Customer Data Platform - a marketer's holy grail
Mapping customers' journey and creating a 360-degree view of their behavior is not a new concept. With so many customers constantly switching between phones, tablets, laptops and sometimes purchasing offline (in your store or calling a sales rep. directly), marketers seek a unified view of their customers.
Customers increasingly expect one-to-one communication, requiring you to know what they did in the past, what they are currently doing and what they will most likely do in the future. At the same time, companies need to account for new channels, technologies, and data sources. It is challenging for marketers to keep pace with the rapidly changing ecosystem.
Having a single source of truth for all your marketing, sales and customer data, where data can be collected, managed and transformed to useful signals is not a dream any more.
What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) ?
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a database which consolidates useful customer data from several channels and data sources. CDPs provide companies with streamlined access to deep and specific insights about their customers that they would not otherwise have a unified overview of. How do they achieve that? A CDP contains your first-party data that you can then enrich with second/third-party data for a holistic view of every customer.
Hence a CDP is designed specifically as a central location for all customer data, including personal identifiers, websites visits, social media comments, purchase orders, email responses, audio recordings, customer service interaction, mobile app touch-points and any other data related to the customer. Once the CDP pulls this data from the sources, it cleans and combines it to create a single, unified customer database that’s accessible to other systems (marketing automation software, CRM etc.)
Visualization of a CDP (source: Emailvendorselection.com)
What kind of data you can store in a CDP?
A CDP is built to handle any type and category of data. It can connect all sources of customer data, whether internal or external, structured or unstructured, batch or streaming. This allows you to form a much more comprehensive view of your customers and act on it in (almost) real-time. Below, I just mention a few examples so that I give you a taste of what is possible:
Click-stream data & browsing history
Social media: comments, shares, likes
Campaign data: UTMs, Sent Newsletter/Opens/Clicks, cost-per-click
Customer data: name, email address, telephone, address, job title, date of birth
Transaction data: orders, invoices, payments
Data about Product usage
Customer support data: Live chats, number of support tickets, time to resolve the issue
Offline data: shop visits, shop purchases
Third-party (enriched) data: demographic data, Net Promoter Score, surveys
What will marketers achieve by adopting a CDP?
Efficiency: Decrease advertising spend by targeting the right people; communicating to a carefully selected audience or to those who have already expressed interest in the product. Doing this would requires an accurate segmentation and a centralized, complete view of the customer.
Democratization of data: CDPs centralize data about customers, saving hours of integration work. Also, business rules are gathered in one place and can be leveraged throughout various tools and platforms in the company, saving lots of work in the process.
Single source of truth: A comprehensive, holistic view of the customer is made available to other systems and multiple departments of the organization (also offline). This helps create the most comprehensive customer experience.
Bringing it all together, a customer data platform is a marketing system that provides a single point of real-time control over customer data by unifying all types and sources. Customers want their brands to deliver targeted, highly-personalized buying experiences – across all channels. To achieve that level of omni-channel personalization, you need a customer data platform.
Have you adopted a CDP already or curious on how to get started? Get in touch and let me know your thoughts!
