A customer data platform (CDP) is software that creates unified customer profiles by collecting data from all your different channels and touchpoints. This allows you to gain a complete view of each customer in one place.
Rather than having customer data siloed in separate systems like your CRM, website analytics, email marketing platform, etc., a CDP brings everything together. It integrates data from all these sources to build detailed profiles with key info like contact details, purchase history, web activity, and campaign interactions.
With full profiles powered by a CDP, you can better understand your customers and deliver personalized experiences across channels. A CDP doesn’t just aggregate data – it activates it. CDPs use the unified profiles to inform your marketing campaigns, website personalization, product recommendations, and more.
In this article, we’ll explore the key benefits CDPs provide:
- Unified customer profiles
- Data-driven insights
- Omnichannel personalization
Keep reading to learn why adding a CDP is essential for brands today.
Unified Customer Profiles with Complete Data
Customer data today is highly fragmented across different systems and touchpoints. Marketers struggle to get a complete view of their customers with data siloed in separate channels.
CDPs create unified customer profiles by ingesting data from all sources, whether it’s your CRM, website, mobile apps, email systems, and more. They merge this disparate data together to build 360-degree customer profiles.
These unified profiles contain every interaction and transaction a customer has taken. You get a complete view of each customer instead of just channel-specific snapshots.
With full customer profiles, you can gain powerful insights into behaviors, preferences, and trends. You understand your customers as real people rather than just accounts.
Unified profiles enable you to deliver personalized experiences based on complete data. You can tailor messaging, product recommendations, and offers that align with what each customer cares about.
Hyper-personalization requires a unified customer view that only CDPs can provide. Siloed data cannot support the level of personalization needed to stand out today.
Data-Driven Insights to Optimize Experiences
CDPs go beyond just aggregating data to provide actionable insights that marketers can use to optimize customer experiences. By analyzing behavioral data, purchase history, website activity, and more, CDPs can surface trends and patterns within customer segments.
Key types of insights CDPs enable include:
- Identifying high-value customer cohorts based on traits like lifetime value, engagement, retention, etc. Marketers can then tailor messaging and offers for these priority segments.
- Determining which channels and touchpoints are most effective at driving conversions for different audiences. This allows for optimized resource allocation and campaign targeting.
- Uncovering customer pain points or friction in the conversion funnel based on behavioral data. Marketers can proactively address these issues to improve conversion rates.
- Forecasting likelihood to churn based on past behavior of similar groups. Proactive win-back and retention campaigns can then be activated to prevent customer defection.
- Anticipating future needs or propensity to purchase specific products based on inferences from current data. Marketers can deliver personalized recommendations and timely, relevant offers.
With data-driven insights from their CDP, marketers can truly hyper-personalize experiences across channels in an impactful way. The CDP enables them to understand customers, predict behavior, and optimize engagements for continually improved performance.
Omnichannel Personalization Powered by CDPs
Customer data platforms focus on centralizing data from all different channels and touchpoints, whether online, offline, mobile apps, email, social media, and more. This gives marketers a comprehensive understanding of each customer.
With a unified customer profile from a CDP, marketers can coordinate consistent messaging and experiences across channels. A person may get an email with certain offers, then when they visit the website, they’ll see relevant recommendations based on their email engagement. The mobile app can remind someone about items left in their cart on the website. Every outbound message reinforces others.
Without a CDP, disparate data sources make omnichannel personalization very difficult. Messages may seem random and irrelevant when they come from disconnected systems. CDPs act as the customer data hub to prevent this and allow coordinating seamless experiences across channels. The centralized data gives marketers the power to create consistent messaging tailored to each individual.
Why Customer Data Platforms Are Essential Today
Customer data platforms have quickly become an essential component of modern marketing technology stacks. By unifying customer data from all touchpoints into unified profiles, CDPs enable hyper-personalization across channels while providing data-driven insights to improve marketing performance.
As the examples in this article demonstrate, CDPs deliver tremendous value for all types of businesses. Retailers leverage CDPs to provide personalized ecommerce experiences. Financial institutions use them to deepen customer relationships. Nonprofits rely on CDPs to better engage donors across channels.
The need for CDPs will only increase in the years ahead. According to Gartner, over 50% of enterprises will have invested in a CDP by 2023. And CDPs deliver results. Forrester finds that CDPs can increase revenue by an average of 10%.
For any business looking to drive growth through data-driven customer engagement, a CDP is now a must-have. To learn more about how a CDP can benefit your organization, request a demo or download an ebook today. With the right CDP, you’ll be on your way to more unified customer data, actionable insights, and highly personalized marketing.
