What is a CDP and why should you use it in your company?

[muskanislam25]

Traditionally, companies did not have many direct communication channels with their customers, and those that did exist were handled by different areas of the company. This caused marketing data and strategies to remain in silos in independent channels. It was common for the same person to be included in different marketing actions, resulting in a fragmented and inconsistent customer experience.

With the rise of ICTs, there was an explosion of new channels, devices and meeting points between companies and customers. This generated an unimaginable volume of data. There was all kinds of data circulating: from how a customer prefers their coffee, where they live, how they pay, among others. Big Data raised a new question among marketing specialists: how to take advantage of this volume of vital information about a customer? A paradigm shift in marketing was brewing, now more focused on getting to know its consumers in depth from their information trails.

Data collection and management technologies had been implemented since the 1990s. However, in this new context, their evolution accelerated given the demands of companies. A solution was required that could collect data from multiple sources, organize it and centralize it in a single profile. Data took a central place in new marketing strategies and it was not a fad. Data and information translate into knowledge; the more data, the more knowledge. And greater knowledge fosters closer ties between customers and companies.

In 2013, the term Customer Data Platform (CDP) was first used uganda whatsapp lead to refer to marketing software that aimed to create a 360-degree view of the customer. It was a resounding success! By 2016, the CDP industry had already become established, since CDPs were more than just software; they were a change of mindset in line with the philosophy of the new marketing paradigm. Unified customer profiles made it possible to move from multichannel to omnichannel contact and to hyper-personalize messages for each customer based on their behavior. This is how a personalized and consistent customer experience was achieved.

In the future, data will be even more crucial. The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be created every day worldwide; almost a hundred times more than everything ever created by humanity since its existence. Companies that want to survive will have to learn to be more competitive and embrace the philosophy of data culture. CDPs are here to stay and understanding them better means a step forward in their implementation.

What is a CDP?

Source:Salesforce.com
CDPs – Customer Data Platforms – establish a new paradigm for marketing, now data-driven and customer-centric. They are basically a set of packaged software solutions, designed to collect and combine customer data from all sources. And ultimately create complete and unified profiles of each customer.

How does a CDP work?
Its operation is relatively simple:

What is a CDP
Nowadays, it is common to use Artificial Intelligence techniques, mainly machine learning, predictive models, statistics, sentiment analysis, frequent itineraries, graphics, among others. All of this allows for more effective marketing actions, since they are based on customer behavior trends.


Main Features
CDPs have three essential characteristics:

Packaged software: These are pre-built systems, usually purchased and managed by a company's sales departments, usually Marketing. Their packaged nature means that, although technical resources are required to configure and maintain the software, it does not require very advanced technical skills. They are easy to implement and update in accordance with corporate needs. This speeds up and reduces the cost of the entire process.
Persistent and unified database: allows data to be collected from multiple systems, unified and stored for chronological monitoring. The system has personal identifiers that can be used to target marketing campaigns and monitor their results on an individual level.
Accessible to other systems: Data collected by the software is used by other systems for analysis and customer relationship management. CDPs collect information, restructure the data, forecast trends, and propose behavioral models. They finally share the results in formats that other tools can process. They often include APIs, database queries, and file import and export.

CDP vs. CRM, which one do you need for your business?
What are they? What makes them different? Which one is best for your business? In this article we provide you with all the information you need to make your decision.

SEE MORE ➜

Why and for what purpose to use a CDP
The simplest answer would be to create a persistent and unified database that collects 360 profiles of our clients. Now, why is this necessary?

Because a comprehensive view of your customers allows you to transform data into knowledge. This not only has a direct impact on the optimization of marketing campaigns, but also allows you to understand your consumers' opinions, behavioral and purchasing trends, needs, demands, and other valuable information that will help you make more accurate and successful business decisions. To do this, a CDP solution performs the following actions:

Identity Resolution: Organizes and unifies a user's history across all devices and channels to display in a single customer view
Creating features and trends: Analyze and summarize the data obtained by transforming it into individual features and trends
Audience segmentation: Segregates clientele in a way that allows marketers to personalize campaigns.
Activation: Drive more effective marketing strategies based on data collected, segmentation, and results achieved. CDPs merge historical and real-time data with artificial intelligence tools to hyper-personalize messages and make each customer’s experience unique.
Benefits of using a CDP
Comprehensive customer view: 360-degree profiles of each customer are the core of these systems. This comprehensive customer information across all devices and channels of the company allows marketing campaigns to be optimized and made more effective.
Optimized system integration: By implementing a single “system of record” for customer data, redundancies and errors are minimized. Data thus flows more quickly to the other systems.
Improved data accessibility: The persistent, unified database centralizes customer data from across the company, making it easier and more efficient to share across all areas and customer engagement points.
Greater marketing efficiency: A comprehensive customer view enables more precise targeting and personalization in marketing campaigns, and more relevant customer experiences with the brand across all channels.
Increased marketing speed: Since the CDP is generally in control of this area, the time to segment and create audiences, execute campaigns and analyze results is significantly reduced.
Greater regulatory compliance: This allows for greater internal control over customer data. This is because in order to contract a CDP solution, you have to comply with the various regulations that affect brands around the world.
In short, CDPs are part of the new paradigm of business marketing and its philosophy in favour of an appropriate data culture. Although there is already talk of a solid CDP industry, it is a futuristic tool that is essential to guarantee competitiveness, and therefore its best practices are still in the making. In a future article, we will go into more depth on the comparative functionalities of this technology compared to others also used in the business world.