There is a huge demand for customer data platforms today as more data than ever before is awash in today’s businesses. Transactional data, demographic data, and virtually unlimited behavioural data are all available. When you add it all up, you’ve got data on everything from anonymous ad impressions to known customer purchases, product usage, and customer service. Customer data is a subset of all of this information. This data is typically stored in silos, whether organisational or technological, making it difficult for businesses to deliver consistent customer experiences across multiple channels and consumer devices.
The issues that have drawn marketers to the CDP are real, and the benefits of solving them are substantial. However, marketing technology analysts are increasingly convinced that these capabilities do not meet enough of a marketer’s objectives for the CDP to remain a stand-alone technology solution. Many people believe that CDPs will simply become standard components of large enterprise marketing solution suites like multichannel marketing hubs or real-time interaction engines. It is critical that businesses carefully consider their CDP options. Marketers must first determine what the CDP solution under consideration truly offers, as well as how many of their specific needs will be met today and in the future.
Customer data platform :More than a middleware
A Customer Data Platform is more than just an intermediary or middleware. Its primary purpose is to move data between tools. It also serves as a repository for all of this vital information, allowing different teams within a company to access it whenever they need it.
For example, if the marketing team wants to experiment with Pinterest advertising and wants to target a specific group of users based on their previous behaviour, they can easily create an audience in the CDP by combining user attributes, events, and data from other campaigns, and pipe this information to Pinterest. A CDP can also create unified customer profiles, which allow businesses to see all of a customer’s activities in one place. While this sounds great in theory, no one has time to sift through each customer’s activity in practice; thus, having a “single view of the customer” should not be the primary motivation for implementing a CDP.
The CDP you choose should include out-of-the-box integrations with popular systems like:
- Platforms for marketing automation
- Databases, data warehouses, and data lakes are all types of data storage.
- CRMs
- IoT and sensor data are being advertised.
- Business intelligence (BI) platforms.
- Google Analytics
- Ecommerce
- Use of social media
The primary capabilities of the CDP are as follows:
- Ingestion of data.
CDPs collect first-party customer information from a variety of sources (e.g., transactional systems, web behavior, call center, demographics, or POS). - Management of one’s identity:
Customers’ identities are resolved by CDPs across multiple channels. With identifiers provided by the inbound data, the majority use deterministic matching and profile stitching. A persistent customer identifier is created and maintained by the CDP. - Segmentation
With the unified data in the CDP, marketers can create and maintain universal, omnichannel audience segmentation. - Data provision/activation
CDPs make it easier to put the CDP’s insights and unified customer profiles into action. Connectors and APIs to other marketing technologies are used to accomplish this.
The large variety of data that can be stored and unified is a distinguishing feature of a customer data platform. Here are a few examples of common data sources.
- Data on transactions and orders: Client purchases, order and renewal dates, customer value, abandoned carts, returns, and other information are generated by eCommerce, administration, and sales systems. All of this information is extremely useful for marketing and sales efforts.
- Behavioral, web and mobile data are essential for determining current and potential customers’ behaviour and preferences. It details the products and categories they’ve looked at, as well as the number of pages they’ve visited per session, the average session duration, and more.
- Customer profiles: Customers are at the heart of every business. Knowing who they are and what they want allows you to market to them more effectively. You can add psychographic data to your lead generation forms to learn more about your users’ preferences.
- Although not strictly customer data, product data allows you to have more personalised and meaningful interactions with customers. Inventory levels and pricing are two basic examples of product data.
Conclusion
When it comes to building their own martech stack, today’s marketing technology landscape includes a plethora of technologies. Connecting the dots between multiple best-of-breed solutions is a difficult task. Data silos form when information cannot be shared between systems.
By allowing the collection of customer data from multiple systems into a single location, a CDP makes the best-of-breed challenge easier to overcome. The “back-end” of your CDP serves as a central intelligence hub for all of your marketing systems. APIs in modern digital marketing and sales solutions make it simple to connect to the CDP and export and import customer data in order to create personalised marketing campaigns.
