Customer Data Platform-A Futuristic Necessity

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a type of software which creates persistent, unified records of all your customers, their attributes, and their data.  A CDP builds a complete picture of your customers on an individual level. It collects 1st party customer data like transactional, behavioral, demographic, etc. from a multitude of sources and systems, and links that information to the customer that created it. This creates a 360-degree customer profile, also called a single customer view, which can then be used by 3rd party tools or built-in marketing automation tools to execute marketing activities and analyze their performance. 

How does Customer Data Platform help?  

1. Importing Data from Multiple Sources: There are multiple avenues from which Data can be extracted to CDP. CDP has data sources like: 

   • Transactional data – for example, the number of products previously purchased, abandoned carts and purchase frequency. 

   • Campaign behavior – for example, number of clicks on email campaigns, open rates and optimal send times. 

   • Online activity – for example, user engagement on-site, site navigation, as well as receptiveness on social media or response to specific campaigns. 

   • Customer service data – for example, customer service contact and past service history, leading through to issue resolution. 

   • Identity and personal data – In the CDP, personal data acts as a marker for identifying individual customers. This data can include simple information such as name and address. It can also include professional data (such as place of work) and account information specific to the website or company involved. 

   • Offline Sources – CDP has SFTP connectors, so the kind of data that can be imported can be of any type. 

2. Customer Data Unification: After gathering data from all the possible sources, CDP uses different Identifiers to map and unify data points from different sources. It provides a unique golden ID for a given User that relies in different Databases. We can use this ID to map users between tables and create a single view of customers. 

3. Creating a Single View of Customers: Data collected and organized with a CDP is visualized through individual data profiles for each user. This 360-degree view of the customer is possible since all customer data is in one central location. This view tells us about the attributes and behaviors of a given user which can be used to understand the data at a user level. 

4. Personalization: Personalization is a feature where the content is personalized for every user. Real world example includes Facebook, YouTube, etc. where feeds or recommended videos differs from person to person. In a similar manner, CDP’s 360-degree customer view can suggest different types of users for which we can send personalized emails to users. For example, A user who has opened the email can see products that are relevant to him and can have a better chance of conversion. 

5. Predictive Scoring: Some of the CDPs has in-build ML algorithms which scores a given lead. This score is nothing but the probability of conversion. Using these scores, we can prioritize leads having high scores since they have a better chance of conversion. The modelling part is kept dynamic in order to personalize the inputs and weightages used to calculate the score. 

6. Customer Segmentation: Customers can be segmented into clusters of similar behaviors and attributes. Segment has helped thousands of companies collect, analyze, and get more out of their data. These segments are then used for targeting specific use cases depending on business needs to create personalized experiences and increase customer engagement. Having multiple sources of data to unify upon, there are multiple possibilities that the customers can be segmented on since the number of possible attributes and behaviors have increased. 

7. Smart Behavioral Retargeting & Lookalike Advertising by activating segments on various Media channels: The above created segments can be activated on Integration with Facebook Ads, Google Ads and Analytics which enables the company to leverage insights from CDP to run powerful acquisition & retention (lookalike) campaigns outside of the company’s website. 

At Merkle Sokrati we deal with a varied profile of clients which provides knowledge and exposure to variety. we provide a holistic approach in understanding your requirements and connecting them with the best possible measures. We are happy to provide you services like Customer Data Platform, Data Management Platforms, Analytics Platforms, Web Personalization Platforms, Tag management services etc.   

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