A customer data platform provides a central hub for all your first-party consumer data and analytics. It’s a unique source of truth that combines all your business’s tools into unified profiles with predictive scoring.
CDPs also connect these profiles to marketing systems in a privacy-safe way. This is what makes them so powerful.
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Unified Customer Data
A CDP is a marketer-managed system designed to collect and normalize data from multiple sources to build unique, unified profiles for each customer. These profiles can then be shared with other marketing technology systems for use in real-time to create personalized customer experiences.
Traditionally, the different software applications marketers use to connect with their customers—email sends engines, CRMs, DMPs, e-commerce platforms, and more—work in siloes. This makes it difficult for marketers to get a complete picture of their customers because the various systems rarely communicate.
In addition, the data that each system holds often needs to be updated or completed. This is because many of these systems were initially designed to support only one type of software application, such as a personalization engine or a campaign management tool.
A guide to customer data platforms solves this problem by acting as a central hub for storing your company’s customer data and organizing it so that anyone across your organization can access it. This is called a unified customer view, making a CDP powerful for driving loyalty.
Once a CDP has collected and organized your data, it will be activated. This means it can start sending updates to all of your marketing technology tools in real time, which allows your teams to interact with each customer in a highly-personalized way, just as they would if the information was already connected and up to date.
Real-Time Insights
A CDP uses built-in connectors, SDKs, webhooks, and APIs to ingest data from multiple systems, including CRMs, email, e-commerce platforms, mobile apps, POS, and more. It normalizes and structures the information into a single, unified customer profile, then makes it available to other technology systems at scale.
A unified customer profile can be used for real-time marketing, enabling brands to personalize every interaction across channels. This helps increase brand engagement, customer loyalty, and customer lifetime value. In addition to providing a single, unified customer profile, CDPs can perform advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and machine learning. These capabilities enable marketers to spot potential churners, identify high-value customers, and deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences.
A CDP will improve its accuracy and quality over time as the data collection continues. This differentiates it from data warehouses and traditional databases, which often rely on historical or aggregated datasets. This ensures all teams work with the most accurate and up-to-date information possible.
A unified profile is the core of any marketing strategy, and a CDP provides an easy way to bring your data together for a single source of truth. This data can be accessed by your entire team, including sales, support, and product teams. In this way, your organization can work together to find cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and create targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to succeed.
Data-Driven Decisions
Streamlining the way data is collected and structured, a CDP offers marketers a unified view of insights like consumer behavior, information, and purchase history. This allows teams to understand the audience better and identify upsell or cross-sell opportunities across the company.
Customers interact with businesses through many different channels, leaving behind bits of information in each interaction. A CDP ingests these first-party data points, normalizes them, and builds unique, unified profiles of each customer with a consistent identifier. It then reformats that profile into the information needed for various marketing processes and systems, including CRM, analytics, marketing automation, A/B testing, content creation, and personalization.
A CDP also helps address the issues of limited marketing technology budgets and consumer privacy. It can send an individual’s “golden record” to other marketing technologies on a user-defined schedule, which can then act on that profile to deliver personalized experiences for each consumer.
Unlike previous tools focused on one type of data or process, a real-time CDP updates these profiles in the cloud in near-real time. This enables companies to give their audiences the expected and needed experiences rather than basing engagements on delayed and incomplete information. Ultimately, this is what consumers want. And it makes a CDP an important tool for the modern marketer.
Data-Driven Marketing
If you want to make every marketing dollar count, a data-driven approach is essential. Marketers can collect and organize data using a CDP to create unified customer profiles across channels. These profiles enable marketers to connect with people when it matters most and deliver experiences that meet the needs of their target audiences.
As customers interact with brands on different devices and in new ways, they leave behind bits of information–first-party data–each time. A CDP ingests this first-party data, matching individual data points to identify each person (identity resolution) and then standardizing and transforming the data into a consistent customer profile. This data can then be activated in multiple systems, such as CRM, analytics, and marketing automation platforms.
Additionally, a CDP can manage data flows in compliance with GDPR and other privacy laws, such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act. By enabling marketers to store and share data that doesn’t contain PII, it becomes easier to comply with these regulations.
A CDP also puts all of a brand’s customer data in one place, making it easy for marketing and other teams to view a clear picture of each customer. This enables cross-team collaboration, including between customer support and marketing. For example, the shapewear fashion brand Honeylove used a CDP to collect all customer interactions in one place and then use that data to help their team create more targeted ads and nurture their relationships with consumers.
