CDPs for Marketing: 5 Ways Marketers Get Better Results with Customer Data Platforms

If it seems like you’re hearing the term “customer data platform” or “CDP” everywhere, it’s because you are, and with the increasing volume of marketing customer data available, you’ll probably hear it a lot more. One big reason the term is getting so much buzz is the number of new entrants into the market, and growing recognition of established, recognized CDP vendors such as Treasure Data. (the Treasure Data CDP was also recognized in the Gartner 2019 Data Management Solutions for Analytics Magic Quadrant. Learn about the Gartner CDP Magic Quadrant situation here -it will stay updated)  The pace of introduction is dizzying: In just the first half of 2019, 19 new vendors and $317 million in new funding have flooded the CDP landscape, according to the CDP Institute.

What’s behind the buzz? The ability for your marketing team to transform the way it works, as well as the way customers interact with your brand. CDPs break down martech silos, unify online and offline customer experiences and data, make marketing more efficient, and drive better results. A CDPs capabilities range from collecting and storing comprehensive customer data, to seamlessly integrating with existing marketing technology, and delivering actionable, data-driven insights.

These are just a few of the features that make CDPs a wise investment for any data-driven marketing team—which in 2019 should be every marketing team. While addressing marketing and IT’s key concerns, CDPs play a key role in improving marketing’s efficiency, data quality, and security.

What Is the Definition of a CDP?

David Raab, founder and head of the CDP Institute, defines the CDP like this: “The official CDP Institute definition is ‘packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems’.” Raab says the following points are critical in understanding what a CDP is:

• A CDP is packaged software, rather than a custom-build project like a data warehouse or data lake, which makes it quicker, easier and cheaper to deploy

• A CDP builds an actual database rather than assembling information on the fly by querying external systems, which yields better performance and allows time-series analysis

• A CDP works with identified customers, not just anonymous cookies like a DMP (learn more about CDP vs. DMP)

• A CDP lets other systems read its data rather than just holding it internally

One critical thing to realize is the distinction between a customer database in general and a CDP in particular: a CDP is packaged software to build a customer database; you could also get a customer database by building it yourself or buying a larger product that included it.

Here are five ways you and your team can get better results with an enterprise CDP:

1. More Finely Tuned Segmentation

The more data you have—and the more correctly unified it is—the better you’ll understand your customers, including their purchase behaviors, desires, and motivations. This, in turn, helps you create smart audience segments for more relevant personalization.

With a clear, 360-degree view of your customer, you’ll know exactly how to market to them and lead them further down the path to purchase—and a marketing CDP can provide you with that view.

2. Real-time Engagement

What’s even better than detailed data about an individual’s history, preferences, and behavior online? Getting that information in real-time. To deliver more targeted offers and better outcomes, a holistic understanding of customer engagement is crucial. It involves the real-time aggregation and analysis of data across marketing, sales, and customer service. A CDP can deliver this information and even use it to orchestrate campaigns, promotions, and tailored user experiences. As a result, you can more consistently provide personalized omnichannel brand experiences for your customers, no matter what channel they’re on.

A CDP also helps keep your customer data accurate, reliable, and secure by constantly cleaning, translating, and updating data over time. With round-the-clock access to this up-to-date data, you’ll quickly improve the quality of your customer interactions.

3. Omnichannel Customer Experience

With an enterprise CDP, you can unify all customer data securely and provide a consistent, positive experience that helps guide customers through their journey. A good CDP can process information from multiple applications—Marketo, Facebook, Salesforce—and piece them together to get a full understanding of what your customers want, buy, read, visit, watch, and more.

Advanced CDPs will automatically analyze new data based on the unique rules you establish within the system. You can analyze and organize data for audience segmentation, personalization, campaign optimization, push and pull notifications, syndication, and more.

From there, you can use this newly categorized information to answer your most pressing marketing questions, and begin improving results across channels by improving or changing your marketing strategies.

4. Cross-Sell and Upsell

CDPs can integrate with major sales and marketing systems, like Point-of-Sale (POS) systems, and provide built-in customer profile metrics. A full suite of marketing tools helps marketers build customer segments for personalized offers and advertisements based on these metrics.

By using your CDP to quickly consolidate information from all channels, you’ll know when your customers make a purchase and it’s time to shift to a cross-sell or upsell strategy. Once a customer decides to buy, you can improve retention with personalized, data-driven recommendations. This can extend your relationship far past the first purchase.

5. Improve Products and Services & Identify New Revenue Streams

Customers expect personalized content and better customer experiences—but not at any cost. Marketers need to get creative and rethink the formats of content used to reach customers across devices. This includes what promotions marketers send—and when—as well as what types of alerts and notifications are pushed when customers step into a physical store.

Customers want special attention and improved products and services that meet their specific and unique needs. A CDP helps you gain a more complete understanding of your customers’ preferences, so you can prioritize your product and service offerings to more closely align with customers’ wants. Or, you can create an entirely new stream of revenue by identifying and capitalizing on trends borne out of your customer data.

Delivering Customer Data and Better Results

CDPs for Marketing: Marketers can’t ignore customers’ increased demand for frequent, personalized marketing messages. It’s time to invest in a customer data platform to transform your marketing department and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Learn how our enterprise CDP software can help you take advantage of the big opportunities in omnichannel marketing. Request a demo to get started.