What is a CDP?
Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a specialized software that centralizes the data and manages it efficiently. Customer data platforms collect data from various resources and it creates a unified and comprehensive view of individual customers.
The customer data platform collects all the interactions and gives an overview of each customer’s lifecycle. It also makes the data accessible to all other integrated systems and marketers can seamlessly leverage the data from marketing and sales outreach activities.
Benefits of Customer Data Platform for Marketers
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Consolidates data efficiently
The customer data platform consolidates the data from various resources. It collects data from various platforms like websites, mobile applications, email marketing platforms, CRMs, Social media, IoT devices, E-commerce platforms, offline sources, etc.
CDPs are an excellent solution for cross-channel integration, database marketing and CDPs make sure that no valuable data should be left behind from any touchpoints.
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A 360-degree view of every customer profile
Customer data platforms collect data from every resource and provide a structured and comprehensive view of a customer profile. CDP collects data points associated with each customer and creates detailed individual customer profiles by stitching together all the data from various resources.
So, marketers find it convenient to access the data from customer data platforms as they get the required information at first view without the need to browse different platforms and systems.
When marketers can access comprehensive information about each customer, it becomes easy to analyze the patterns and behaviors of customers which ultimately leads to effective and data-driven marketing decisions.
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Personalization
Personalization is an essential marketing strategy to engage and nurture present-day modern customers. Customer data platforms help businesses to personalize their marketing strategy by providing unified customer profiles.
By leveraging unified data from CDPs, businesses can understand the behaviors of customers across all platforms and touchpoints, and personalize their marketing efforts for every individual and every marketing channel.
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Behavioral tracking and insights
The CDP is a powerful tool that helps businesses track customer behaviors across various channels and touch points. It is capable of extracting insightful information from each stage of the customer lifecycle.
CDPs facilitates businesses with valuable and comprehensive customer data that help in effectively optimizing their marketing approach and encourages data-driven decision-making.
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Omni-channel marketing
As discussed above, customer data platforms collect and track data from all touch points and platforms including online and offline. CDP marketing is one of the effective marketing strategies that enable businesses to use huge data parameters to engage every individual customer.
Customer data platforms with the help of AI track and update real-time information about the customer journey. Businesses can track immediately whenever the potential customer initiates interaction with the brand. Likewise, CDPs can track the interactions of potential customers across various channels.
Businesses can leverage this information to understand their potential customer behavior on different channels and initiate Omni-channel marketing campaigns.
Another admirable feature of customer data platform marketing is it encourages businesses to leverage all offline and online channels for their marketing campaigns and constantly supplies real-time data.
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Helps in mapping the customer journey
Mapping customer journeys is a strategic process used by businesses to understand how their customers behave and change across various touch points and throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
With the data and insights from customer data platforms, marketers can create visual maps and journey schemas to understand and analyze the customer’s path.
Marketers use CDP marketing in mapping the customers because it helps to identify key moments, decisions, and channel points where customers engage and interact with the brand.
Kinds of data collected by customer data platforms
The customer data platform marketing process leverages data from all the possible resources and channels and are capable of tracking and collecting data from both online and offline resources. Below is an overview of the kinds of data collected by CDPs.
- Demographic Data: It includes information like Name, Address, Phone Number, Email Address, Gender, Age, Profession, Income, Educational Background, etc.
- Transaction Data: It includes information like purchase transactions, order history, subscription preferences, payment methods used, etc.
- Behavioral Data: It includes information like website visits, interactions, dwell time, product views, add-to-cart actions, cart abandonment details, clickstream data, app usage, email open rates, etc.
- Geographic Data: It includes information like location-based searches and preferences, competitor visits in specific locations, Location data including IP addresses and GPS coordinates, geo-location data from mobile applications, etc.
- Marketing and Campaign Data: It includes information like email marketing data including email open and click rates, subscribe and unsubscribe rates, ad campaign data, social media ads (clicks and impressions), landing page interactions, etc.
- Customer Support Data: It includes information like survey responses, customer inquiries and help center queries, customer service interactions, chat transcripts, customer satisfaction scores, support ticket data, etc.
- Social Data: It includes information like social media handles, type of content engaged, type of content formats liked and interacted with, social media connections, networks, etc.
- Consent-related data: It includes information like communication channel preference, opt-in and opt-out status, data related to privacy regulations, types of cookies accepted and managed by customers, etc.
- Third-party data: It includes information like data purchased from external vendors, data from third-party integrations including APIs and data enrichment services, etc.
- Miscellaneous Data: Customer data platforms are capable of collecting data from numerous resources including time-stamped data, anonymous user’s data, device preferences data, etc.
Conclusion
Businesses are proactively leveraging the capabilities of Customer data platform marketing. CDPs help businesses deeply understand the preferences, challenges, and pain points of their customers.
The most admired feature of the customer data platform is its capability to provide detailed information and a 360-degree overview of every customer. This helps businesses in high-quality segmentation of the target audience and allows businesses to create highly personalized and targeted sales and marketing outreach activities.
Customer data platform when combined with AI capabilities are more powerful and provides more opportunities and features for businesses to implement effective marketing strategies.