A centralized CDP system collects, unifies, and structures first-party data into profiles. It also manages consumer privacy and data rights.
Unlike data warehouses and data lakes designed for analytical purposes, customer data platforms are tailored to marketers’ needs. They ingest and process data in real time and make it available instantly.
Targeting
A customer data platform (CDP) is a marketing technology that ingests, unifies, and orchestrates your first-party customer data. In addition, the guide to customer data platforms is designed to help you eliminate blind spots and make every customer interaction matter. It can piggyback on existing data management platforms (DMPs) and CRM solutions or work with third-party technology vendors to deliver a more holistic view of your customer.
Unlike legacy systems that can take hours to sync, CDPs synchronize your information in real-time and empower you with insights to drive more relevant interactions and outcomes. With a single, trusted source of data and an ability to segment and activate audiences on a massive scale, marketers can focus their resources on delivering value for their customers and growing their businesses.
While many marketing departments use several tools and systems to collect customer data, they often need to be more siloed, making creating a single view of each customer challenging. With a CDP, you can send unified and persistent data – or “golden records” – to other marketing systems for better targeting. These tools can then use this information to boost media campaigns, create targeted retargeting and search ad campaigns, and provide more personalized experiences. This type of system also enables omnichannel attribution and predictive content personalization. It can even help you identify new customers by identifying their similarities to your highest-value customers.
Segmentation
Market segmentation allows marketers to craft a more tailored marketing strategy for their target audience. This can help them improve customer retention and increase sales. It also helps them identify new market opportunities, such as potential customers that may have yet to be aware of the brand’s products and services.
The first step in segmentation is identifying the market segments most relevant to your business. This involves conducting a thorough analysis of your existing customer base. This can include demographics, behavior, and purchase patterns. The next step is to select the appropriate market segment, which requires a deeper understanding of your customer’s needs and wants.
Choosing the right market segments is crucial to your success as a marketing manager. You want to ensure the details you select are viable and align with your marketing strategy and overall business goals. This will help you avoid wasting time and money on ineffective marketing campaigns.
Customer data platforms (CDPs) collect and store your customer data in a unified database, making it easy to identify and communicate with each individual. They offer many benefits, including persistent data gathering, advanced analytics, and cross-channel automation. They also allow you to respond to consumer demands and meet regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and CCPA. They promote efficiency and can automatically update your database when new data becomes available.
Engagement
Personalized customer engagement requires a connected feedback loop between the brand and its customers. This connection is facilitated through optimized marketing teams and the ability to create customized messaging across all channels and devices. To do so, marketers need to know exactly who their audiences are and what messages will resonate. This is why it’s essential to choose a customer data platform that can be trusted to deliver accurate information at scale.
A CDP is a piece of software that gathers and organizes customer data from various sources to give marketers a holistic view of their audience. It connects data from multiple internal systems and channels, like email and CRM software, social media platforms, websites, loyalty programs, and paid campaign tools. Depending on their specific business needs and capabilities, companies may connect as many or as few of these tools as they want to their CDPs.
Unlike data warehouses and data lakes, which collect and store raw data in their native format, CDPs are tailored to marketers’ needs. They use identity resolution to assemble customer profiles from different systems and make them available instantly. This eliminates the time-consuming and error-prone process of manually stitching together disparate datasets. By doing so, CDPs can bolster productivity and help businesses keep up with rising consumer expectations. They can also optimize attribution models by giving marketers the most accurate information about who and what is driving conversions.
Measurement
The marketing space is filled with tools and software to help you optimize your campaign strategy. But not all are created equal. While ERPs and CRM tools can bolster your marketing team’s capabilities, they must be designed to connect data sources. This is where CDPs come in. CDP software can ingest all your 1st-party customer data and unify it into a single profile, enabling you to make more informed decisions about your marketing efforts.
These platforms can also collect information about customers’ interests and behaviors, allowing you to build relationships by delivering targeted messages. This can lead to more effective retargeting campaigns, increased revenue from personalized marketing, and improved retention rates. And as your company grows, these efforts can be scaled to support growth.
In addition to this, CDPs can also ingest and process data in real time. This makes it possible to identify changes in customer behavior in real-time. For example, if someone switches from YouTube to Twitch, a CDP can spot this change in their behavior and adjust marketing efforts accordingly. This feature separates CDPs from traditional data management tools, allowing marketers to optimize their efforts and maximize results.