A Customer Data Platform: What Is It?
A customer data platform is a technological tool that enables companies to create a single customer profile by aggregating consumer data from many systems, channels, and data streams. These technologies often include of management resources for multichannel marketing, real-time customer interactions, networked data, and customer databases and automation. With the help of a CDP, businesses can instantly compile all of that data and provide customers with hyper-personalized experiences.
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As a central database for user-level data, CDPs are helpful. They connect databases such as marketing platforms, service applications, and e-commerce engines that would not otherwise exchange data. This makes it simple for you to obtain the client insights you want. According to Salesforce’s most recent “State of Marketing” study, 78% of high performers and 58% of underperformers, respectively, reported using a CDP.
We’ll look at consumer data platforms’ past, present, and future in this post. Next, we’ll talk about how this technology can fuel additional tech stack elements like your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, enabling you to create spectacular real-time experiences with your customer data.
How is a platform for consumer data operated?
The four main functions of customer data platforms are data collection, data harmonization, data activation, and data-driven insights. Let’s examine each one in more detail.
1. Gather Your Information
All of your company’s client data is housed in one single location—your CDP. It is the location where all of your company’s client data is centralized.
In order to do this, every single client must be uniquely identified by your CDP through the collection and integration of data from every CRM platform and data stream used by your business. This includes your marketing platform, service software, and e-commerce engine—systems that don’t often exchange data.
“Customer resolution” is the process of combining and integrating all of this inconsistent data and uniquely identifying each customer based on their whole interaction history.
2. Sync Up Your Information
Resolving customer IDs across devices comes next, following the creation of customer identities by your CDP using all of your company’s data. This entails connecting anonymous data that potential clients may have supplied before to becoming clients, such as anonymous cookies and mobile device IDs, with identifying information from known customers, such as phone numbers and email addresses.
Cross-device identity resolution is meant to assist you in seeing your customers’ experiences as a whole. For instance, you may observe that a consumer interacted with you via an email campaign and then proceeded to your website, where they divulged personal information, downloaded material, or completed a transaction.
3. Utilize Your Information
Your CDP activates the data when it has fully unified and resolved customer profiles, enabling your teams to customize customer experiences in real time.
The consumer data in your CDP is connected to all the many technological platforms you use to interact with customers, enabling this customisation. Send engines for emails, automated processes, real-time analytics, demand-side platforms, and content management systems are a few examples of this.
4. Extract Knowledge from Data
It’s simple to view the whole data catalog that every customer shares and to follow their full customer journey with the help of the unified customer profiles that your CDP generates. Additionally, you may use this data to build personas and lookalike audiences to help you target new audiences, as well as to gain insights about your consumers and group them.
Your CDP is a wonderful resource for information that demonstrates the reach, revenue, and return on investment (ROI) of your efforts since it gathers and arranges all of your customer data in one location.