Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Customer Data Platform’s (CDP) are becoming an integral part of the modern marketer’s playbook. According to the 2020 State of Marketing Report, among marketers who say they use CDPs, 86% are increasing or maintaining their use of them. If you’re still at the point of considering whether to adopt a CDP, our guide can help you to make the best decision for your business.

CDPs are for when you need a marketing database with user-level data. A CDP usually includes a customer database, marketing automation, multichannel campaign management and real-time interaction management. Data legally collected through a customer’s interaction with the company’s website is collected by a CDP to help companies have an intimate understanding of their purchase preferences, develop personalised experiences and create a fast, seamless service.

Most customer journeys involve over three different channels or data sources (such as email, web and mobile app), and customers tend to move seamlessly and quickly between these channels. However, most companies don’t have these data environments connected in real time. The result is a disconnected experience for consumers and the lack of a single source of truth about customers for the marketer. Customers expect their experiences to be consistent and “in the moment” as they move from channel to channel. CDP technology helps to fill this gap for organisations.

This technology is now utilised by the top brands in the world. Amazon can predict what products customers are likely to buy next, Netflix recommends the shows they like with great accuracy, and Uber lets them customise trips right down to the type of vehicle they want to travel in. As these leading brands evolve, so will the market’s expectations. This will impact how your company interacts with customers to continue sustainable growth for the future.

The first thing CDPs need to do is connect all of a company’s customer data in a single place. This means not only stitching together a single customer ID from many different CRM instances, but also tying together databases that traditionally don’t share customer data, like marketing clouds, service software and ecommerce engines. This is often described as the customer resolution.

The next thing CDPs must do is reconcile the identities organisation have about their customers (like email and mobile numbers) with what they know about customers before they share their data with companies (such as anonymous cookies and mobile device IDs). This way, marketers can start to associate an interaction that started with an email campaign and continued onto the website with the same customer. This is a cross-device identity.

Once the CDP has created unified profiles of customers, the system has to make that data available in real time so companies can deliver personalised experiences. This involves connecting the customers behavioural data to many different types of systems – email-send engines, demand-side platforms, and content management systems.

In a nutshell, CDPs are concerned with these primary tasks: data collection, data unification, data activation and data insights.

The CDP data process:

• Acquire: CDPs need user-level data from common marketing services.
• Process: This involves cleaning data, and matching fields and identities.
• Expose: Subsets of data are stored for fast access for analysis.
• Analytics: This stage will use segmentation and prediction and will help personalise customer journeys.
• Delivery: Data can be fed to messages, sites, apps, ads and social as well as customer service agents.
  

How a CDP uses customer data

There are certain functions that are suited to CDPs. The following explores some of the key functions that a CDP provides end users.

Personalisation

A customer comes to a website, browses a product and then leaves. CDPs gather the data from the customer’s website visit to make the unified profile available to all addressable channels, enabling personalisation and relevancy. Customers who see content tailored to their interests are five times as likely to engage with a brand.

Suppression

Sometimes the best use of data in marketing isn’t to better target consumers — but to not target them at all. A unified profile that connects marketing and purchase data enables marketers to optimise their addressable spend by suppressing consumers that have already made a purchase, and redirecting those dollars toward new customers.

Insights

Many analytics systems operate in silos. A CDP allows an outdoor retailer to have a customer’s marketing interactions tied with ecommerce data (purchase history) and website interaction data (products viewed multiple times). When this information is available to a service rep in the call centre, this type of personalisation can turn a $15 per hour call centre rep into a $100,000 a year salesperson.