Over the past three years, there has been a lot of confusion about what a Customer Data Platforms (CDP) can and can't do, and subsequently what benefits a CDP can bring to a company. Here are the 5 most frequently asked questions about Customer Data Platforms:

1. Can I use our home grown solution to create CDP-like benefits?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) will typically be controlled and used solely by the marketing team, so the information stored will be customer-related (contact information, customer activities/behaviors and transactions). Its raison d’être is to create a Single Customer View (SCV) by normalizing the customer data collected from marketing and operational systems across the business, and drawing together all known information about the customer into one ‘Golden Record’. During the Single Customer View creation process the CDP will cleanse the data, correct incorrect or inconsistent formatting, and merge duplicate entries. The data is also persistent, which means that it is retained indefinitely (unless required to be removed by law), including every change or process, which is then timestamped for 100% traceability.

Customer Data Platform series: 5 of 5

Over the next 5 weeks, read a new blog each week from our CDP Series as our CMO helps you to understand the CDP landscape, capabilities and functionality.

Let's just get something straight; it's common (and understandable) to assume that 'tag management' means organizing either the tags that make blogs more searchable or the meta tags used to improve the SEO of a web page. That isn't what we're talking about here.

This blog focuses on management of the snippets of code (tags) embedded into a web page to record information when a customer accesses and interacts with a company’s website or mobile app, or to help launch the functionality of marketing technology products. In the latter case, the vendor of the martech will request that the customer embeds the code. Just like a Customer Data Platform, the main function of a Tag Management System is to help manage large amounts of first-party information collected by companies about their customers. 

Customer Data Platform series: 4 of 5

Over the next 5 weeks, read a new blog each week from our CDP Series as our CMO helps you to understand the CDP landscape, capabilities and functionality.

The basic raison d'être of both a Master Data Management (MDM) solution and a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is similar. Both exist to ensure that a business has a supply of carefully curated, unified, accurate and reliable corporate data, a single trusted view to deliver insights and drive business innovation, but that's where the similarities end.

For a start, MDM is a discipline and a set of processes designed to transform organization-wide data, especially in large companies, while a CDP is a packaged software product with a specific purpose to deliver a single view of the customer that the marketing department can use for the improved personalization of marketing campaigns. Another key difference is who stands to benefit from their use and how they are managed within the organization.

Customer Data Platform Series: 1 of 5

Over the next 5 weeks, read a new blog each week from our CDP Series as our CMO helps you to understand the CDP landscape, capabilities and functionality.

Poor quality data is the result of numerous errors that can progressively ruin the success of your marketing campaigns. In fact, according to IDG, poor data quality is one of the modern marketer’s biggest concerns, with 66% of those polled declaring data quality and accuracy as a “top priority”. 

Inaccurate names, addresses and contact details, along with duplicate records and decayed information, will distort your view of a customer, resulting in poor campaign results and inaccurate insights. Worse still, it creates a bad experience for your customers whereby they either miss out on a specific offer, are targeted wrongly or receive the same message multiple times.

Our customers are taking increasingly complex journeys consisting of multiple online and offline touch-points. They interact with brands through any channel or device they wish (email, web, social, mobile app, direct mail, call center or in-store), and therefore its a strategic imperative that marketers are able to utilize data from all these channels and execute campaigns in an omnichannel way.

Without the ability to capture and act-on the available data points it creates disjointed and impersonal experiences that can frustrate buyers and damage a potential conversion.