Customer Data Platforms (CDP) |Fully Explained
What is CDP (Customer Data Platforms)?
CDP is a type of software. Specifically, it is a type of database software: a type of software that creates consistent and permanent records of all of your customers, their attributes, and their data. A good CDP integrates seamlessly with your existing data and makes it easy to retrieve the data you store.
It can be used by marketers, customer service teams, customer data teams, analyst teams, customer service teams, and sales teams to import customer data from platforms, channels, and related equipment, including marketing, product, sales, and support systems, to provide a unified, a unified view of your customers: “Gold Record” or “Unique Customer Profile.
CDP functionality :
Customer Data Analytics - Use Forecasting, Lead, and Machine Learning best practices to analyze customer data and provide a better view of the customer journey across channels, revealing the direction of trends to help improve service quality.
Report - Support dashboard that provides customer profile information and goals. segments, trip maps, and more.
Activate - Provides real-time profile data to marketing or ad systems to launch and deliver personalized and targeted experiences Channel and device targeting
Customer data analytics - use machine learning recommendations, relationships, and predictive scores for Analyze customer data and provide better insight into the customer journey across channels, detect trends to help improve the experience
Reports - Supports dashboards that provide profile analysis, customer goals and segments, journey maps, and more.
Activation - Provides real-time profile data for marketing or advertising systems to launch and deliver personalized and targeted experiences across channels and devices
Data Ingestion - Import data from customer marketing, sales and product systems including CRM systems, marketing automation systems, web and mobile subscriptions, email marketing, e-commerce, IoT and more.
How CDP Works
CDP needs to link all of the company's customer data in one place, which means not only combining customer IDs from many different CRM instances, but also joining the database traditionally. The system does not transmit customer data. such as marketing clouds, software services and e-commerce tools. We termed this as client-side solution.
The next thing CDP needs to do is match the credentials we have about our known customers (such as email addresses and mobile phone numbers) with what we know about customers before they share them. Our data with the company (anonymous cookies and mobile device identifiers (for example, in this way we can initiate an interaction that starts with sending an email and continues on the website) We treat this as identification between devices
After CDP created a unified customer profile, the system must make this data available in real time so that companies can deliver a personalized experience.
CDP’s Data Unification Methodology
CDPs combine customer IDs and data sources to create a unique customer view (SCV), also known as a unified customer view (UCV), 360-degree customer view, or yellow profile.
During consolidation, customer data is validated, cleaned, and outputted to create a unique customer profile. Identity resolution is done in two ways:
Deterministic — Unique identifiers for customer records in each system are compared using common information such as an email address or just a name. This highly reliable approach works best when native data is available.
Probabilistic: This approach analyzes many different customer data points to estimate the statistical likelihood that two identifiers are the same customer. While statistical links are not as reliable as authenticated individuals, they can be extremely useful when your own data is limited. Profile
is then augmented with secondary and third-party data sources to fill in missing attributes and update other attributes with newer information.
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| CDP Softwares |
Types of CDP softwares
As marketing technology systems under pressure become more and more flexible about data, many non-CDP companies have partly entered the CDP space or started selling themselves as CDPs. Traditional marketing technology systems are struggling to create and / or obtain integrated CDP functionality for marketing.
These companies can be divided into four categories:
- Marketing Clouds CDP
- Marketing Orchestra CDP
- CDP Utility
- "Label Manager" CDP
Conclusion
The CDP vertical is rife with buzzwords and features, as well as the broader marketing technology space, where thousands of companies claim to be "a true 1-1 omnichannel solution for marketers" at scale. "
To understand where CDPs can fit into the space and which CDPs are best suited for a given business, in addition to the high-level classification above, teams need to start with applications, business value, and use cases to get back to the technical aspects. This might sound intuitive, but many teams are still trying to align their CDP scoring criteria with existing requirements for CRM tools, database applications, and more.
Finally, investment for companies has significant value compared to CDP. However, the results-based assessment method and the teams' ability to disprove rumors are critical.