A 360° view of one’s users and customers is for marketers and strategists no longer just a coveted goal, but an indispensable necessity if one wants to invest in personalising the customer experience.
It is indeed here that lies the key to making a success of one’s business in the face of an increasingly demanding, informed consumer, able to move fluidly between the off-line world and the digital reality. The consumer becomes the protagonist, the touchpoints of the customer journey multiply, but above all, expectations grow on the brand’s ability to offer increasingly relevant customer experiences thanks to the timely collection of data, the evolved profiling and segmentation of audiences and the personalisation of communication and interactions.
But while consumers increasingly demand personalised experiences, marketers are faced with the gradual and inevitable extinction of cookies and third-party data, hitherto indispensable elements for profiling and segmentation activities.
It is precisely at this juncture that Customer Data Platforms come into play: technological solutions capable of offering indispensable technological support to collect and manage valuable data and information about users and customers, in full compliance with privacy provisions.
Customer Data Platform: between market and functionality
We have to go back about ten years to find the first reference to the term “Customer Data Platform”.
It was, in fact, first used by David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute, who defined such solutions as “a software package that creates a unified and persistent customer database, accessible to other systems”.
It then took five years for this software classification to be officially recognized by the martech industry thanks to Gartner, who defined CDP as “a marketing system that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels.”
Since then, the trend relating to Customer Data Platforms has been steadily growing. After an initial phase characterized by a real explosion, however, today the market is consolidating with a significant presence that also includes legacy big vendors such as Adobe, SAP and Salesforce.
But what are the peculiarities of these platforms?
The definition given by Gartner is certainly simplistic: to fully understand the potential of these technological solutions it is perhaps appropriate to dwell on their acronym, which encompasses three key concepts.
- Customer: the customer who increasingly plays a central and active role in the relationship with the brand;
- Data: customer and user data, the new driving force for effective marketing strategies capable of generating value;
- Platform: the technological solution often in SaaS mode, intuitive and user-friendly.
We could thus define a CDP as a technological solution that unifies a company’s customer data from multiple channels and sources (e.g., POS, social media, website) with the aim of creating complete user profiles, accurate and updated in real-time. Data collection, data normalization and more: many platforms offer customer analytics services integrated with AI and machine learning, for even more advanced profiling and predictive marketing activities. From data collection, to data activation, to customer journey orchestration: the most modern CDPs integrate marketing automation, marketing personalization and omnichannel campaign management.
CDP: why you may need it
The future of marketing and business strategies is data driven: no more choices based on macro data and industry trends, but the need to make decisions and devise marketing strategies on the basis of certain information about users and customers.
Completing the picture is an increasing interest in first-party data due essentially to the now inevitable apocalypse of third-party cookies.
Valuable data and information about known users, but not only: over 94% of users who browse a site or an eCommerce store choose to do so without providing personal and contact-related information. This means that we tend to target all our marketing activities at only 2%-4% of the users that make up our audience. And the remaining percentage? CDP platforms make it possible to track, but above all to segment anonymous users, also taking advantage of the data made available during browsing for subsequent lead generation and nurturing activities.
In this context, the use of a customer data platform becomes essential in order to implement effective marketing automation and customer experience customization strategies in an omnichannel perspective.
