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Customer data platforms are more than just marketing automation tools or customer relationship management systems. They have evolved into a multifaceted system that encompasses data management, intelligent segmentation, and marketing analytics. Finding the proper CDP requires understanding a vendor’s history, technology, and how it fits within the company’s infrastructure.
However, there are five key considerations every business needs to make to find the right CDP.
Data streams are always continuous. It’s not just enough for CDP to ingest all the incoming data, but also analyze it in real-time. A CDP is constantly monitoring all the incoming numbers in real-time. These numbers can be analyzed for patterns and trends, and the probability that an event will happen in a specific location at a specific time.
A CDP without real-time support cannot deal with unstructured data and can only do what it’s programmed to do. But a full-fledged CDP with all bells and whistles structures the data on-the-fly and makes mince-meat out of the job of analyzing the numbers.
A customer data platform must have the ability to build customer profiles based on users’ behavior across devices. This includes linking the actions of anonymous users to known users after their identification — a process called “reverse stitching”. A CDP maintains a log of all transactions, both successful and unsuccessful. This includes tracking every user interaction with a transaction as well as every user interaction with other transactions, following it up with segmenting and targeting advertisements in real-time.
The ability to segment, personalize, and start campaigns is one of the most important parts of customer data platforms. Segmentation allows the customer data platform to understand the needs of different customers. Personalization enables this company to improve engagement across customer groups by catering to their individual interests. Campaign activation means that personalized content can be sent quickly through a number of marketing channels that have already been set up. These marketing channels can be used to reach marketing goals like lead generation, product sales, or customer service.
If a CDP doesn’t already have built-in features for segmentation, personalization, and campaign activation, there may be extra costs. Businesses will have to compromise on flexibility, cost, and automatic activation while incorporating other tools.
A customer data platform should fit snugly into the company’s martech stack. It’s vital that it has an open architecture that allows for multiple types of integrations, so a company can easily expand its range of third-party and internal services. This means having the right set of features for different use cases, like collecting, storing, and processing digital data, and built-in support for all important third-party integrations.
A good CDP has a lot of integrations that let third parties get information about the company’s customers in real time. If it’s lacking in even one of these critical integrations, it will not only cripple the entire martech stack, but also leave the company vulnerable to data leakage. An open architecture is an important feature, given how quickly other companies are developing technology that competes with a CDP’s functionalities.
As GDPR regulators tighten their restrictions, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance are becoming increasingly important. For a customer data platform, having robust data privacy protection is not just a perk, but a necessity. Any company that uses a customer data platform that is not GDPR-compliant or does not have a regulatory compliance officer on staff will become subject to large fines. A CDP must have strong security policies in place for handling sensitive information, as well as taking the necessary steps to ensure compliance with GDPR regulations.
The final consideration pertains to what you are going to use it for and what you are hoping to get out of it. The best CDP platforms typically provide software modules that can be integrated with other applications for specific use cases like marketing automation, CRM, or analytics. But to leverage all these powers, your CDP must:
● Provide a complete understanding of the customer journey.
● Enhance the personalized experience for the customers.
● Developing multichannel advertising strategies with greater targeting.
● And finally, combine online and offline data.
A successful implementation of a customer data platform requires forethought and careful planning. The following are some best practices that can help achieve this goal.
Determining the size of the data set and the potential customer base is the first step. There may be a correlation between these variables, but they are not necessarily correlated.
● Consider how many possible customers there are in a specific geographical area. The total number of possible customers for a given product is dependent upon how many people live in the geographical area and how often those people will be using the product.
● What about retaining user information? Most historical information is kept on an individual level, but some organizations choose to keep track of all activity instead. Since it is important to have access to the data for analytical purposes, some organizations may choose to perform offsite backups that are not online.
● Determine data sources and which organizational tools and platforms are necessary to support the enterprise data strategy and roadmaps. Doing this ensures that their CDP is correctly aligned with their data strategy.
The design configuration is one of the most important aspects of the successful implementation of a customer data platform. It describes how the platform will work with other systems inside an organization and with partners or customers outside the organization.
CDPs can be configured in a variety of ways. The key to success is knowing what data needs to be ingested, what tools and methods should be used for that, how the platform should be set up, how long it will take for a typical user to learn how to use it, etc.
● Identify the real-world and digital touchpoints where customer data is needed.
● Choose an appropriate customer data platform to meet your needs.
● Develop a plan for the integrations into your current marketing technology stack.
● Review and determine the resources you need to gather, mix, and merge data from different sources and make it available to your data platform.
● Finalize the configuration.
The next step involves conducting a thorough audit of the company’s current infrastructure to ascertain the quickest and smoothest way to integrate CDP into the company’s technology stack. Auditing the company’s current infrastructure allows for a better understanding of how each component is working and which nut must go into which bolt.
● Prepare a list of the technical requirements for ingesting data from the necessary data sources. Data ingestion is the process of taking data from one source, such as an external system or a database, and loading it into a dataset in a database.
● The list of technical requirements would include information on how often the data gets updated; how long it takes for a transaction to be completed; and what kind of method is used for ingesting data.
● It’s also worth checking how the shortlisted customer data platform handles batch-capturing of data.
● Configure and connect API services to CDP and schedule data pulls.
● Finally, if CDP calls for a schema, make sure it’s properly organized and formatted before proceeding with the data mapping. A CDP that favors schema-less ingestion makes it easy for different types of data sources to be ingested and integrated.
If everything has gone according to plan and there are no rude surprises that threaten to break the proverbial camel’s back, CDP is ready for deployment.
● Create the segments for activation: Define and segment customer base to target them with relevant offers and content.
● Create a plan for deployment: Create a plan for rolling out the customer data platform to customers so that the success of the CDP can be measured and adjusted as needed.
