urement of CDP adoption: Comprehensive framework

It is a significant investment to implement a customer data platform. To paraphrase Spiderman: With great investment, comes great expectations from C-suite. They will be looking for the most difficult question: “Are our CDPs delivering value? And what is the ROI?”

Numerous studies have shown that CDPs increase business value. This is because:

• A single, omni-present view of all customers.
• Creating consistent experiences across channels.
• Information about the delivery of personalized information
• Real-time customer profile access.
• Technology platform consolidation can eliminate redundancies.
• Automation and time to activate are two ways to increase efficiency.

They do this with other systems and not by themselves. It is difficult to assess the value contribution and show ROI. The following framework will help you evaluate its value.

Get deeper: What’s a CDP?

Framework for CDP adoption

Additional business benefits can be achieved by increasing CDP adoption. It is easy to understand and measure adoption if you have a comprehensive framework that considers:

• Platform utilization.
• Organizational adoption.
• ROI linked to CDP-powered activations

This framework will give you quantitative and qualitative data that will help you understand:

• What a journey your company has taken.
• It is amazing how far you will need to go before you reach your ideal level of maturity.
• Here’s what you should do.

Each CDP is unique in its capabilities. However, many types of usage can be analysed for any platform in a universal adoption framework.

Let’s take a look at each one of these seven categories.

Data availability

Your CDP can only be as good as the data it contains. This chart will help you assess the data in your CDP.

Integrations

Your CDP is responsible for the customer experiences you create through outbound and inbound channels. It must work with all major platforms in order to create consistent, coordinated experiences.

• Platforms that determine what is most important.
• These platforms deliver the prescribed experiences

Your CDP should constantly augment your profiles with signals from outbound and inbound interactions.

A CDP that is well integrated connects to platforms that support relevant-time decision making without any information gaps.

CDPs that aren’t interoperable will not be able to provide the maturity needed to realize what most organizations want — real-time optimization at every interaction.

Get deeper: Identity resolution. How can platforms adapt to privacy changes?

Platform features

Usually, the features that are available on any platform fall into one of two categories.

• Consider the features that you considered most important in your purchase evaluation.
• Those who were not.

We often find that these ancillary features go unnoticed and are under-leveraged.

You can still use out-of-the box site personalization capabilities even if you have an advanced site personalization platform. Because the integration is already built, they are often easy to implement.

Access to the user community

Although marketers are often the driving force behind adoption of CDPs, they are not the only ones who need them. It is important to encourage people beyond the marketing department to use the CDP. This is possible through education and strategic partnerships.

CDP intelligence has a greater impact on customer service programs and sales than marketing that is used rich first-party data.

Marketing and IT stakeholders are not responsible for CDP adoption success. Marketing, IT, marketing analytics and sales are all required to make sure CDP success is achieved.

Management of the audience

You can see the following:

• Access How wide are the audiences accessible across touchpoints and how many are being used on platforms that create experiences?
• Automation Utilizing more advanced techniques (e.g., creating event-driven audience for use in journeys or automatic delivery of audiences to activation platform) allows you to spend more time supporting the most urgent needs within your organization.
• Time it takes to launch a campaign How long does it take to go from ideation through campaign design and implementation? The CDP will speed up the process. The process will become slower if there is more data to be collected and more platform work.
• Machine learning (ML) When predictive modeling is integrated into audience management methodologies, it will enhance the level of sophistication that marketers strive to achieve in personalization.

Activations

A CDP is not enough to show how well an organisation has adopted a platform. It is possible to measure ROI using use cases that are directly enabled by the CDP with some discipline.

To compare activations before and after the CDP, use existing measurement methods and infrastructure whenever possible. Before execution, create a plan that clearly identifies the KPIs, audience and creative. Make sure all platforms and integrations are properly configured to allow for execution and data capture.

Solution for identity

Each CDP promises one customer view (SCV). SCV cannot be achieved without identity resolution.

You must have clear rules to link all identifiers from all data sources. The platforms that deliver these experiences must also be able to handle all identifying events.

These platforms will need to capture all identifiers as well as their associations, and then provide this information to the CDP’s identity processing processes.

Scoring your CDP

Quantitative output

Take a look at the categories and record your maturity level on a scale from 1 to 5.

It is impossible for any organization (or anyone) to achieve a 5 in all categories. It is impossible for every organization to achieve a score of 5 in all categories. This should not be an arbitrary scoring.

Actable has established clear definitions for maturity in multiple categories within each category that we use in our scoring rubric. These guidelines should be defined before you score to ensure that you score objectively individually or in a committee.

Qualitative output

What areas should you focus on to close the gap between your current and target states maturities?

Maybe data quality is a problem. You might need to prioritise building the missing integration that will allow you to better understand your customers.

Or, it might be time to test that channel or capability that you’ve always wanted.

The post Measuring CDP Adoption: A Comprehensive Framework was first published on MarTech.