Customer Data Platform: What Is It, and Why Do You Need One?

In today’s competitive business world, you’re going to have to do more than just provide the best product or service in your industry to be successful. No matter how innovative your product is, you’ll never be able to grow your customer base if your marketing campaigns aren’t cutting edge as well. What is a Customer Data Platform?The Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a data management layer between your customer engagement channels (web, mobile, voice, etc.) and your analytics applications. The CDP helps collect all your customers’ data from these different sources into a single unified system. It also ensures that when each source changes—for example, when you add a new field to an app—the change propagates to other systems in near real-time. A customer data platform does much more than just store information; it empowers companies to easily extract value from their customers’ digital presence across web properties, apps, social media pages, e-commerce sites, and more. Companies can use customer data platforms to answer any question they have about how customers interact with their business or products. Questions range from basic website traffic metrics to market basket analysis on a multi-channel eCommerce site, as well as sophisticated questions such as:

• Who are my best customers?
• What products do those customers buy?

The value of a customer data platform extends beyond sales activity insights.

Why Do I Need One? It’s easy to focus all your attention on customer acquisition when starting out in business, but that’s just not enough. You also have to give customers a memorable experience when they engage with your company, both when they are purchasing from you for the first time and long after. The best way to do that? Collect data about them so you can provide what they want most in every interaction. This is where a Customer Data Platform comes into play.

• In a Customer Data Platform, data from your business’s multiple channels – web, mobile, social, etc. – are collected in a single location so that you can see how customers are interacting with your brand over time.
• You can analyze those interactions to learn what they mean for future business decisions and individualize their experience based on what they want most from your brand.
• You can also use customer data for cross-channel marketing campaigns by syncing up all of your business’s information. By collecting customer information in a centralized place, you have all of your bases covered.
• When customers are your business, collecting data about them is an essential step in making smarter decisions.
• A Customer Data Platform allows you to learn more about them over time so that their experience with your brand remains consistent across all of your different channels. Just because someone may have interacted with your business on social media doesn’t mean they won’t want something different from your website. Knowing how customers want to interact with you enables you to cater to their preferences across every channel.

How Does COD Work? CDPs are a new approach to analytics but still work in a very similar way to data warehouses. They bring together customer interaction data from across your organization’s systems—big data platforms, point-of-sale machines, websites—and combine them with 3rd party marketing information about your audience.

But what makes CDPs unique is their ability to support interactive queries across all of these datasets on a single platform that can be connected to an enterprise marketing automation solution or CRM.

This makes it easier than ever for marketers to really understand how well each tactic is working so they can iterate fast and cut out wasted spending.

A proper CDP can also become an integral part of your predictive marketing efforts. When combined with machine learning technology, CDPs allow you to build models based on historical interactions and use those models to better target people most likely to buy at every touchpoint along their journey.

Because they integrate seamlessly with marketing software, CRMs, and eCommerce solutions, they can even be leveraged by sales teams right alongside sales collateral to help influence buying decisions.

And because CDPs capture a granular level of behavioral data within seconds of a website visit or product purchase, you have more time to segment your audience into finer groups so you can hyper-target groups of prospective customers who have shown intent at different points in their journey.

Ending Words! A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a technology designed to help businesses collect, compile, manage, analyze and use customer data. CDPs are used by companies of all sizes, ranging from Fortune 500 enterprises to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).

Today’s competitive market has made customer data an essential asset for any successful company. In order to be relevant in a saturated market, customers must be able to provide relevant information about their preferences and behaviors. Companies can effectively identify new opportunities, improve business operations, and ultimately generate revenue with access to these insights.

We hope you enjoyed our post on customer data platforms. Now, if you need any help with your CDP project, get in touch! MUSE Digital is a premier provider of a complete Customer Data Platform solution to enterprise-level companies. Our team of certified experts can assist you at every step of your implementation process—from initial planning through live deployment.