ou need a customer information platform for your company? //
Understanding the benefits of a customer data platform (CDP), and your organization’s capabilities, is key to deciding if your company requires one.
CDP benefits include:
- Increased enterprise collaboration. Because it collects data from across the enterprise, a CDP facilitates collaboration among siloed group members and supports customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. Enterprises can see how their strategies for customer experience, audience and execution fit together. It also allows marketers to reach audiences across multiple platforms and build them. This allows for a consistent and informed customer experience.
- Increased data accessibility. A CDP is a central hub that gathers and stores customer data from all corners of an enterprise. To create unique customer profiles, data are combined and normalized. This creates a persistent customer database that can be shared across the company more efficiently and easily.
- Streamlined system integration The CDP unites data systems throughout the enterprise, including customer service and marketing, as well as call centers and payment systems. Data redundancies and errors can easily be reduced by creating one “system of records” for customer first-party data. Data can flow faster into and out of marketing automation platforms, email service providers, CRMs, and other martech systems.
- Improved marketing efficiency The CDP unites individual data with unique IDs to create strong customer records. The CDP automates many manual tasks, which allows marketers to concentrate on more creative and analytical tasks. This results in more precise modeling, targeting, personalization, and customer experiences across channels.
- Faster marketing velocity. Marketing often “owns” CDPs, which reduces the need to have IT or developers intervene in collecting, analyzing, and acting upon data. Marketers have more control over their data, which makes it easier for them to segment audiences and execute campaigns. It also reduces the time required to analyze results and analyse the results. Engineers may still be required to conduct deep data analysis and facilitate the integrations. This is particularly true since CDPs go beyond marketing to include sales and customer service functions.
- More stringent regulatory compliance. A CDP provides greater control over customer data and streamlines data governance to meet the many regulations that affect brands around the world. HIPAA regulations must be adhered to by marketers in the healthcare sector. Businesses that deal with European customers or handle European data must comply with GDPR. Californians should also be aware of the CCPA (California Consumer Protection Act). Most CDP vendors have been ISO and SOC certified to ensure best practices in handling personally identifiable data (PII).
Evaluate your needs, capabilities, and available resources
Once you have all of this information, it is time to do an extensive self-assessment about your company’s financial resources, staff capabilities, and business needs. The following questions will help you determine the answers.
What is the best way to manage customer data currently?
Many fragmented pieces of customer data are stored in silos within marketing, sales and customer support departments. Is your company equipped with a system to manage customer profiles? Are you aware of what customer data it contains? Are there any third-party anonym data? What number of applications are included in your martech stacks? How does data travel from one application to the next? Are they transferred in real time? Every hour? Every day? All these areas are where a CDP could help standardize and simplify data storage and processing. You may be using another tool that already has some CDP functionality.
How efficient is your marketing data process?
Software applications for marketing are meant to increase campaign efficiency and data quality. Dissimilar systems can lead to data duplication, insufficient standardization, and a rise in manual tasks. Automating data integration might be the right thing to do if you spend more time normalizing or de-duplicating contacts records and less time executing campaigns, evaluating campaign performance, or even evaluating them.
What are the business requirements for a CDP?
CDPs almost all provide core capabilities in data management. However, many CDPs also offer a variety of data analytics and orchestration features to address different business goals. What could a single view of all your customers do to help you? Do you want to decrease churn by offering more relevant offers to customers? You can also increase customer acquisition profitability by targeting more relevant customers. Do not invest in a CDP without developing use cases that show how adoption will improve marketing performance and reduce costs. It should be more than just a cost-saving investment.
Are you ready to go for a CDP?
Are you clear enough about your customer journeys and use cases to be able to select the right solution? What impact will centralizing your data, and audience definition have on your company? Do you feel confident that all the necessary teams — IT, marketing, customer service — will be educated about the potential benefits of a CDP? Are there early adopters in your organization who can offer proof points for other users?
What systems could we integrate with the CDP?
Many organizations are finding that the martech stack becomes more complex and larger. Implementing a CDP can streamline integration. It can normalize data to make it easier to import and export into other systems. Marketing success is dependent on omnichannel marketing, which involves multiple martech apps. It has become crucial to create a single view of your customer.
How can we benchmark CDP success?
What key performance indicators (KPIs), and what decisions will be made based on CDP implementation, do you want? Do you want to reduce data redundancy, and track the impact on campaign execution speed? Do you want to reduce the amount of time that your marketing team spends manually moving data between systems? To be able later to measure success, it is important to set business goals. Businesses are now more focused on quantifying the return on their martech investments.
Does management buy-in exist?
Management support is crucial for CDP success, as with any major investment in an organization. Start with short-term goals that show how the CDP benefits the business. These can be either cost savings or revenue increases. It is important to convince senior executives that a single view of the customer will improve the bottom line.
Are we looking for self-serve, full service or something in-between?
CDPs are usually designed for end-users in marketing. However, CDPs can be very flexible in their capabilities and it is essential to receive ongoing training. CDP vendors offer varying levels in customer support, onboarding and/or professional services. You should ensure that your marketing team is aware of the CDP and what managed services are available if they lack the resources.
How much does it cost to own a home?
Monthly license fees for CDP vendors are based on how many data records, events (or customers actions), and applications integrated. Additional fees may apply for staff training, APIs/custom connections, and onboarding. You should know what your business requirements are, how much data you have and how you plan to restructure your staff and systems to allow CDP to operate. Knowing all these factors will allow you to understand the cost of your investment. You may also see cost savings if your system makes it easier for people to work efficiently. For a more detailed look at the cost of a CDP, click here )
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Customer data platforms: A snapshot
What are they? Customer data platforms (or CDPs) have become more common than ever. These platforms allow marketers to identify key data points that customers have shared across multiple platforms. This can be used to create cohesive experiences. These are particularly popular right now, as marketers are under increasing pressure to deliver a consistent experience across all channels.
Understanding the need. Cisco’s Annual Internet Report revealed that internet-connected devices have experienced a 10% compound annual rate (CAGR), from 2018 to 2023. This marketing transformation has been only accelerated by COVID-19. To connect with customers in a constantly changing world, technologies are developing at an increasing rate.
These interactions have one thing in common: they are data-rich. Brands are getting valuable data from customers by asking them a few questions at each touchpoint. Consumers expect that companies will use this data to fulfill their needs.
Why we care. Marketers can find it difficult to meet customer expectations. CDPs are here to help. Brands can extract data from all touchpoints of customers — web analytics and CRMs, call analytics and email marketing platform — and use it to overcome the challenges presented by multiple data platforms.
Do you need a customer database platform for your company? was first published on MarTech.