Customer data platforms (CDPs) have become a critical component of modern marketing stacks. As consumers engage across more channels and devices, CDPs help businesses achieve a unified, 360-degree customer view. According to recent research, over 75% of enterprise businesses have implemented a CDP or plan to within the next year.
What is a Customer Data Platform?
A customer data platform is a marketing software that creates persistent, unified customer profiles from data sourced across all systems and channels. The CDP becomes a “single source of truth” that collects, segments, activates, and analyzes customer data.
Key capabilities include:
- Ingesting data from all sources including web, mobile, CRM, email, offline purchases, and more
- Unifying data to create rich, reliable customer profiles in real-time
- Segmenting audiences for targeted campaigns and personalization
- Activating profiles across any channel or system
- Providing analytics and reporting
Benefits of Implementing a Powerful CDP
There are many compelling reasons for brands to invest in a robust customer data platform:
1. Truly Personalized Experiences
With unified data and customer insights, CDPs allow you to create highly tailored messages and offers. Personalization can lift conversion rates and revenue.
2. Superior Customer Intelligence
By consolidating data into single customer views, CDPs offer a holistic understanding of behaviors and preferences. This amplifies customer intelligence to drive better experiences.
3. Increased Marketing Agility
CDPs make audience segmentation, campaign activation, and performance measurement fast and simple across channels. This marketing agility allows for rapid optimization.
4. Future-Proofed Marketing Stack
With open and connected architectures, CDPs easily integrate new data sources and applications as needs evolve. This future-proofs your stack.
As consumers, channels, and devices continue to proliferate, CDPs provide the customer intelligence to compete and win. Unlocking unified profiles leads to personalized experiences, superior insights, agile campaigns, and future-aligned systems. The time for customer data platforms is now.
Overcoming Data Silos With a CDP
Historically, customer data has been fragmented across disconnected systems and channels – from email platforms to ecommerce to offline transactions. This creates organizational data silos that limit a unified view. According to analysts, companies use an average of 32 different marketing technologies.
A customer data platform breaks down these silos to connect data across sources. As a central hub, CDPs eliminate media, technology, and team silos to provide:
- A complete view of every customer
- Visibility across acquisition, conversion, and retention
- The foundation for coordinated cross-channel campaigns
With data unified in one platform, teams have access to the comprehensive insights required to improve the customer experience.
10 Leader Customer Data Platforms
All CDPs are not created equal. As the category matures, distinct tiers and capabilities have formed:
- Enterprise CDPs – For global and complex organizations
- Mid-Market CDPs – For growing teams with expanding data sets
- Analytical CDPs – Primary focus on customer insights
Based on market share, funding, and customer reviews, the current enterprise CDP leaders include:
- Adobe Real-Time CDP
- Salesforce CDP
- Oracle CX Unity
- Acquia Lift
- Segment CDP
- mParticle
- Amperity
- ActionIQ
- Tealium AudienceStream
- BlueConic
As needs scale, these robust customer data platforms provide the tools to unify profiles, personalize at scale, orchestrate journeys, and measure performance.
Evaluating CDPs – Key Considerations
With many customer data platform options, how should brands evaluate solutions? Key criteria include:
- Data Integration – Assess ability to connect all customer data sources, especially legacy systems.
- Identity Resolution – Evaluate flexibility around stitching together customer identities across devices and sessions.
- Audience Segmentation – Review tools for both rule-based and predictive audience building.
- Activation & Orchestration – Validate ability to activate segments across all digital channels.
- Analytics & Reporting – Ensure insights into customer behavior and campaign performance.
- Privacy & Governance – Verify capabilities around data transparency, consent, and regulatory compliance.
- Scalability & Cost – Confirm technical architecture and pricing model aligns with future scale.
Carefully examining these key considerations will guide you to the right CDP aligned to business requirements.
Real-World CDP Success Stories
How are top brands leveraging customer data platforms to drive growth? Here are two powerful examples:
30% Lift in Email Revenue
A leading B2C retailer implemented a CDP to create unified customer profiles for precise segmentation. By personalizing email campaigns based on purchase history and behaviors, they increased revenue by 30% within the first 3 months.
10x Growth in App Usage
A top video streaming service connected web, mobile app, and first-party data in their CDP. Leveraging these rich profiles, they deployed tailored push notifications that reduced churn and drove a 10x increase in mobile app usage over 2 years.
These real-world examples demonstrate the sales, engagement, and retention improvements possible with CDP-powered personalization.
Conclusion
In summary, CDPs have moved from a “nice to have” to a “need to have” as consumers and data continue proliferating. Unifying profiles and unlocking customer insights leads to superior experiences, agility, and sustainable growth. For modern marketing stacks, customer data platforms provide the foundation for success.
