Many companies are packed with more data than ever before. There are different types of customer data sets that businesses can rely on. This data includes demographic data, transactional data, and an infinite amount of behavioral data both in-person and virtually.
We can all agree that modern marketing campaigns rely heavily on data. Therefore, CDP are gaining momentum. These are faster and more efficient than any other marketing technique.
However, what is a customer data platform, really? And how can using a CDP benefit your business? Let’s learn more about customer data platforms and their benefits below.
What is a customer data platform?
A customer data platform or CDP is a tool designed to manage and consolidate customers’ data from different resources. Even more, a CDP can aggregate all customer data and unifies it after cleansing that into a single customer view. This customer view you can then use to design your marketing campaigns.
Most amazingly, you can also access this data from other systems. Even more, a CDP can also let marketing teams utilize customer data for different objectives. These may include personalized communication, customer segmentation, customer analytics, and more. Additionally, you can do this all with minimum IT involvement.
Why is Customer Data Important?
Customers of the present time are more informed. Therefore, they expect a lot from the businesses and brands. Most of them have experienced personalized services. So, if you want to keep up with them, you need to provide it to them.
However, this is all possible because of customer data only. Even more, customer data can also help you in providing:
- A consistent customer experience across multiple channels
- Appropriate products or services recommendations
- Personalized communication and more.
All of these things are necessary to keep today’s customers with you. However, if you won’t meet the heightened expectations of customers, you will have a problem. It is because this will let your customers think that you don’t value them. Consequently, they will take their business to your competitors.
To avoid this all, it is highly important to have well-maintained, insightful, and accessible customer data.
Who needs a customer data platform?
CDPs are essential to use for both business and marketing processes. Therefore, every business must consider having a customer data platform. Besides this, independent marketing firms can also consider this to add more effectiveness to their marketing campaigns.
What is customer data?
Customer Data Platforms are gaining momentum because customer data is crucial for both marketing and business operations.
However, customer data is information that your potential prospects leave behind when using the internet or interacting with the business. You can get this data from different sources, including e-commerce portals, blogs, in-store interactions, social media, and websites.
Collecting customer data has become critical for businesses to offer personalized services to their customers.
However, here are four main customer data types you must know:
-
Identity Data
This type of data builds the base of every customer profile in a Customer Data Platform. It will let you identify each customer uniquely and keep you from costly replications. Identity data often includes information such as:
- Name
- Demographics
- Location
- Social information
- Contact details
- Professional and account details
-
Descriptive Data
This expands on identity data and will let you get a complete picture of a customer. However, the category of this data will depend upon your company’s type. While descriptive data includes:
- Lifestyle information
- Career information
- Hobby and interest
- Family information
-
Quantitative or Behavioral Data
While quantitative or behavioral data will let you understand how each customer is engaged with your products or services. However, this type of data includes details such as:
- Email communication information
- Transaction information
- Customer service information
- Online activity information
-
Qualitative Data
This type of data provides context for your customers’ profiles. It can provide customers data a personality. However, qualitative data includes:
- Opinion information
- Attitude information
- Motivation information
Key Benefits of a CDP
CDPs are here to improve your business’ customer relationships in a more effective way. Even more, these can also complement your current marketing efforts and tools. However, here we have enlisted the top benefits of a CDP that you must know:
-
Avoid data soils
Customer data platforms can help you avoid data soils. By unifying customer data and employees, you can rest assured that your data is accessible and available for everyone.
-
Access the most accurate and reliable customer data
Even more, the customer data you can get from Customer Data Platforms is always accurate. It is because the data is collected directly from your consumers. Therefore, this is always the best and most reliable type of data you can have. Ultimately, you can easily use it to make informed decisions with ease.
-
Get to know your customers more.
To ensure effective customer-centric marketing campaigns, you need to know more about your customers. Fortunately, Customer Data Platforms can help you in this regard.
-
Unify multi-channel marketing efforts
Most commonly, businesses have established their presence across multiple channels online. These include multiple social media platforms, websites, and more. However, CDP can help you to unify your multi-channel marketing efforts more effectively.
What Problems do Customer Data Platforms Solve?
As your customers interact with your business across multiple channels and through different systems. Therefore, customer data is becoming more fragmented, with more frequency. Therefore, this has increased the demand for a system that can assemble customer’s data from multiple resources.
Ultimately, A customer data platform is here to manage data from multiple sources into one consistent and complete customer view. Even more, it can then let you share the results with all other essential systems. This is exactly what customer data platforms can solve for you.
Top Customer Data Platform companies
Here are some of the best customer data platform companies that you must know. These customer data platform companies are providing top-notch solutions for you to grow.
So, here we go:
-
Segment
It can let you collect and unify your consumers’ data across different online sources. It offers three pricing plans to provide you more flexibility.
-
Emarsys
This platform is here to let you build an omnichannel approach by using, collecting, and analyzing data from multiple sources.
-
Exponea
This is one of the most amazing Customer Data Platform companies which offers end-to-end services. However, its services are majorly focused on B2B and e-commerce businesses.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this is a detailed guide on what is a customer data platform. However, here you can learn much more about a CDP (customer data platform) with ease. In a nutshell, it can help you to boost your marketing and other business operations by knowing more about your customers with ease.
