How a Customer Data Platform Can Transform Your Business

With the plethora of avenues from which they can get information, a buyer’s path to purchase becomes a process that involves several touchpoints and interactions.

When was the last time you searched for something online with the intent of buying? Perhaps you searched for an office desk for your new work-from-home setup? As a buyer, your journey probably looked like this.

You:

• Searched for the “best office desk of 2021” and took note of what you liked
• Visited review sites to see how the desks fared with real-life users
• Checked e-commerce sites like Amazon and retailers’ websites like Ikea or Walmart
• Went to physical stores that sell office desks

Once you’ve decided on the perfect desk for your needs, you do additional research. This may include looking for the best place to buy that specific desk and searching other sites to compare prices or look at alternatives. With each action, you may have started to notice that each experience seems to have become more tailored to suit your needs. Ads become more relevant and marketing emails come across as more personalized.

It seems as if, by some sort of magic, brands know exactly what you want. How are businesses leveraging information like transactional, demographic, and behavioral data to create curated and relevant experiences for consumers?

Marketing has become a complex activity that involves various channels and devices, approaches, applications, and challenges. Furthermore, consumers today have high expectations from businesses. They assume or expect businesses to know who they are and what they want. They expect to be provided with tailored solutions anytime they’re needed and for these to be available across all channels. If you’re unable to meet customer expectations and demands, business growth and sustainability might be difficult to achieve.

Integrating information and acting on key insights are among the greatest challenges that marketers and businesses face today. Traditionally, data comes from a variety of sources and are stored in separate systems that weren’t designed to integrate with other pieces of information. Confined to silos, this makes it difficult for businesses to gain actionable insights that enable them to provide engaging and consistent customer experiences across all channels and devices.

Creating a unified customer experience using customer data has become a top priority among marketers. This is wherecustomer data platforms(CDPs) come into play.

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How a Customer Data Platform Can Transform Your Business:

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什么是客户数据平台(CDP) ?

A customer data platform or CDP is software that’s designed to collect and integrate customer data from multiple sources to create a persistent, unified customer database. It stems from the need to have a deeper, more intimate understanding of consumer preferences and to deliver more customized experiences.

Unlike siloed data, which operates in confined systems, CDPs enable other systems to utilize available data to take appropriate action on customer interactions. The problem with siloed data is it doesn’t necessarily translate or share a customer’s experience from one platform to another.

For example, a customer is using a mobile app to interact with your company. This customer expects the interactions they had on the mobile app to translate to experiences with, say, your website or your physical store. Without a unified database, you’ll end up with different datasets for each interaction that are generated from the same customer. This creates a lot of confusion and disconnect, preventing you from creating a consistent experience across multiple channels, which consumers have come to expect from businesses.

CDP允许这些系统分析，监视和管理此类交互的数据。汇总数据可以包括行为数据，产品使用数据，浏览数据，事件数据和交易数据。

为了使CDP被视为功能齐全，必须具有六个核心功能，如客户数据平台研究所的RealCDP计划所述：

• Able to absorb or collect data from any source
• 收集数据的捕获完整的细节
• 无限期存储表示数据的时间note that this is still subject to privacy constraints
• Create unified profiles of individuals you’ve identified
• Share data with any system as necessary
• Respond in real time to new data that’s made available as well as to profile requests

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How a Customer Data Platform Works

A customer data platform collects all of our customer data into a single, unified database. It can create a holistic customer profile from CRM interactions, for instance, and combine disparate databases like service software and marketing cloud systems. This process is called customer identity resolution. It enables systems to stitch identifiers, such as email addresses, physical locations, and anonymous cookies, that are coming from various systems to create a single customer profile.

It will then reconcile this customer profile with the available information you have from your existing customers (like their email) and from website cookies and mobile device IDs. This creates a pathway that maps out the customer’s interaction with your business.

创建统一的数据库后，应实时提供数据，以便您立即响应消费者的需求并开始提供量身定制的体验。

Aside from being a tool for collecting data and creating a unified database, a CDP has two other primary purposes:

• 客户数据management

A customer data platform has the ability to control data flows, enabling marketers to effectively manage first-party data, consumer privacy, and data rights. CDPs also help you meet consumer and data privacy regulations.

• 客户数据activation

客户数据activation lets you take action on consumer’s data, allowing you to use information from customer interactions so you can create more targeted marketing campaigns.

CDP能够在可用的各种来源（例如CRM和Web表单）中自动更新其数据库。收集后，CDP可以构建此数据以创建集中式客户资料，然后您可以使用这些数据来识别和与客户互动，并提高他们终身价值.

