Customer Data Platforms
We’re customer data platform specialists
Businesses today are awash in more data than ever before. There’s transactional data, demographic data, and virtually infinite amounts of behavioral data. A customer data platform or CDP helps organisations stitch this together to build a single view of their customer.
- 52% marketers saying data management is their most time consuming activity
- $1bn CDP industry revenues in 2019
- 1 Tealium is top rated global CDP
- 78% number of US corporates investigating CDPs
What is a CDP
A CDP Definition
The CDP Institute defines a Customer Data Platform as ‘packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.’ It’s a system that centralises customer data from all sources and then makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns and customer experience initiatives.
Middleware
In many respects a CDP could be defined as a piece of middleware that ingests data from a business’s other marketing technology applications before processing and modelling it. Preconfigured integrations with thousands of platforms, mean that system deployment and data enrichment is a rapid process.
First Party Data
Unlike a DMP, which is typically focused on using cookie-based 3rd party data to allow advertisers to reach prospects they don’t already know, a CDP aggregates customer data from your entire marketing ecosystem helping you build a picture of who your customer is, how frequently they engage with you and what they’re interested in.
Advantages of a CDP
Marketing Managed
CDPs are designed for use by marketers. As packaged software, CDPs contain prebuilt, configurable components to connect to common source systems, run standard processes for data cleaning and customer identity management, format the data for external access, and push data extracts to systems that need them.
Unified Database
By storing their own data, CDPs can identify customer patterns and connect customer identities by comparing old and new data. As the data they hold is first-party, personally identified information, a CDP enables organisations to turbo charge their marketing programmes creating personalised messaging that’ll resonate.
GDPR Compliant
By centralising access to customer data, CDPs can be an important tool for GDPR (and POPI) compliance. Moreover, implementing an effective approach to data management will help organisations earning customer trust at a time when consumer awareness of data breaches and shady data collection habits has become commonplace.
