Confused about Customer Data Platforms (CDP) and how they can benefit your marketing strategies and campaigns? Well, you’re not alone! A new Winterberry Group report holds the answers you need. It clarifies what should be regarded as the core capabilities of a CDP, which capabilities are ‘nice to have’, and what strengths are exhibited by various categories of the technology. It also gives an overview of the market and where it’s headed.
Learn more about what defines a CDP in the extract below, or download the full report here.
Marketers are increasingly looking to CDPs to address the challenges they face, from personalization, to attribution, to privacy and regulation. Nevertheless, prospective and early-stage CDP adopters are frequently confused about the technology and its role. This is primarily due to three key factors:
- Many CDPs having previously competed in other martech categories, creating a spectrum of competitors that have as many differences as similarities.
- Vendors that offer ancillary capabilities to the CDP, but claim the ancillary as core to their CDP definition, resulting in a market devoid of consensus.
- Adjacent categories (e.g. analytics platforms, orchestration engines and engagement systems) labeling their technology as a CDP in order to be included in RFPs, even as their primary offering lives in the application layer.
What is a Customer Data Platform?
A CDP is a data management platform that focuses on first party customer data and is able to:
- Ingest and unify customer data from multiple sources.
- Offer customer profile management.
- Support “real-time” customer segmentation.
- Make customer data accessible to other systems.
Core capabilities of a Customer Data Platform
True CDPs encompass four core capabilities all of which reside within the data layer; additional, non-core features include analytics and applications.
Data ingestion and integration
At a minimum, must address event-level behavioral data (e.g., session behavior from websites, apps, and mobile browsers), customer demographic data, transaction data, campaign data and engagement metrics, customer service data and modeled data (e.g., RFM models, propensity scores).
Customer profile management
Create universal and persistent consumer profiles by resolving the identity of customers and visitors across different states (known and unknown), assigning persistent identifiers and leveraging multiple keys and linkage approaches (multiple email addresses, changing social IDs and device IDs, and both deterministic and probabilistic matching).
“Real-time” segmentation
Create and manage rule-based segments. To function in real-time, require either a modern data processing pipeline, which can deploy decision-making rules to endpoints, or a streaming architecture.
Expose customer data to other systems
Integrate “out-of-the-box” with other systems through connectors and APIs, allowing access to data for deeper analytics and/or to inform customer engagements.
Adjacent capabilities within some Customer Data Platforms
Activation and analytic functions live in the application layer, in contrast to the other CDP capabilities that are in the data layer. Vendors in these categories have often originated from legacies as applications that have added CDP capabilities over time to further promote the adoption of their functionality (e.g., analytics, personalization, orchestration,...).
Analytics/AI/ML
Develop predictive/prescriptive analytics and ongoing optimization.
Attribution
Leverage a rule, or set of rules, to determine how credit for sales and conversions is assigned to touch-points in conversion paths.
Marketing activation and orchestration
Send and activate segments via proprietary, integrated applications or solutions and personalize messaging based on unique profiles. Determine how and where data should be transported throughout the customer journey, either through dynamic logic or processing capabilities.
CDP Benchmark and Score Chart
As well as defining what is, and isn’t, a CDP the CDP Benchmark report also provides a score chart to help you understand how BlueVenn features compare with other types of CDPs and marketing automation platforms on the market.
If you’d like to learn more about what makes us different and how our technology could help you to optimize your marketing efforts, book a demo today.
Download Customer Data Platform benchmark report
This new 14-page Customer Data Platform benchmark report by Winterberry Group provides much needed clarity on the 'core' and 'adjacent' capabilities you should expect from a Customer Data Platform.
This download includes:- A definition of core CDP capabilities
- CDP market trends and insights
- CDP adoption trends and questions
- CDP capabilities matrix
