September 08, 2020

What is CDP- And Why Does Your Business Need it?

How would you achieve a unified, broad view of your customers’ minds and needs with multiple interactions and touch-points? The struggle is definitely real, especially today, where the digital marketing industry continues to undergo constant developments, changes, and competitions.

What is CDP- And why does your business need it?: eAskme
What is CDP- And why does your business need it?: eAskme

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Think about managing customer identities, supplying data to other systems, and assimilating audience data from various sources.

Thanks to the emergence of marketing technology called CDP, the day-to-day digital activities of marketers are much made easier.

Though, what exactly is CDP, and how can it add value to your business?

Plus, how do you get started?   

Customer Data Platform (CDP): What is it?  

Customer Data Platform is a database software that accumulates and organizes relentless, merged records of all the data and attributes of your consumers.

As asserted by the founder of CDP Institute David Raab, it is a “marketer-controlled software” with external marketing implementation that is primarily dependent on “persistent, cross-channel customer data.”

It combines artificial intelligence and data science to build personalized customer experiences. CDPs are considered a very valuable marketing tool with a huge potential of transforming client engagement and the marketing industry.

A good CDP like enterprise CDP easily integrates with the current data you have as well as allows for easy recovery once these data stores. It builds a single customer view or what they usually call a 360-degree customer profile.

Inbuilt marketing automation tools and third-party tools can use it to conduct marketing activities and assess their performance.

It also tends to roll up first-party customer data, including behavioral, demographic, and transactional, from a throng of systems and sources.  

Key Functions & Benefits

CDPs perform numerous functions which any marketers will find highly beneficial, including:

  • Loading and storing customer data  

  • Personally identifying customers and their contact information both from online and offline activities

  • Improving customer profiles through predictive data, such as email open and the probability of acquisition

  • Linking information from several sources to the same client.

  • Taking input from varying formats and data sources

  • Making the data entirely accessible to external systems

  • Featuring a structured design to completely support the needs of marketers for marketing analysis, business intelligence, and campaign management

  • Enhancing email deliverability

  • Optimizing online reviews from the consumers

  • Allowing for marketer control

  • Applying procedures to make the data more useful for marketing
  • Delivering significant benefits to a growing business  

To get started with the Customer Data Platform, you have to specify your use cases first. How do you plan on using it?

For instance, you may need software with personalization capacities and execution layers. Then, hire a potential vendor that can match your requirement.

How long it will take to carry out the CDP greatly depends on various factors, like your identity merging needs, integration difficulty, unique business rules, and the contemporary state of your data.  

CDP vs. DMP vs. CRM

Contrary to some ideas, CDP doesn’t have the same function as customer relationship management (CRM) and data management platform (DMP).

Organizations integrate them to promote a much smoother business operation.  

Differences between CRM and CDP...

While both CRM and CDP accumulate customer data and offer value to companies, CRM only tracks the intended interactions of the customers with an organization through manual entry.

At the same time, CDP independently builds fused customer profiles with data racked up across different offline and online mediums.

Also, the autonomously-entered data that CRM was able to collect could potentially get mislabeled or lost if inaccurately handled.

CDP, on the other hand, can efficiently handle diverse data points from a vast number of sources. The possibility of this data getting lost or reproduced is only minimal.

Differences between DMP and CDP...

DMP and CDP have wide differences too.

The former works with both known and anonymous people – storing names, contact numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, and other personally recognizable details. DMP work exclusively works with anonymous entities like IP addresses, cookies, and devices.

CDP accumulates largely first-party information, casts back particular, personalized customer identifiers, influences almost all forms of marketing, and tends to keep data longer.

DMP mainly generally piles up 3rd party data using data providers, services, and managers.

It reflects cookies and other anonymous customer identifiers, and mainly influences advertising to better reach target audiences and ads; keeps data just for a short amount of time to create clone audiences and target ads.

CDP, DMP, and CRM may possess different functions, but when incorporated, they can build personalized customer experience and inclusively, offering a notable value to your organization.

CDP’s development in the market continues to evolve – with over $300Mn stockpiled by 27 vendors in 2006.

And in 2019, it garnered up to $1Bn. Yes, what a figure! At the beginning of 2018, beyond 4000, companies deployed CDPs in their organizations, and the total funding achieved an amount exceeding $1.2Bn.  

Who are the Best Customer Data Platform Vendors?

The list is limitless, actually, though we will stress out those highly established and recommended:

1. Tealium

This is the most notable CDP brand that specializes in universal data integration from various sources and even the Internet of Things (IoT).

It has been providing efficient CDP solutions to more than 700 businesses worldwide.  

2. Lytics  

It is known for integrating machine learning algorithms to deliver data-driven insights.

There are also Al capabilities that prove to be beneficial for some firms.  

3. Redpoint Global  

It offers robust workflow capabilities and data segmentation, besides extremely strong data stitching, data quality, & enrichment capacities by integrating with third-party providers.  

4. Segment  

Have been a go-to place for some leading companies who needs a steadfast CDP, including Time and Century Fox.

Well-built out-of-the-box integrations with over 200 SaaS providers are one of its strong points.  

5. Treasure Data

It provides CDP with 100+ plug-and-play connectors to fuse raw data in a single customer view. It has secure Al and reporting capacities too.  

6. Blueconic

This Amazon cloud-based infrastructure is considered as a fast-developing Customer Data Platform vendor.

It provides a highly expansible solution along with a unique ML based product and content recommendations system.

Never miss out on another client milestone with a reliable Customer Data Platform!

If you still have any question, feel free to ask me.

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