Best Customer Data Platforms (CDP)

Customer Data Platform Software

Marketing is one of the most difficult tasks which every serious business organization must confront on a daily basis. No matter how wonderful your products or services are, everything becomes useless without a dedicated and well-equipped marketing department. Successful marketing needs a great volume of information about your customers. You need to know about what they love as well as those that they don't. Furthermore, a significant success also calls for understanding what they think about your business.

Quite frankly, the game doesn't just end there. There are many more details regarding your clients that you'll need at your disposal to record a few substantial improvements as far as effective marketing is concerned. Undoubtedly, you must have already realized just how important the marketing department is to your business. To cut a long story short, appropriate marketing strategies are the engine of your organization; you lose focus, and you may end up losing everything.

Therefore, for positive results to prevail, you'll need to use a very special tool called Customer Data Platform (CDP) software. In this piece, we've explained CDP in detail so that all your answers are answered in one. Let's get started!

What is the Customer Data Platform?

Customer data platform (CDP) is highly sophisticated software which serves the purpose of collecting, organizing, and analyzing data about the customers of a given organization from many different online sources. The information being collected may include details like how customers came to know about your organization as well as what they would like to be added or removed from the services offered, among others.

Such information is very vital for relevant planning in the production and marketing departments. CDP software goes the extra mile by unifying the data collected into individual customer profiles, which are incredibly seamless to study and analyze.

Four Main Types of Data Collected and Analyzed by CDP Software

1. Qualitative Information

It includes the customer’s opinion and attitude about specific products and services or your organization as a whole. Qualitative data may include things like your clients’ most preferred colors, sizes, and much more.

2. Identification Data

This is the primary source of customers’ data. In this case, the CDP collects personal information about your customers from various online channels. The data collected in this category will include things like name, contact (Phone number or email address), gender, age, city of residence, professional background, social media details (Twitter or LinkedIn handle) and much more.

3. Descriptive Data

The already collected identification information about the clients get described in details. Top CDPs let you know the finer details like marital status, number of children, and the hobbies of your potential customers, which will help greatly for planning and coming up with effective marketing strategies.

4. Quantitative Data

Which include the number of website visits, the number of product reviews or clicks on the links among others. Having customer data platform software at your disposal will also help you track communications quite easily. You can view the number of email opens and responses too. Furthermore, using the best CDP will as well let you track the number of transactions and purchases plus the respective dates just by a single click of a button.

Customer Data Platform software features & capabilities

One thing you must never forget is the fact that not every customer-related software you come across qualifies to be a CDP. There are some specific features and capabilities that would make software to be considered a Customer Data Platform.

1. Ability to Collect Data from Multiple Sources

This capability is what makes CDP a really powerful tool. Customer data platform software can collect customer data from many different online sources, some of which include emails, websites, social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.). This is why a CDP can give an extremely more comprehensive analysis of what the customers want.

2. Unification of Customer Data

A Customer Data Platform not only collects and analyzes customers’ data but also integrate the information into individual highly detailed profiles for easy analysis. This feature is what truly makes a CDP one of the greatest online customer data platform tools for established business organizations.

It may be hard to analyze scattered data, but thanks to CDP for making the process one of the most seamless operations to perform, it’s not possible to analyze the data to near perfection.

3. Friendly User Interface

It's without any doubt that having to involve the technical team every time you're using the software is not only time consuming, but notoriously expensive. Today, organizations are more focused on minimizing costs and maximizing profits. But you probably won't be able to achieve this unless you're equipped with a powerful Customer Data Platform software.

Most top CDPs have been designed in a way that they're more user-friendly to eliminate the need for a technical team and reduce the chances of user errors by a higher margin.

4. Scalability

If you run a small business today doesn't mean it'll remain the same forever. A business that is well-managed increases in size every single minute, and we believe yours is not an exception. Therefore, a Customer Data Platform should be in such a way that it can be easily customized in the future to handle billions of daily events should such a need arise. It’s needless to say that you would never want to purchase a new one, and that is where scalability comes in.

5. Ability to Transfer Collected Data to External Systems

You'll agree with us that sometimes you'll want to analyze the collected data further. This cannot be possible if the CDP has no inter-systems data transfer capability. It's actually what adds more power to this amazing tool.

6. Ability to Predict Outcomes Using Machine-Learning Algorithms

A few decades ago, one could never do so many things with most of the business management tools which were available. But today, technology has gone a notch higher, making business operations a huge success. For instance, powerful Customer Data Platform software will help you to predict future trends, and this is information that would add great value to your marketing and planning patterns, and even your business as a whole.

