CDP – Customer Data Platforms are revolutionizing marketing

The Market is Changing

Everything we buy and all the services we use are just a click away, creating intense competition. Customer journeys now involve interactions at both digital and physical touchpoints, forming a unique pattern for each customer.

Yet customers expect a seamless experience that is relevant, akin to the service level and personal touch offered by human interaction at a local café or store. This means:

We Must Leverage Data

More information is available to us than ever before, and our ability to process it is expanding swiftly. Digitalization allows us to create new data-driven services and automate our internal operations. Now we can get truly personal.

We Need to Change How We Communicate with Customers

Brands are built through direct customer experience at the touchpoints, not just through branding campaigns. We need to reach customers in real-time in the contexts and channels where they make purchasing decisions, and we have to be personal to stay relevant.

To technically support this cohesive customer experience, we need technology that backs it up. Customer Data Platforms, or CDPs, support this. CDPs enable us to communicate with customers in real-time with relevant messages in the right channel at the right time. A CDP supports this through various components:

Data Management

Collect data from all types of sources. Data cleansing, transformation, and management of a data structure that supports business processes and marketing efforts.

Profile Unification

Build a customer profile from various data sources. Use business rules to match multiple profiles for the same customer to get a clear picture of preferences and profile.

Customer Analysis

Profiling customers through DNA, segmentation, predictive models, recommendation models, etc., to analyze customers and provide them with the most personalized experience possible.

Targeting & Triggers

Manage personalized customer dialogues. We need to address the customer based on how they interact with us.

Campaign Orchestration

Manage customer dialogues across multiple channels and organize dynamic multi-step campaigns. Share segments across platforms and channels to reach customers with relevant communication via email, social media, or apps.

Follow-up & Reporting

Measure all communication using control groups. A/B testing of dialogues. Dashboards for monitoring communication and customers to ensure they receive the most relevant messages and that those messages are effective.

Not all CDPs have the same focus and can be classified into different categories. Gartner has divided the CDP market into four segments:

CDP Engines and Toolkits: These providers are often described as a CDP toolkit or available as open-source, offering feature sets ideal for IT-led teams.

Marketing Data Integrations: Focus on data management - features enabling detailed control of event data streams from a marketing-friendly interface without campaign orchestration. Examples include Tealium and mParticle.

Smart Hub: These providers emphasize orchestration and personalization. Predictive analytics, segmentation, and customer journey design interfaces are common. Systems like Exponea, Optimove, BlueVenn, and BlueConic are typical.

Marketing Cloud CDPs: Tools where everything is built into a suite but still facing challenges in data management and orchestration, and difficulty in integrating with other systems, examples being Adobe, Salesforce, etc.

Summary

Companies looking to provide their customers with a coherent experience that is relevant and resembles the service level and personal touch of human interaction should invest in a CDP to support these capabilities.

Remotion has conducted numerous evaluations and procurements of CDPs, as well as implementations of them. Remotion is a leader in Scandinavia in data-driven communication and using new technology to support it. We have experience and knowledge of several CDPs and personalization engines.