What is a CDP (Customer Data Platform)?
Customer data platforms (CDPs) are popular tools these days. They pull, clean, and combine data from multiple sources to create a single customer profile that marketers can use to:
Personalise customer experiences
Deliver value & earn customer loyalty
Capture more revenue from marketing efforts
In short, there’s almost nothing you can’t do with unified customer data. So, gear up. You’re about to take purposeful customer experiences to the next level.
Why should Marketers care?
As mass-produced marketing continues to repel customers, customised, entertaining, end-to-end experiences are the goal. What marketers really need is a way to unify data spread across multiple systems.
That’s where a CDP can help.
Outsmart the competition:
Exactly how big is the CDP industry? A recent report from the CDP Institute estimates that revenue growth is on track to reach $1 billion in 2019.
CDPs vs. the competition
The more you can connect customers’ preferred devices and channels the more likely you are to have a long-standing relationship.
Marketing Automation Systems
CDPs retain details that other tools, like marketing automation systems, don’t. This is an important feature to have when analyzing trends, leveraging predictive analytics, and providing recommendations using historical data.
Enterprise-wide data warehouses
Because CDPs mainly serve marketing department use cases, they can be nimble and more responsive than enterprise-wide data warehouses.
Integration platforms
Unlike integration platforms that route data directly between systems, CDPs store information in a central database— so it’s available whenever a system needs it.
Marketing suites/clouds
Instead of only allowing access to marketing suite and cloud components, CDPs can easily integrate data from all available sources to create a more complete customer profle. The value customer data platforms provide is hard to beat.
How do CDPs help companies?
Today’s consumers expect brands to know them and to deliver personalized experiences. Your ability to collect, integrate, and use customer data to improve those customers’ experiences can create a substantial competitive advantage.
A CDP makes it easier to know what customers want, and to even anticipate those wants. This is particularly useful for retailers and industries that deal directly with consumers, where brand loyalty and customer retention are critical.
CDPs are widely used throughout the travel, hospitality, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, and education industries. They’re just beginning to be adopted by B2B marketers.
CDP, DMP, CRM: What’s the difference?
CDPs are sometimes confused with customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and data management platforms (DMPs). All three deal with customer data, but there are differences.
- DMPs are focused on supporting web display advertisements. Geared to advertising, specifically for campaigns designed to gain new customers, these systems gather data from cookies. Unlike the data collected and aggregated by CDPs, the data collected by DMPs is often anonymised and is usually retained for a short period of time, such as 90 days.
- CRM solutions use tools and technology to gather customer data that marketing teams can use to build a stronger relationship with the customer. CRM solutions differ from CDP solutions in that they typically do not aggregate or analyse data from multiple sources. However, a CRM solution can use CDP data.
Customer Data Platforms help solve an old problem, but might aggravate a new one
“Josh Griffiths, digital direct sales manager at nib Health Fund, said that with less than 50 per cent of customers coming through the direct web the organisation was not ecommerce focused.
What NIB realised though. was that nearly every sale at some point involved the web. “We struggled to connect, though that user journey across online and offline channels.
“The CDP really helped enable us to connect the journey, the private health insurance path to purchase, which is probably [takes] about three to four weeks.”
SOURCE: Which-50
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