Why Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are Leading the Marketing Tech Trend

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have become increasingly essential for businesses as they bring uniformity, relevance, and comprehensiveness to the customer data that enterprises use. In today's digital landscape, businesses are collecting more data than ever before to offer personalized and seamless experiences to their customers. However, many face challenges around data unification, data quality control, or difficulty in using data to create more relevant experiences.

The Challenges Businesses Face

A recent EY survey found that 58% of Indian businesses believe that gaps in the breadth, depth, and quality of consumer data need to be addressed to enable data-driven decision-making. Similarly, many marketing teams in B2C and B2B organizations in India use up to 20-30 data sources, yet less than half are satisfied with the completeness and accessibility of their data. Furthermore, 37% of service agents have to toggle between multiple screens to find the information they need to do their job.

Solving Data Challenges with CDPs

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can help resolve these challenges by providing a single source of truth for hyper-personalized engagement. CDPs can ingest vast amounts of data, unify personal, demographic, behavioral, purchase, and engagement data, and manage customer consent across touchpoints. Here’s how you can use a CDP to tackle these challenges:

Create a Single Source of Truth for Hyper-Personalized Engagement

CDPs provide marketing teams with a 360-degree view of each customer through unified profiles. This enables businesses to deliver the right messaging to the right customer and create hyper-personalized shopping experiences. With unified customer profiles, businesses can ensure that customers don't walk away with a disconnected experience.

Unlock Insights for Informed Decision-Making

Unified customer data can help businesses deep-dive into insights such as calculating customers' lifetime value or engagement score, which can help enrich profiles. CDPs help marketing teams quickly identify campaigns that work well for specific customer segments to refine the marketing mix and optimize budgets. This results in more informed decisions and better targeted marketing strategies.

Build Smarter Audience Segments

Many businesses find audience segmentation challenging as it can be complex and time- and cost-intensive. CDPs, as effective segmentation engines, allow marketing teams to quickly query a rich set of data attributes, build audience segments, and activate them for targeted mobile messaging, advertising, personalization, and more. This leads to more effective marketing campaigns and better customer engagement.

Break Down Data Silos for Better Customer Experiences

A CDP allows businesses to activate data and insights generated on the platform across functions and throughout the customer lifecycle. This can lead to increased audience reach with lookalikes, improved engagement through behavior-based targeting, upsells and increased retention through loyalty segmentation, special offers, and churn identification. CDPs break down data silos, offering more seamless and cohesive customer experiences.

Lower Costs and Improve Efficiency

By providing a single platform that connects all customer data, CDPs help businesses lower costs as they don't need to invest in multiple platforms. This leads to more efficient data management and utilization, resulting in better ROI on marketing investments.

Conclusion

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are increasingly becoming the go-to solution for businesses looking to unify, analyze, and leverage customer data for improved marketing strategies. If your business is looking to enhance customer engagement, unlock insights, and build smarter audience segments, consider implementing a CDP. As the world's leading CRM, Salesforce offers CDP solutions that can help businesses achieve their goals. Explore our Salesforce CDP or request a free demo today to learn more.