It helps you unify business data, create 360-degree views of each customer, and personalize engagements—all key to delivering the right engagement for the right person at the right time. You can use a CDP to personalize every customer touchpoint, across all online and in-person engagement channels.
A CDP unifies an organization’s customer data—including transactional, behavioral, and demographic data—from all channels and sources. CDPs are business-managed systems that create persistent, unified customer profiles accessible by other systems such as analytics, marketing, advertising, and customer engagement platforms. Business applications can directly access and use standardized data from the CDP to facilitate a wide range of actions, including segmentation, web personalization, journey optimization, marketing campaigns, next best actions, recommended products/services, churn detection, sentiment analysis, and case resolution.
Organizations have a lot of data. The challenge is that data exists in silos, collected by systems that were never designed to integrate. Adding additional complexity, these systems often store—not interpret—the data they house. To understand the benefits a CDP can bring to your business, it’s important to understand how disparate systems with disconnected, inaccessible customer data are holding you back.
The proliferation of channels and data types has resulted in a customer data boom. Customer data spans everything from anonymous ad impressions to known purchases, product usage, and customer service interactions. There are three main types of customer data:
The problem with siloed customer data is that it makes it difficult to understand who your customers are, what they’re doing, and what they want. Without data-driven insights into the core of your business, decision making is limited and less effective.
Each type of customer data can be used to improve engagement with new and existing customers. For customer data to be useful, however, it needs to be unlocked from silos, unified, enriched, and made accessible. CDPs are designed to analyze multi-source data and provide insights, recommendations, and a holistic view of each customer that’s based on data from every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Customers demand personalized experiences, and the only way to deliver them is to improve your understanding of what your customers want and need. A CDP provides a central, accessible, and useful source of customer data that can be used by multiple departments. It provides the single, accurate source of truth you need to drive growth across critical customer touchpoints:
Marketing: Deliver targeted, personalized approaches across all online and in-person channels with relevant content and campaigns that raise the likelihood of conversion, increase marketing ROI, and provide a competitive advantage. Identify loyal customers and reward them with meaningful offers that increase their brand affinity. Design retention strategies informed by insights about sentiment and likelihood of churn.
Sales: Create detailed segments and personalize sales engagements with contextual information such as loyalty status, customer lifetime value, buying frequency, spend, and recent purchases to optimize each sales opportunity.
Service: Equip customer service representatives with 360-degree customer profiles so they can provide proactive, consistent omnichannel support that leaves customers feeling understood and valued. Use detailed profiles to direct high value customers or those with unique support needs to specialized agents.
A CDP can deliver numerous benefits to your organization, in addition to the ones listed above:
While a customer data platform shares some similarities with other customer data solutions, it’s important to understand how a CDP differs from the other systems you might already be using.
A CDP adds to the functionality of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and data management platforms (DMPs) by integrating the data from first-, second-, and third-party sources. This means it incorporates CRM and DMP information to provide a comprehensive view of each customer, so you can find all the information you need from a single application.
CDPs and CRM solutions both collect customer data. CDPs help you manage customer data, improve your marketing effectiveness, and inform high-level business decisions about customer touchpoints. They generate unified customer profiles and segments that can be shared with other marketing tools or business systems in your stack and be used to personalize customer engagements.
A CRM only stores what’s known as first-party data—information about your customer’s direct interactions with your company. Data entry in CRMs is mostly manual; sales teams enter notes from calls, support tickets, etc. While CRMs can help you organize and manage information about customer-facing interactions, they are generally most useful for employees who manage individual customer relationships.
CDPs help you create personalized customer experiences by aggregating first-, second-, and third-party customer data, which can include personally identifiable information like names, mailing addresses, email, and phone numbers of both anonymous and known people.
DMPs typically work only with anonymous or non-personally identifiable customer data. DMP’s primary data sources are second-party and third-party data. A DMP’s primary use is to segment and categorize your customers anonymously for advertising purposes, whereas CDPs help you create persistent customer profiles that can be shared with marketing, sales and service teams to inform and improve customer engagements. A DMP can’t run on first-party data alone, so second-party data can be used to supplement and scale your first-party data. Third-party data is used to supplement first- and second-party data, adding depth and precision to customer profiles.
A CDP pulls data from all sources—including online, offline, operational, and IoT—to create and drive insights about your customers. With marketing automation, you can likely drive single-channel engagements such as targeted emails, but achieving true one-to-one personalization requires the depth of insights delivered by a CDP.
Marketing automation systems help marketers orchestrate customer journeys to nurture leads, win more customers, and increase customer loyalty. They rely on data and insights to power campaigns and often run alongside other MarTech and AdTech systems. However, marketing automation systems aren’t often designed to use data from multiple sources to build and deploy omnichannel campaigns.
A CDP is an intelligent data source, which, when shared as robust 360-degree customer profiles, can power consistent experiences across an omnichannel customer journey. When marketers have access to unified customer profiles, they can optimize their automated campaigns by successfully targeting the right customers, at the right moment, with the right message.
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