// 15
TECH
ISTOCK/ GENESTRO
Customer Data Platforms and Why You Need One
BY FIONA HILLARD
Chapter 1: What is CDP? e’ve all experienced it at one time or another – that moment when you took a chance on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, or Amazon’s product recommendations, and they completely knocked it out of the park with their picks for you. Let’s hear it for the customer data platform (CDP). Over the past decade or so, digital marketers have been leaning more and more on the CDP to deliver standout customer experiences. And this demand looks set to continue. In fact, according to the CDP Institute, many organizations are prioritizing CDP investments as they prepare for a post-pandemic world. With a multitude of versions now available, figuring out how to choose a CDP — and more importantly — the right CDP, can be tricky. A customer data platform is a major investment
W
JUNE 2022
and there are several important factors worth considering before you take the plunge and commit to a vendor. Understanding what a CDP is and what it does is a great place to start. In simple terms, a customer data platform is a tool that allows marketers to transform their users’ data into impactful customer experiences. The CDP does this by capturing digital signals in real-time as users interact with channels. It can then predict what customers want based on current and historic behaviors. With the support of a CDP, marketers can activate customer insights for optimization and personalization in any channel and share audiences across their entire ecosystem, resulting in improved alignment across campaigns. But what exactly constitutes a CDP? Well, according to the CDP Institute’s definition, a customer data platform is “packaged
software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”. Chapter 2: CDP Capabilities n Gartner’s Market Guide for Customer Data Platforms 2020, analysts Benjamin Bloom and Lizzy Foo Kune suggest a CDP product should feature a marketerfriendly, web-based interface that allows the following: ❯ Data Collection: The ability to ingest first-party, individual-level customer data from multiple sources, online and offline, in real time and without limits on storage. Data persists within the system as long as it is needed for processing. This includes firstparty identifiers, behaviors and attributes. ❯ Profile unification: The ability to consolidate profiles at the person level and connect attributes to identities. This must include linking multiple
I
❯
❯
devices to a single individual once that person has been identified and deduplicating customer records. Some solutions may support thirdparty data matching or aggregating customers into a household or account. Segmentation: An interface that enables the marketer to create and manage segments. Basic offerings support rulebased segment creation. Advanced segmentation features may include automated segment discovery, predictive analytics and propensity models, and the ability to import and deploy custom models built in external advanced analytics or data science environments. Activation: The ability to send segments, with instructions for activating them, to engagement tools for email campaigns, mobile messaging and advertising, for DMN.CA ❰