● Deploy and measure success: Deploy the CDP, measure results, and adjust accordingly. Close the loop when satisfied with the results.
● Communicate success internally: Share successes internally so that everyone is aware of how well they are doing in their role.
● Communicate externally: Share success externally so that people know what is going on at your company.
● Businesses use CDPs as both platforms and applications used to manage campaigns, interactions in real time, and the orchestration of multiple channels.
● The primary goal of CDP adoption is to power an application, such as a marketing campaign or a real-time interaction with a customer.
● Given the wide range of products available for any given use case, it’s easy to see why there’s so much misunderstanding about what’s required of a CDP. The CDP Institute recommends starting out with less demanding use cases like data assembly and analytics.
● CDP projects should initially focus on deploying a small set of use cases that have similar resource requirements, and then expand to include more use cases that have similar requirements.
“75% of customers expect companies to use new technologies to improve their experiences,” finds the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer Report. Customer data platforms let companies respond to their customers’ actions within seconds of them interacting with their brand, giving them a personalized experience whether they are a large group or just one person.
The various CDPs have been organized by Gartner into the following four categories: CDP Engines and Toolkits, Marketing Cloud, Smart Hub, and Marketing Data Integration.
These CDPs help businesses with their digital marketing strategy by providing them with a platform that helps them build and develop customer profiles in-house.
With a Smart Hub CDP, marketers can coordinate and personalize both online and offline marketing. They can seamlessly integrate their campaigns with customer interactions from a single interface. Lytics and Redpoint are some of the more popular names in Smart Hub CDPs.
Data integration CDPs like Segment and mparticle bring together different sets of data so that they can be analyzed and used in marketing activities like targeting, personalization, automation, research, and more.
The Marketing CDPs in the cloud are the new kids on the block. As demand for CDPs has increased, major cloud service providers like Adobe, Microsoft, and Salesforce have created their own versions of the technology. They have the strongest integrations within their own ecosystem and are a part of a larger marketing stack.
What makes these the most powerful CDPs is their ability to combine all the most effective features of the other types of CDPs — particularly Adobe’s AEP customer data platform.
The Adobe Experience Platform boasts a robust set of tools, features, and functionality delivered through a unified interface with a single login and a single application. Essentially, this capability creates an expansive portfolio of digital services for customers and for internal use — from CRM to marketing automation to sales enablement.
Adobe’s AEP can figure out what information is most important to the customer based on the customer’s situation and context at that time. The more customers use their CDP platform, the more relevant the CDP becomes. It’s not what AEP does, but how it does it that makes it unique and different.
The Adobe Experience Platform lets data scientists play with complicated stuff by letting them run code like Python and Scala — something that very few CDPs can do. The platform provides visualization tools and powerful deep learning capabilities, giving the power to create stunning user experiences.
The platform that creates segments from profiles and sets up stuff like segments to send emails to people in certain phases and ties it into a company’s martech stack. This is available in both the B2B and the B2C versions.
The business-to-business (B2B) version has features that are specific to each account and built-in connectors to third-party platforms that let relevant professional industry data, like account status and funnel stage, be pulled from those platforms. Compared to the B2B version, the B2C one is more concerned with the buying process, cart abandonment, and related issues.
The Adobe Experience Platform is a software platform that helps companies create and deliver personalized customer journeys across digital channels, even without injecting SQL codes. AEP gets its data not just from Adobe Analytics but also from the AEP data lake. This makes it easy to create user flow analysis and predictive customer journeys.
AEP’s one-of-a-kind Journey Orchestration function figures out where a person is in the buying process and tells them what to do next. It provides a way to understand the customer’s progress and help them get closer to a purchase. The way Adobe Experience Platform does it is by using a “Journey” score, which is an overall rating based on how much of the journey they have completed. After that, the Journey Orchestration function will be triggered, and the user will be provided with a “path” to help them further their journey.
The Experience Data Model (XDM) is the de facto standard data model for describing customer interactions. The data model is designed to describe all customer interactions in terms of their experiences and interactions with the company.
AEP’s XDM infrastructure supports real-time customer journey analytics, real-time customer profiles that ensure end-to-end scenario and goal analysis, predictive analytics and real-time customer experience optimization. It provides an integrated platform for all types of business objectives, such as new service introduction, sales pipeline analysis, and campaign profitability. The XDM system is ready for use once schemas are created, and it starts ingesting data that conforms to them.
Virtusa, a Platinum Partner of the Adobe Experience Platform, is a specialist in delivering solutions that help companies turn business ideas into reality. Their innovative solutions are designed to accelerate time to market, optimize content migration, and create new digital experiences with AEP. As one of the first companies to work with AEP, Virtusa is at the forefront of bringing industry-first solutions to market.
Their innovative framework ensures smooth and hassle-free adoption of the Experience Cloud, which means crafting unique and exciting digital experiences without having to spend months or even years on complex migration projects.
Virtusa’s Fusion framework optimizes content migration, allowing users to easily convert content that was created on one platform into another. The solution is designed for companies looking to reduce the cost and risk associated with creating new workflows or converting old workflows from legacy platforms to AEP.
The Adobe Experience Platform is the best-in-class combination of manageability, scalability, and integrations that gives you the ability to deliver personalized experiences for your customers and increase revenue. Virtusa has deep expertise in the platform and can work with companies to ensure that they get all the benefits from this world-leading platform.
Sidheshwar Chauhan is a MarTech Executive with over a decade of experience in spearheading marketing transformations and driving significant growth through strategic innovations and partnerships. Proven expertise in integrating AI and advanced data analytics to enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency, leading high-impact digital solutions across multinational landscapes and critical initiatives for large brands.
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