Types of Customer Data Platform software

There are four main types of CDP as we have described below.

1. SMEs

• CDP’s for small upcoming business organizations

2. Large Enterprises

• CDP’s for already established organizations which also operate on a large scale.

3. Cloud-Based

• CDP’s which are accessible via the internet. Can always be used from anyway. You don’t necessarily need to be in your offices.

4. On-Premises

• CDP’s which are locally installed. However, due to increasing technological advancements, they’re becoming less important to most organizations.

Key Benefits of CDP software

Best customer data platform software has some special benefits which can never easily be found in other business management tools. Below are some of such benefits you may need to know.

1. Access to Firsthand data

Nothing else could be more beautiful than knowing what your clients are really after as well as what they want to achieve by associating with you. Customer data platform software lets you get firsthand information straight from your clients. The fact that whatever you get is real-time data makes it possible for your organization to target customers with specific relevant information.

2. No Data Silos

A data silo is usually experienced when data is accessible only by a few departments in your organization. Data silos may result from a shortage of modern technology or if the tool you are using lacks adequate scalability to catch up with the rapid growth of your business.

The CDP makes sharing of information between various departments, a seamless task. This, therefore, means that if you are using Customer Data Platform software, then the information will be available to all departments – boosting the organizational coordination by a significant margin.

3. CDPs let you know, and Better Understand your Clients

A successful marketing plan starts by first knowing your clients and Customer Data Platform software will help you achieve that. The information presented on individual customer profiles and their behavioral analyses adds tremendous value to your marketing success. This is always possible because you target those people you already know as well as understand their tastes and preferences. Top customer data platform software, therefore, is a must for targeted-marketing strategies.

4. Enhance Overall Marketing Efforts

The capability of the Customer Data Platform tools to unify many different marketing processes at the same time is a huge win for your organization. Being able to multitask saves a lot of time and resources which would be needed if conventional marketing strategies were applied.

CDP vs. CRM

CRM is the short form of Customer Relationship Management tool. A CDP and a CRM are similar only in one thing, which is a collection of customer data that’s very important to your organization. The two tools, however, differ in quite a number of ways as we have explained below. Let’s take a quick look!

1. One of the major differences between CDPs and CRMs is the fact that CDPs collect both online and online customer data while CRMs only focus on online data. It’s important to note that if a CRM were to collect any offline data, then the information would have to be entered manually.
2. Another notable difference between the two is that CDPs collect data from many different online channels on a large scale, thereby, reducing chances of data loss through replication and maximizing accuracy. A CRM operates a little more differently – the information collected is singular and based on individual entries which can easily be interfered with through human error.
3. The data collected by the Customer Data Platform tools usually come from anonymous visitors while the data gathered by a CRM specifically comes from potential or already known clients. And what does this tell you? Well, it’s quite evident that the CDPs have huge data coverage than the Customer Relationship tools, something making them extremely helpful to your business.
4. Most CRMs will only analyze sales pipelines and, perhaps, forecasting. They always never go beyond that. Well, the CDPs go the extra mile. They track customers in many different dimensions, which include their lifetime behaviors and journeys.

Why use Customer Data Platform software?

This question committed business owners the need to answer. Is it worth it to purchase CDP software? Does your business need it? And will there be any tangible return on investment? Here are reasons why you should use Customer Data Platform software.

1. The qualitative data obtainable from the software lets you understand your customers' tastes and preferences and, after that, respond appropriately by offering exactly what they want.
2. CDPs work by keeping close contact between your business and clients. You can always communicate seamlessly should the need arise. This helps to retain the clients you already have and maximizing the possibilities of getting new referrals.
3. The ability to collect data from anonymous visitors is a real game-changer when it comes to achieving marketing success. Having a wide coverage of not only your customers, but others as well increase chances of growing your clients’ volume by a notable margin.
4. A CDP gives you a wider field of view of market trends and forces, thereby, increasing your chances of success. This is possible because the data collected is from many different sources.
5. Using Customer Data Platform software saves your marketing team a lot of time and resources which would have been utilized if you went the conventional way. These factors together minimize the cost of production and significantly increase your profits.

Who uses CDP software?

A Customer Data Platform is one of the most important tools that any business should have. This is regardless of size and any other factors. The good news is that even if your business is small, the CDP’s scalability will provide room for a seamless expansion in the future. CDP software is primarily used by the marketing department to ensure enhanced planning and coming up with working strategies.