You’ve probably heard of customer data platforms, or CDPs. You might have investigated different CDP technologies or spoken to a CDP vendor or two. But, like many of your fellow Marketers, you might still be wondering, “How would a CDP help me?”

What’s a CDP?

CDPs are central repositories of all the information you know about your customers. They allow you to combine customer data across all your touchpoints, to discover your customer stories, and ultimately to target your customers in highly directed ways. Along these lines, CDPs have four basic areas of focus:

  • Aggregating all your customer data from various sources,
  • Integrating the data to tell a singular customer journey,
  • Enriching the story by creating meaningful classifications and potentially importing external sources, and
  • Allowing you to Operationalize what you know about your customers in meaningful and highly monetizable means

What Can a CDP Do For You?

A person sits in front of a computer monitor and types on a keyboard

Get to Know Your Customers

By aggregating all your data about your customers in a singular location, CDPs allow you to stitch your known customers together, providing a true 360-degree view of who they are and how they’re engaging with your organization. This allows you to classify them in highly marketable segments and identify the optimal ways to engage them. Going further, together.

CDPs allow you to stitch your known customers together, providing a true 360-degree view of who they are and how they’re engaging with your organization.

But how does a CDP help with this? CDPs are built for ingesting data from multiple disparate sources while identifying common identifiers for individual customers (could be Email Address, IP, Various User IDs) to allow you to merge all the sources together. Third-party data can also be merged into your dataset via data coops or various open source or paid marketplaces. Finally, CDPs excel at customer segmentation, allowing real time classifications of who your customers are based on what they have done, or even are likely to do.

Target Your Customers More Effectively

Once you know who your customers are and can group them into targetable segments, you can engage with them in highly personalized ways via directed marketing or website personalization. A couple examples of what this looks like with an effectively implemented CDP include:

Directed Marketing with a CDP: A user is classified as a Young Parent who is Brand Conscious and Purchases Apparel for their Young Children. This could tell you that the best time to engage with directed emails is early afternoon, as the children need to go to school in the morning and often have family time in the evening. It would also suggest that engaging them annually with back-to-school messaging would have a high chance of conversion as children grow out of their old brand clothing.

Website Personalization with a CDP: You’re running a boutique hotel in Southern California. Based on what you know about your users, you could render add on experiences on your site for Wine Country Excursions for Users Classified as Foodies, Star Tours for Users Classified as Cinephiles, or Romantic Experiences for Couples. The site could be tailored to the user in extremely directed and meaningful ways.

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Optimize Your Customer Engagement

Analyzing the results of customer targeting efforts can help you ensure that you are targeting customers in the right ways. Are you missing potential segments? Could you personalize differently? Segment-based analysis, facilitated by most high quality CDPs, allows you to understand how different segments respond to your various marketing attempts and take informed steps to improve results. Marketing is an art, but having a CDP helps you to turn it into a science and significantly improve your customers’ experience while increasing the ROI on your marketing spend.

Marketing is an art, but having a CDP helps you to turn it into a science and significantly improve your customers’ experience while increasing the ROI

Need More Advice on Choosing a CDP?

Learn from our very own CDP experts Andrea Walker and Nathan Poorbaugh, along with James Meyers of ActionIQ, in a sales-free discussion as they walk you through some of the most common mistakes made when selecting a CDP.

This event is part of On the Mark – a new series of discussions dedicated to Digital Experience. We bring together the Blast team and industry leaders to discuss key trends, use cases, and emerging technologies. In a casual, unscripted format, we throw the agenda out the window and let consultants and experts share their real-life experiences with some of today’s leading companies and technologies.