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What is the value of a Customer Data Platform?

Introduction

The Customer Data Platform – CDP- is one of the major technologies being deployed to solve challenges marketers are dealing with around browser and device changes and growth in data volumes. This new landscape makes it more difficult and expensive for brands to achieve the same results whilst competitive.

If you’re considering buying a CDP, then you know it’s a big decision. This fifth piece of our CDP series explores the methods used to match customer data in a CDP implementation.

Don’t miss the first four pieces of the CDP articles series:

Richer data for audience targeting

Many media platforms allow marketers to upload their first-party data to target their customers and audiences. Some channels like search and social are direct uploads, while most display and app platforms require a 3rd party intermediary to translate personally identifiable information (PII) to cookies or device IDs.

However, when customers interact with your brand in real-time – i.e. making a purchase, opening an email, clicking an ad – they flow between the stages of the Customer Lifecycle. CDPs connect all those interactions and historical attributes into a single profile for audience building and making it visible to media platforms. Media channels are then executing campaigns and targeting customers based on the most recent interaction, improving customer experiences and performance metrics.

Direct media platform integrations

CDPs can provide real-time profile refreshes and updates to media channels because of their direct connections to online tools and marketing platforms. The ability for CDPs to ingest and store data, and then make it available to all major activation platforms is at the core of CDP functionality.

Their direct integrations can activate audiences across all digital channels, from Programmatic Display, Connected TV through to Social and Search campaigns across applications such as Google, Facebook and SnapChat. These direct integrations remove the marketer’s dependency on engineering teams to build custom APIs/integrations to individual media platforms, enhance a campaign’s speed to market, improve personalisation, and deliver real-time triggers.

Integrated media orchestration

CDPs are bringing about significant changes breaking down the silos across data, reporting, and marketing channels. By centralising the audience under a single platform, a CDP allows marketers to plan and execute strategies across the omni-channel. Marketers can move from utilising consumer research and best practices to mining valuable customer data in the CDP when building integrated campaigns.

And when a customer opts-out of one channel of communication, it signals the marketer to either increase or decrease marketing in other channels. By utilising the CDP’s customer profile options and known behaviours, marketers can hone the ideal marketing channel mix at an individual level in the most effective and cost-efficient way.

Conclusion

CDPs- Customer Data Platforms- are helping brands deal with new challenges in the digital era. A CDP keeps customer data in one place, giving brands a 360° view of their customers to implement personalised marketing strategies across multiple channels. CDPs connect all user interactions and historical attributes into a single user profile for audience building and make it available to media platforms. It onboards datasets from different sources and then unifies the data under a single Customer ID to make it available for marketing purposes.

Brands need a reliable partner to help them understand the impacts of a cookieless world, create a future, and roll out new solutions so they can meet these changes with confidence. At CvE we are evaluating other options from identity graphs, to clean rooms, to ID-free solutions, as well as those solutions proposed by central technology owners, such as Google and Apple.