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CDP和客户数据

客户数据is integral to business and marketing. It refers to information about consumers that businesses collect. This data collection is done in order for businesses to have a deeper understanding of customers, which, in turn, allows them to effectively communicate and engage with them.

Your customers provide you with data through interactions with your business and can be done through various online and offline channels such as your company’s website, mobile applications, and marketing campaigns. Other avenues for data collection include tracking pixels, contact information, customer feedback and surveys, and website analytics.

But why is customer data crucial?

客户希望tailo的优质服务red according to their preferences. If you want to win customer loyalty, you need to deliver a seamless, consistent, and engaging customer experience across all channels. This means providing customers with relevant recommendations and personalized communications whenever they need it. Failing to meet these expectations can drive customers away from your business.

What can you do to give them the best personalized service? Use customer data.

客户数据serves as the backbone behind every effective marketing campaign and business strategy. The need to leverage all this data gave rise to CDPs.

Do CDPs just collect all types of data? Not exactly. Customer data platforms primarily collect and organize four types of customer data:

Identity data

Also known as basic data, identity data acts as the foundation of every customer profile. These pieces of information will then be used as a basis for audience segmentation. Standard or basic data can include:

• A contact’s name
• Email address
• Contact details
• Location information
• 链接的组织
• Demographic data

Descriptive data

Descriptive data is more robust and provides you with more in-depth information about your customer. This type of data can include career information, family information, and lifestyle information.

Behavioral data

Behavioral or quantitative data provides insight into a customer’s interaction with your business. This can be collected through avenues such as:

• Online interactions with your business, such as free trial sign ups, account logins, and product views
• 交易，使您可以访问交易信息，例如有关特定客户支出的数量或购买频率的数据

Qualitative data

Qualitative data paints a fuller picture of your customer. It lets you view things from their perspective and tells you why they do what they do. This information, in turn, allows you to make informed marketing decisions and recognize patterns that may help you improve. Qualitative data covers aspects like:

• Motivation, which examines the intent behind a customer’s actions or what pushed them to perform a particular action
• 意见，这实际上是知道客户对您的产品或服务的感觉
• 态度，告诉您客户的特殊偏好，例如喜欢的颜色或食物

Note that data collection and storage is subject to rules and regulations. Each country has a unique set of regulations. To make sure that you’re complying with your country’s requirements on data collection and storage, it’s best to study these regulations and seek professional legal assistance.

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Uses for CDP

A CDP is a versatile tool that has a variety of uses. Below are some of the common use cases for customer data platforms:

• Personalization

企业可以使用CDP创建更自定义的营销方法，该方法将吸引您的目标受众。For example, when someone checks out your website but doesn’t complete a desired action like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter—a CDP can create a unified profile that helps you craft a personalized offer, like a custom email, that can encourage that person to go back and engage with your business.

• 控制或重新定位

您可以使用CDP来控制自己的目标。例如，通过使用CDP，您可以访问统一的个人资料，该个人资料告诉您客户的行为，无论他们是否是赞助人。如果该人已经与您的业务互动，则可以更改目标和策略，并专注于获取新客户。

• Data unification

CDPs are capable of uniting all your customer data from online and offline sources, allowing you to stitch a unified customer identity from various channels.

• Predictive analytics

CDPs let you utilize data so you can run predictive models and predictive analytics. With CDPs, you get insight into customer behavior and motivations, allowing you to determine their likelihood to interact with your business, make a purchase, and even their likelihood of churning.

• Recommendation engines

Similar to how customer data is used to generate predictive analytics, you can use customer behavior data, such as when a customer bought or returned a product in the past, to run split tests and improve the recommendations shown to the customer.

• Insights

With data come valuable insights. However, if you’re employing a traditional silo for data, you won’t be able to maximize all the information that you’re getting. A CDP will enable you to leverage different types of data from multiple sources and share it to other systems.

For example, by using a customer data platform, you’d be able to share a customer’s marketing and website interaction data with your sales department so they can develop strategies for engagement.

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Key Benefits of CDP

客户数据平台是一种强大的工具，但是您可以从为您的业务使用CDP来获得什么？

• Streamlined customer data management

CDPs let you streamline your customer data management, which refers to the process of collecting, organizing, and using customer data. Moreover, given that CDPs automatically update when new data is available, it allows for greater flexibility and agility. This ensures that your customer data and customer profiles and segments are updated regularly.

CDPs also promote efficiency, as they allow you to utilize multiple data sources in real time. You won’t have to spend a lot of time manually managing, verifying, and checking your data for duplicates.

