What is a CDP - Customer Data Platform in 2021

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What is CDP – Customer data platform

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is the marketing technology (MarTech) capable of unifying customer databases to a single place.

Here are 6 key elements of Customer Data Platform

1.Marketers and business users: These people can configure the system.
2.The connection between data and various systems: The setup could be done by data experts including Data engineers and data scientists. Then, the business users are capable of managing data for marketing activities like self-service.
3.Collecting first-party data: These data include transactional data from Customer Relationship Management (CRM), demographic data of membership from website database, behavioural data from web analytics and mobile analytics.
4.Capability to connect various third-party data: For example, connecting Ad Audience from different data brokers, event data from the marketing automation system.
5.Capability to connect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from various channels such as website, POS and Mobile Application
6.Open for data visualization tools to connect with the database and extract data for finding insights.

What is a Customer data platform (CDP) and how it is different from CRM and DMP?

I believe that fellows from the Digital Marketing industry especially from the agencies and online media may be familiar with Data management platforms (DMP).

However, for 1-2 years, we have recently heard the new word “Customer Data Platform” (CDP) which is the platform for managing customer data. More MarTech companies capable of utilizing CDP have made the market entry to Thailand. As I have experienced in working in Marketing Technology for long time, I have chances to discuss with the various platforms’ owners and users, try using platforms; get their demos from the sales representatives, and purchase their services.

Therefore, I would like to discuss CDP with you but before exploring the detail of CDP issues, I would like to explain the types of data based on the data sources.

First-Party Data: This is the data we have collected by our owns mainly Personal Identifiable Information (PII) such as an address, email and mobile number
Second Party Data: This is the data passed from business partners.
Third-Party Data: This is the data collected in vendors, platforms and other systems. Mainly, they are anonymous, and the unidentifiable customer information such as Device ID, Cookie ID, Landing page or other digital behavioural data.

1st party data, 2nd party data, 3rd party data

Well-known Data management platform (DMP)

Oracle Data Cloud
OnAudience.com
MediaMath
Nielsen DMP
Adobe Audience Manager
BlueKai

List of the data providers and data brokers

That’s it for DMP. Here we come to CDP.

For 3 – 4 years, Customer Data Platform (CDP) has recently been in the news and got interested by different organizations. This is because marketers worldwide have believed for a decade that if customer data could be unified, the accuracy, intelligence and effectiveness of the marketing activities will be much improved.

That is the reason why almost all organizations (especially the giant companies with plenty of internal systems including Enterprise Resource Planning, Product Information, and Point of Sale) share the pain points. One of them is the incapability to unify customer data to see the whole picture of the customer behaviour from the beginning to the end of the journey.

Certainly, there are attempts to build a system that integrates or consolidates data. Leading infrastructures have been invested. Master Databases Management has been planned. These tasks are under the responsibility of IT, it is the data Science team that takes care of the data foundation.

Here is an example of how CDP works: treasuredata.com

However, not all attempts are successful to deliver CDP instantly in terms of marketers’ definition. Thus, there is the concept that the customer data management system should be managed by marketers (Marketing Managed). Plus, there is the growth of various MarTech with the data integration tools for unifying data. That is why there is an attempt to develop CDP.

What makes CDP outstanding is that it is capable of collecting data from all sources to a single point. It connects, stores, unifies, enriches and activates by the following activities

Owned platforms pass the first-party data to CDP
CDP enriches the data from other sources by exchanging and purchasing through data providers.
The enriched data is utilized for more accurate ad targeting or message personalization
The data is also visualized via business intelligence tools

Some platforms like ARM Treasure Data have a built-in dashboard such as Customer 360 View, which can be customized through API

Example of Customer 360 View extracting and visualizing data from Jasmine Yu (Customer)

Revenue gained from her
Her channel preference
Predictive Score to the future behaviours
Interest Categories & Words
Matched segments to the customers with the similar profiles
Customer Journey, media attributions and touchpoints as the digital footprints
List of the seen ads
Visited webpages
Clicked emails

Customer Data Unification For marketing activities > Segment-Based Personalization > Running a campaign and media distribution > Collecting the data on campaign performance back to CDP

SessionM is another latest CDP acquired by Mastercard in October 2019
SessionM is well-positioned as the customer engagement & loyalty platform (Segmentation Intelligence) followed by the predictive metrics including Risk of Churn and Product affinity.

Also, here are the following features of SessionM

Built-In Marketing Automation for cross-channel communication including email, SMS, pushed message and in-app messaging
Campaign Creation with the action-based promotions by triggering under conditions and qualified rules.
Ability to integrate with the in-store POS system which is interesting for retail customers.
Have reward points and tiering customers like the function of spend, points earned and transaction count.

In Thailand, there is CDP called “Growth.AI” which can automate in every lifecycle stage of customers

Example of the Growth Segmentation
Normally, there is the marketing science team in Growth.AI that manages data from activation, unlock to taking action. As a result, segmentations are prepared on the first day the system of the Growth.AI is completely installed.

Comparison between CDP and the relevant technology such as Enterprise data warehouse

Source: Gartner (March 2018)

The similarity and difference among CDP, CRM and DMP

Data in Data Management Platform (DMP)

ID that is not personally identified
Context, Behavior, Attributes
Data is utilized mainly by media agencies
Data could be expired

Data in Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Personal Identifiable Information
Flexible data structure which may have the relational data
Data is utilized mainly by marketers

Data in Customer relation management (CRM)

Data is connected with CDP by PII
Data is utilized by the sales team and after-sales

CDP Vendor with Key Customers *Last update : 2019, July

Cases of CDP Application

Ads Suppression List Prevent customers to see ads or promotions of the purchased products

Cross-Channel Cart Abandonment Campaign Create campaigns for the prospects who add the products to the cart but do not purchase

See the insight from the historical data of the high accumulated value customers This is to understand the high-value customer behaviours from their digital footprints to create content, media types and media affinity for predicting the likelihood to buy of the visitors who share similar behaviours.

Each CDP has different operations and unique selling points. Some have the capability of collecting data or stitching data. Some focus on the predictability or ability to give recommendations

Here is the list of the interesting customer data platforms

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Reference
https://piwik.pro/blog/dsp-dmp-hybrid/
https://www.slideshare.net/EddyWi/the-dmp-101-data-management-platforms-explained https://orbitsoft.com/blog/2014/03/wev-added-a-lot-of-dmp-providers-and-increased-your-odds-for-advertising-success/
https://www.treasuredata.com/
https://www.cdpinstitute.org/directory
https://www.sessionm.com/
https://www.slideshare.net/EddyWi/cdp-101-everything-you-need-to-know-about-customer-data-platforms-138106895