How to Get the Most Value From Your CDP Today–And Tomorrow

How Do CDPs Drive Value Today and How Do We Get Greater Value From Them in the Future?

Over the past few years, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have developed a set of advanced and sophisticated features that advance them beyond their original charter to unify customer data from multiple sources.

While unifying customer data is still at the heart of a CDP’s mission, businesses also use them to drive segmentation, analytics, campaign management, and personalization. CDPs deliver marketing messages across channels, while maintaining privacy compliance.

How do organizations take advantage of new and emerging CDP capabilities? How do they balance quick implementations and immediate impact with the long game? And as CDP maturity grows, how do you go from baseline use cases to more advanced uses that help transform your business?

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New Study From Advertiser Perceptions and Treasure Data

To answer these questions, we partnered with market intelligence leader Advertiser Perceptions to assess how CDPs drive value today and how decision makers expect to get greater value out of them in the near future.

The research is based on a survey of 100 martech decision makers who use CDPs. These decision makers are based in the United States and work at companies of 1,000+ employees. The report includes insights from interviews conducted with six of the decision makers.
Here are some key findings from the report.

Current and Future Use Cases of CDPs

The research explored the current and future use cases of CDPs. In the survey, respondents were asked to answer these two questions:

1. Which of these use cases are you currently using your Customer Data Platform (CDP) for?
2. Which of these use cases are you planning to use in the future?

For each question, respondents were presented with 15 choices and asked to answer whether each choice was a current or future use case for their CDP.

Figure 1: Current and future CDP use cases. (Advertiser Perceptions study, 2022)

For current use cases, the top five choices were:

1. Campaign personalization (59%)
2. Audience segmentation and targeting (56%)
3. Measure marketing ROI (51%)
4. Unify data, identity resolution, and maintain customer profiles (50%)
5. Manage cross-channel campaigns (49%)

For future use cases, the top five choices were:

1. Achieve operational efficiency (43%)
2. Develop and support direct-to-consumer (DTC) relationships (40%)
3. Predictive modeling (39%)
4. Deliver more seamless customer experience (36%)
5. Measure customer lifetime value (CLV); provide input for supply chain management (both at 34%)

These results make sense. In the current use cases, martech decision makers are focused on tactics: audience segmentation and targeting, unifying data, identity resolution, and managing cross-channel campaigns. For future use cases, they progress from tactics to more strategic initiatives, such as predictive modeling, measuring customer lifetime value and developing direct-to-consumer relationships.

CDP Benefits Along the Maturity Curve

The survey found that organizations are seeing early benefits from their CDP implementations and expect additional benefits as their use of the CDP develops and grows. The most common current benefits include enhanced reporting and measurement, better understanding of customer journeys, and improved marketing efficiencies that lead to greater ROI.

Going forward, martech decision makers expect to benefit from advanced insights via machine learning. They also expect less reliance on IT to manage customer data and to have improved first-party data ownership. Machine learning capabilities were less important when the CDP was selected—but the survey results make it clear that expectations from machine learning benefits are high as CDP maturity grows.

Figure 2. CDP current and future benefits. (Advertiser Perceptions study, 2022)

The top five current benefits of CDPs are:

1. Enhanced reporting and measurement (50%)
2. Better understanding of the customer journey (48%)
3. Improved marketing efficiency and return on marketing spend (47%)
4. Ability to unify customer data from multiple sources and platforms (40%)
5. Ability to manage data privacy/security/compliance with ease (40%)

The top five future benefits of CDPs are:

1. Ability to get advanced insights from machine learning (46%)
2. Less reliance on IT team for managing customer data / customer databases (43%)
3. Improved first-party data ownership (40%)
4. Improved marketing efficiency and return on marketing spend (39%)
5. Allowing our company to provide customers with relevant, connected experiences (35%)

“Improved marketing efficiency and return on marketing spend” is in the top five for both current benefits (47%) and future benefits (39%). Similar to the use case findings discussed above, the current benefits focus on tactics, while the future benefits are more advanced and strategic (e.g., advanced insights from machine learning).

The Bigger Picture With CDP: Connected Customer Experience

Taking a step back from the specific CDP benefits listed above, let’s consider the bigger picture. We believe the mission of a CDP is to create a connected customer experience. A connected customer experience uses all of a company’s customer data to deliver personalized interactions for every customer across every channel and every department.

In the connected customer experience, every team and every technology works together to create a continuous experience that makes a connection with customers wherever they are, and on their terms. When every department works together across every step of the customer journey, every customer feels respected and understood.

This is the goal of Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud, our suite of cloud-based customer data platform solutions. With the Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud:

• U.S. Soccer increased renewal rates by 350% and made improvements to its loyalty program
• Shiseido, the fifth largest cosmetics maker in the world, maximized the value of all of their customer data to delight customers, resulting in 38% growth year over year
• Subaru unlocked the power of customer data across their entire business, delivering an 80 percent faster time to value compared to a homegrown solution they were considering building

For those considering CDPs, a critical question is: are you selecting a CDP that will be there in the long-term so you get to a higher maturity level? To take advantage of the CDP’s exponential power, you should purchase a CDP that will evolve with you beyond marketing use cases to benefit IT, Sales, Customer Support, Data Science, product and supply chain logistics, inventory management, and more.

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To learn more about CDP use cases and benefits from martech decision makers, download a copy of the Advertiser Perceptions study, “The CPD Value Chain: From Baseline Uses to Business Transformation.” The report also covers how CDPs are selected, top data sources in a CDP, and who sees the most value from a unified customer data foundation.  Read the press release to find out more about the vital importance of CDP solutions.