If you are a business person looking to take your business to the next level, then you should be aware of the customer data platform (CDP). The CDP platform is an important aspect for every business that looks to step in for planning and to witness continual growth.
The platform provides an infrastructure for enterprises to build accurate customer profiles and deliver personalized services or products to their customers accordingly. This builds a better customer experience for the brand.
This article is about explaining customer data platforms in detail and why it is considered an important aspect for businesses.
A customer data platform (CDP) is nothing but ordinary software that was specifically designed to handle customer data effectively. The platform builds a separate database for customer data where all customer data collected from various sources is stored and gets unified based on their relationship and attributes. In addition, it helps businesses easily integrate the new data with the existing one.
Apart from allowing businesses to integrate and retrieve customer data, the CDP platform enables business enterprises to have a complete 360-degree view of customer data. This helps to build a more complete and accurate customer profile.
Why Do You Need a CDP for Your Business?
Recently, the usage of the CDP platform among businesses around the world continues to rise steeply. Owing to the popularity and demands of CDPs, in today’s market, you can easily find numerous vendors offering CDP solutions. The CDP solution will be handy in various areas like data management, monitoring digital products, analyzing data, data integration, and so on. This tool is capable of providing a master data management solution for customer databases on its own.
Many marketers prefer CDP solutions mainly because of their ability to adapt and deliver on an evolving market’s needs. Also, when compared with small-scale businesses, businesses involved in dealing with large product data and handling data in multichannel marketing hubs or in real-time considerably prefer CDP solutions.
The rapid growth of digital transformation and the eCommerce sector has significantly intensified the existing data problem. This is the main reason the CDP solution is garnering so much attention among bigger companies worldwide.
Features & Capabilities of CDP
The enhanced features of the CDP tool allow businesses to understand what their customers are looking for and deliver their products or services accordingly. Here are the lists of some fascinating features and capabilities of the customer data platform that will support all businesses’ growth. Take a look.
Highly responsive Data Collection: Almost every CDP tool collects and gathers customer data in real-time or somewhat delayed. This helps business entities to have a complete 360-degree view of their customer data. Businesses can adjust their products or services to meet the needs of their customers after understanding what they are looking for by analyzing the data they have collected.
Ability To Connect Multiple Platforms: The Customer Data Platform comes with the ability to connect multiple platforms for data collection and data sharing. Using this, the marketing team, development team, and sales team can easily access accurate product data for better analysis and to build effective marketing campaigns.
Data Compliance & Security: If you are doing overseas eCommerce business, you should run your business compliant with local and international regulations. Each country has its own set of rules. Compliance with all those rules is hard to do manually. However, CDP makes it easier through automation and offers high security for the stored data.
Easy to Query Data: The CDP tool adopts new technologies quite easily. This allows new non-techie users to access the platform easily. Also, the easy user interface of CDP allows users to navigate and query data easily. This helps business stake leaders make useful and handy decisions much more quickly.
Easy to Migrate Data: The CDP tool supports businesses in migrating data from one system to another easily. The tool comes with a separate mechanism where users can easily select the option to import or export the data.
CDP’s Key Advantages for Your Company
The customer data platform guide a wide range of benefits to an organization. Apart from removing all the hassles of managing customer data, the CDP improves the brand relationship with the consumers and plays a handful of roles in improving marketing strategy along with supporting existing software.
In addition to those, here are some key benefits that an organization can obtain from a customer data platform.
1. Lowers The Risk of Data Silos:
A data silo is commonly referred to as the isolated version of the same data from one department to other departments within an organization. In most cases, data silos occur when a business tends to expand too quickly without proper data management within departments while sharing. Data silos are a sign of less collaboration within the work environment of an organization. Also, it will lead to slow productivity and the risk of getting low-quality customer data.
Having good CDP software helps organizations avoid data silos by unifying all the customer data in a single location. Also, the CDP tool gives an organization the confidence that data is accurate and easily accessible by any team member.
2. Collects Data Directly From Customer Touch points:
When it comes to customer data, you can find a lot of data floating around in almost every channel. It is nearly impossible to find the legitimate and accurate customer data that you are looking for. So, it becomes essential to collect data directly from the customers, site visitors, brand followers, and brand subscribers. All that collected data will be gathered as first-party data right from your brand audience.
This is where the CDP tool plays a handy role. Having a good CDP tool gathers customer data directly from the audience easily and quickly. This ensures the data gathered by the CDP tool will be the most accurate information about consumers.
3. Briefs You About Your Customers:
To survive in today’s competitive marketplace, you need to be highly focused and follow a customer-centered marketing strategy. To drive a customer-centric approach, you need to be well aware of your customers. Though you can find numerous tools and software performing the operation of ‘Know Your Customer, nothing matches the accuracy delivered by the customer data platform.
The CDP platform helps business entities build relevant customer profiles with accurate data by acquainting brands with every individual customer. It helps brands to understand their customers very well through customer behavioral analysis and identity graphs.
4. Unified Cross-Channel Marketing:
Almost every organization has multiple marketing approaches to beat the high market competition. For effective multiple marketing campaigns, you need to put more effort and energy into communicating and sharing data among the team members. It also requires a high level of education for team members regarding data handline prospects according to the multiple marketing aspects.
The DCP platform removes all those hassles and efforts of the business stakeholders while doing multiple marketing campaigns by unifying all the existing marketing efforts. This is done by providing well-organized, consolidated, and accurate customer data according to the individual campaign formats.
5. Increasing Business Revenue:
Having the right CDP tool will help your business achieve its goals. The enhanced features and capabilities of CDP will deliver higher customer satisfaction. The CDP provides a complete 360-degree view of customer data to business entities by collecting data from all sources.
This helps marketing teams to build more efficient marketing strategies to attract a larger target audience and increase brand presence. Once the team manages to increase brand recognition and customer engagement, conversation rates will increase, leading to an overall business revenue increase.
How to Choose the Right CDP Software?
Having the right CDP software is like gold for large enterprises to achieve and carry out centralized customer data management. The CDP platform helps organizations to build strong customer profiles using reliable and accurate data. It also helps businesses to create efficient and successful omnichannel marketing campaigns.
To leverage the full benefits of the CDP tool, you need to make sure you pick the right CDP solution.
Here are the 5 steps, by following you are able to find a perfect CDP tool matching your business objective.
First, establish a team that is going to work in CDP by picking members from across departments.
Have a complete list pointing to your core use cases that you are going to achieve by using the CDP guide.
Outline the capabilities that you are looking for from the customer data platform.
Compare the CDPs based on their features and the solutions they offer.
After finalizing the one, make sure it doesn’t have any complex installation process.
Conclusion
Implementing the right CDP tool is the key to adding value to any business. The platform provides you with detailed information about what customer data an organization collects and what services and products brands must provide to customers now and in the future.
Today’s digital era is about understanding the customers. Implementing a robust customer data platform will assist business leaders in taking the right decisions and delivering tailored experiences to valuable customers.