• Provides a single view of the customer

CDPs provide businesses with a single view of the customer, or a unified and comprehensive profile of a customer across multiple channels and devices. This eliminates data silos, allowing you to share data to other systems.

• 改善了客户体验

CDP在提供更好的客户体验方面发挥了重要作用。这是因为客户数据平台创建一个统一的数据库，无论他们使用哪种频道或设备，您都可以使用该平台为客户创建一致的体验。

此外，客户数据平台可以帮助您制定更多有针对性和个性化的策略，同时确保您的消息传递与目标客户相关。您也可以将CDP用作构建的跳板audience engagementand monitoring and responding to customer behavior.

• Compliance with regulations

CDP可帮助您遵守GDPR，CCPA和其他隐私法等隐私法规。客户数据平台可帮助您尊重客户的数据隐私，从而获得或维持其信任。此外，CDP非常适合合规性，因为它能够为您提供有关收集数据的历史以及如何使用的历史记录。

• 消除了data silos

CDPs effectively eliminate data silos, which prevent you from making customer data available to all systems within your organization. To thrive, all your data should be available across all systems, whether it’s sales and marketing or customer service.

With CDPs, you have access to a unified and centralized database that’s available in real time and can make informed and immediate decisions.

• Paves the way for more insightful analytics

A CDP is capable of providing you with better insights. This is again because of the centralized database. With a customer data platform, you’re able to better understand customer behavior and create a comprehensive map of their journey. A CDP combines推动客户分析的四个主要方面, which are data collection, data sorting, data storage, and data analysis.

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CDP vs. CRM vs. DMP: Which is Which and Which One Do You Need?

A CDP may overlap with other tools or systems, particularly customer relationship management (CRM) tools and Data Management Platforms (DMP), in terms of functionality. This may cause some confusion. However, a CDP is not a CRM system. It’s also not a DMP or even a personalization tool.

CRM与CDP

While both CDP and CRM collect customer data, the former creates a unified customer profile using the data collected, while the latter monitor’s a customer’s intentional actions.

Customer relationship management focuses on customer-facing interactions. CDPs collect data on customer behavior in relation to your product or service. CDPs are especially useful for behind-the-scenes roles or non-customer facing roles, which can include marketing and product development.

For example, marketing can use data collected by a CDP to create personalized email campaigns. Your product development department can also use the unified data to improve your product and boost customer engagement.

Furthermore, CRM only collects basic data, unlike CPDs, which collect information that can help you map a customer’s journey. A CRM platform collects data manually and has a very specific purpose. Meanwhile, CPDs are able to gather data automatically through integrations and code snippets. This allows you to collect data from sources like mobile devices or apps into a database, which you can then use and distribute as needed.

鉴于CRM专注于面向客户的交互，它们非常适合改善客户之间的互动。如果您希望更好地了解客户，他们的行为和他们的动机，CDP特别有用。

So, should you opt for a CRM or a CPD? The good news is, you can definitely use both!

If you want to improve customer relationships, then use a CRM, which you can then complement with a CDP so you can get a fuller picture of how customers engage with your business.

DMP与CDP

Now, when it comes to the CDP vs. DMP debate, there’s no right or wrong answer. Like in the case of CRMs, you can use both CDPs and DMPs.

但是什么是DMP？

Unlike CDPs, which collect data from both anonymous and known persons, a data management platform is used to obtain and manage data from anonymous data sets. You can get data for DMPs from data sellers or if you have a large number of users. One good example of a DMP is Facebook, which collects user data that they then use to show optimized ads to targeted users.

Furthermore, a CDP primarily uses first-party data while DMPs leverage second and third-party data. A CDP can also store collected data for an indefinite amount of time while DMPs are only capable of storing data for a limited time.

DMPs are primarily useful for creating marketing campaigns if you’re working on acquiring new customers. This is because DMPs use third-party data, which gives you access to new potential customers. Given that CDPs leverage first-party data, they’re ideal for creating highly personalized campaigns for an audience that has already interacted with your business.

您最终使用哪一个将归结为您的目标。但是，请记住他们的某些功能重叠。

Regardless of which tool or platform you use, it’s important to note that when collecting and handling data, you should always do so in a legal and ethical manner.

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Leveraging CDP for Customer-Driven Marketing

最重要的是buyer’s journey几乎不是直接的，每个旅程都会产生大量的消费者数据。CDP使您可以利用所有这些数据并将其转变为可行的见解，使您可以为客户提供更好，更有针对性和更具吸引力的体验。

At the end of the day, it’s all about understanding who your customers are and what they want. Being able to offer them relevant solutions can spell the difference between success and fighting a losing battle.