Customer Data Platforms

Unify your customer data, create omnichannel customer experiences and drive digital growth with CDPs.

INTRODUCTION

Increasing amounts of customer data flow into your company from an ever-growing number of (digital) channels, but you’re still unable to collect, analyze, and use all this data to improve, both the experience of your customers and the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing expenditure. CDPs solved one of the biggest limitations to truly omnichannel and personalized experiences: siloed data, that productively prevented marketers from using it. This has made the Customer Data Platform market is expected to grow from nearly 2 billion EUR in 2020 to 8,5 EUR billion in 2025.

Why care about Customer Data in your organization

Customers expect organizations to provide them with a satisfactory customer experience, and they are willing to pay more for such experience, 80% of consumers say that customer experience is just as important as the products or services a company offers.

In order to provide a satisfactory customer experience, you need to get to know your customers first: their needs, challenges and preferences. This is only possible through customer data collection, analysis and activation.

Being able to handle and act upon this data has shown to be key to the growth of top organizations, as compared to similar competitors in their markets.

Research tells us that organizations that leverage customer behavioural insights outperform peers by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin. (McKinsey)

However, leaders and organizations struggle to collect, organize or use this customer data for several reasons:

Data is scattered and siloed across the many different disconnected solutions used by the teams.
The data is being collected but cannot be processed properly so no insights are drawn from it.
Data is collected and analyzed but the organization is not set up or ready to act upon them.
Data is kept by certain teams within the organization so not everyone can access it and learn from it.
The customer data collected cannot be activated through all channels because is not kept in a central repository.
Customer data is kept in IT-managed solutions in a status that is not ready to use by the (non-technical) marketing team.

Discover in this page why CDPs have become for many marketers an essential tool in their ongoing efforts to get to better know and serve their customers, improve the results of marketing initiatives and have an impact on the growth of the bottom-line of the organization.

ABOUT CDPs

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

Customer Data Platforms are managed systems that facilitate a unified, persistent and agile database of customers that provides a single view across many different viewpoints. A customer data platform functions as a marketing system that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels, to enable customer modelling and optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers (Gartner).

Key features of a CDP

For a Martech tool to be categorized as a CDP it needs to provide, at least, the key capabilities and features below:

Customer Data unification

The first task of a CDP is to collect data and input from any source that generates or stores customer data. To assist them with this task, CDPs use easy-to-implement connectors. Through integrations, a CPD can collect the following data:

Events
Customer attributes
Transactional data
Campaign metrics
Customer service data

After this ingestion, the CDP is capable of unifying this data based on a set of specified rules, to integrate it into a single customer profile.

This capability is one of the main selling points of a CDP. As it enables an organization to centralize and unify the data that would have otherwise been scattered and siloed in several disconnected systems.

Creating a single customer view

The data that comes from this single source of truth is trusted, and processed in a way that allows it to be unified into individual customer profiles. All these data points are gathered from the different channels and grouped in individual customer profiles. This allows you to personally identify a user who is interacting across any/all these channels.

Identity resolution

One of the key features that differentiate CDPs from other solutions is identity resolution. A CDP is capable of attributing multiple data points, including all disparate data collected across different channels during the customer journey, to the same individual customer profile. Additionally, CDPs can still track and store data coming from anonymous users through cookies and are able to fully identify these users and provide more context regarding the pre-purchase stages of their customer journey.

Customer Data Analysis & Activation

Once the CDP has ingested and unified this data into individual profiles, it’s ready to be analysed. The analytical capabilities of CDPs allow for several types of analysis:

In-depth analysis of your individual customers
Real-time audience segmentation
Journey analytics

After your CDP has ingested the data from other systems and channels, unified it into individual customer profiles, and analyzed it in a way that either provides deeper customer insights or helps you create customer segments to target, you are ready to start sending high-quality customer data to the right marketing channels to activate marketing campaigns, E-commerce experiences or website engagement triggers.

CDP vs CRM and DMP

The types of solutions in the Martech landscape continue to grow, and sometimes they may seem to have overlapping features or capabilities. This makes it much harder for marketers to find the right solution for their needs, or figure out how these systems can work together. This holds true for CDPs, DMPs, and CRMs alike. They all help digital marketers work with customer data, but are very different at the same time. And more specifically, it’s the difference in the way these solutions collect data, and the exclusive features they offer, that’s essential to identify.

Use cases of a CDP

Increasing amounts of customer data flow into your company, from an ever-growing number of digital channels, but you’re still unable to collect, analyze, and use all this data effectively to improve the experience of your customers and the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing expenditure. Does this sound familiar?

According to Gartner’s 2019 Multichannel Marketing Survey, 58% of the respondents indicated leveraging integrated customer data was a significant or moderate challenge. This is where customer data platforms come into play: the go-to solution to collect, unify, analyze, and activate customer data in a single centralized platform.

As mentioned above, a CDP's main purpose is to unify all the customer data generated, but there are many use cases that a CDP solution also enables. Below you can find more information on the most relevant ones:

Unify Customer Data

Unify all your customer data from all online and offline sources in a single platform, creating a 360 view for each customer.

Read more ➔

Customer Segmentation & Personalization

Enable in-depth customer segmentation and personalized experiences that increase CLV and reduce marketing spend.

Read more ➔

Omnichannel Marketing Automation

Efficiently orchestrate and automate marketing tactics and campaigns across all your channels.

Read more ➔

E-Commerce Experience Personalization

Personalize product recommendations through predictive models to boost your e-commerce results.

Read more ➔

Future-proof your MarTech Stack

CDP is a key solution to unify, integrate and get deeper insights from your Martech stack's scattered customer data.

Read more ➔

Services

More than 30 years of experience in E-commerce and digital we know how to create a successful strategy for your organization. With an in-depth assessment based on several key criteria points and of your organization's maturity, we will be able to create a data-driven and customer-driven strategy to grow your business through digital marketing and implement the Martech to help you reach your goals, such as CDP or marketing automation tools.