What is Customer Data Platform? The Definitive Guide to CDPs (2020)

Looking for database software that seamlessly creates customer data records? The buck stops at Customer Data Platform (CDP), a special database software that allows you to track and gauge individual and group-based customer data in a single platform.

Characteristics of CDP

CDP allows you to:

• Create a comprehensive account of individual customer behavior and preferences.
• After collecting purchase, preferential, age-oriented/generational behavior from a myriad of data sources.
• As per this information, the Customer Data Platform enables marketing automation tools to evaluate each customer based on business parameters.

Customer Data Platform

Why should you use CDP?

The realm of customer data management has been reinvented by technology, with the number of cloud-based collection and management systems only increasing after the introduction of the online customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Succeeding data management platforms, CDP arrived as a response to two agendas: enhance consumer experience and multi-channel marketing strategies.

What did CDP allow? “Unified customer view,” correlated with an organization’s first-, second-, and third-party customer information, gathered in a central platform. Particularly, CDP lets you collect detailed first-party information.

How to use CDP

As a customer, you might be surprised and confused by the vast range of CDP vendors that are available for sale. Hence, before you decide on a suitable vendor, you create a comprehensive list of instances where do you plan to use CDP. These will be divided into two aspects: long-term or high-value goals, such as customer delight and retention of loyalty, and low-value or shorter-term targets, which inform the former and require CDP. Given below are some uses of the Customer Data Platform.

1. Smooth offline-online connectivity: Seamlessly interlocking offline and online connections to improve your customer profiling efficiency.
2. Curated, omnichannel data: Customers can be classified according to behavioral parameters in terms of entire individual lifecycles of purchase and choice behavior.
3. Predictive Consumer Rating: Use state-of-the-art predictive data.
4. Innovative advertising: Conduct consolidation and expansion campaigns by merging your CDP with applications like Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
5. Product Recommendations: Design new and exciting suggestive models to create a unique customer experience.
6. Increase in conversion rate: Using A/B testing features, create the best design for your online page with pop-ups. Moreover, you can relay cart abandonment emails if improved ROI is your goal.
7. Automated omnichannel experience: Allow your loyal customer to navigate through their shopping cycles by regularizing advertisements and product recommendations via any chosen medium.
8. Increasing email delivery capacity: With the latest Al-developed mechanisms, you can exponentially improve the level of email hits by customers; note the best time to send emails according to individual receptivity at personalized timelines.
9. Detailed feedback: Improve the quality and quantity of online customer reviews and ratings, which is aided by curated omnichannel communication and comprehensive analyses of data.

Market insights for CDP

The most crucial step in buying the best CDP software is deciding on the choice of vendor. This can be hard, as there are plenty of CDPs to choose from! Therefore, you should carefully plan the procedures to follow for your CDP purchase. While certain planning modules are general for any industry, each business poses its own separate design, strategy, and implementation cases. The three salient factors are as follows:

1. Construct a list of instances where you will utilize CDP: Your method of use, the desired characteristics, and abilities, the possible need for “standalone” CDPs, will all inform your analysis of specific business data requirements.
2. Evaluate which of your company interests match with the most suitable CDP vendor: Select the best possible vendors and screen them according to your specific requirements.
3. Seek a demo: Once you have screening that best CDP vendors as per company requirements, invite them to demonstrate the capability of their CDP by showcasing any given use case. Instead of a one-sided demonstration that offers a CDP’s general features, a business-specific use case will reveal its personalized benefit for you!

Conclusion

After diligent planning and thorough supervision, buy the Customer Data platform of your choice! Test its features using projects old and new.

Confused about which CDP to buy or how to plan your buying process? Look no further than RecoSense, an information intelligence platform (that works not only with data engineers but a wide range of other customers) and serves as a platform for acquiring, computing, and analyzing business data.