer data platforms can help eCommerce brands better utilize first-party customer data to reach new customers, reduce customer acquisition costs, and increase customer lifetime value.

The existing CDP landscape

There are many great enterprise CDP options on the market today. As growth marketing consultants and data infrastructure engineers, we are partial to Segment. (In fact, Fueled integrates with Segment out of the box...)

Just a sampling of the enterprise CDPs on the market today.

Each of these enterprise CDP offerings has its own strengths and weaknesses. Where they shine (particularly Segment) is in solving engineering use cases — such as complex integrations for custom applications written in various programming languages, real-time data validation and transformation, and sophisticated identity resolution.

But these aren’t necessarily challenges facing emerging-to-mid-market eCommerce companies selling $5M-$100M annually…

The problem with the usual (enterprise) suspects

Ironically, the challenge that the CDPs above face when working with the eCommerce brands we serve is their very strength:

Existing CDPs are engineering-centric and designed for broad enterprise use cases.

This makes them hard to implement for even the most sophisticated mid-market eCommerce brands.

• Conventional CDPs lack the specific SaaS product integrations that Shopify and BigCommerce merchants need.
• Launching on these products requires a lot of time, planning, and engineering — and often that means finding and vetting an agency partner to assist with development.
• And then, once you’re live on one of these enterprise products, there’s no “playbook” or clear set of best practices for how an eCommerce company specifically can take advantage of their features.

Fueled is a CDP built for specifically for eCommerce

Fueled has been designed from the ground up to remove this friction and to help eCommerce businesses get the most out of their first-party customer data.

• Fueled connects eCommerce software and data to personalize marketing campaigns and better understand customer and product analytics.
• Fueled helps merchants improve conversion, deepen engagement, and increase customer lifetime value.

How Fueled works

Fueled pulls in all of your customer engagement data and events in a standardized, interoperable format — including:

Because these “behavioral events” are standardized, they can be sent to hundreds of destinations to target ads, trigger marketing automations, and personalize customer experiences.

They can also be sent to BI and customer journey analytics platforms like MixPanel and Amplitude for more advanced analysis and segmentation.

And…getting started with Fueled is easy:

1. Simply have us connect your store, marketing tools, reviews, and CX apps to Fueled.
2. Use our Audience Builder to segment customers and push audiences into paid channels, like Facebook and Google.
3. Analyze your data using our built-in data warehouse and reporting tools.

With our concierge onboarding service, from contract signing through implementation, we can have you up and running with Fueled within 10 business days.

What’s included with Fueled

Fueled ships with the core integrations and infrastructure eCommerce brands need to analyze customer journeys and power incredible experiences

• Website event tracking — including Facebook Ads & Google Analytics
• eCommerce and marketing “source” and “destination” integrations
• A data warehouse with all of your critical data prepped for quick analysis
• Automatic replication of historical event data into our warehouse solution
• A robust Business Intelligence tool
• Seamless integration into MixPanel, Amplitude, or Heap

Using our webhook system, we can push to an infinite number of data destinations.

Could Fueled be a good fit for your eCommerce business?

Currently, Fueled has been designed for the needs of businesses doing at least $1M/year in revenue. So, admittedly, it’s probably not the first Shopify or BigCommerce application you’d install for a brand new eCommerce site with little traction (unless you are deeply experienced in the space).

Fueled does not require engineering expertise. We handle all of that for you. But…Fueled is best leveraged by teams with strong marketing experience or a solid agency partner.

If your eCommerce brand meets these criteria, Fueled can help you:

Make more money

Get more out of your marketing tech stack and paid ad spend with Fueled:

• Leverage more and better customer data to drive more precise ad targeting on Facebook and Google.
• Surface more compelling customer attributes when personalizing email and SMS marketing campaigns.
• Present your returning customers with the right offers at the right time to increase customer lifetime value.

Save money

Getting started with Fueled is cost-effective:

• We handle data replication and warehousing — so you don’t have to spend additional money on tools like FiveTran, Stitch Data, Google BigQuery or Amazon RedShift.
• With Fueled, you can cut out one-off attribution apps, like Elevar, to reduce your overall costs.
• We onboard your entire customer data stack for just $1K. Save tens of thousands of dollars and months of back and forth managing engineering resources

Work More efficiently

By pulling all of your data into a “single source of truth,” and exposing your data to other tools in a consistent format, Fueled makes it much easier to work with your first-party customer data.

• Fueled will help you make better decisions when designing customer experiences.
• Similarly, Fueled will help you make better merchandizing decisions by surfacing key product insights in your BI tools.

Next Steps

If you’re interested in learning more about Fueled, check out our product docs and consider getting in touch.

This summer, we will continue building out integrations and are getting started on our own set of eCommerce-specific customer journey/segmentation tools. Exciting stuff!!

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Originally published on Medium.