Data works as the fuel of the digital economy of the 21st century. That’s why customer data is priceless for customer-orientated businesses. This is where the customer data platform (CDP) comes into play.
CDPs help you gain valuable insights into potential prospects and customers. Thus, you can better predict the next step of the customer’s journey and develop suitable strategies to nurture and retain them.
Let’s dive deep to know more about CDPs, their benefits, and of course, the best platforms your organization should try.
What Is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
Before moving any further, let’s get our basics right about CDP. A customer data platform (CDP) is a marketing system that collects customer data from various marketing and other channels.
It also puts the data about the interaction with your service and product in a database that contains separate profiles for each customer. Customer data platform companies help companies to enable customer modeling and optimize the timing of targeted campaigns like messages and offers.
How Do CDPs Help Companies Grow Their Customer Base?
Customer data platform companies offer ample benefits for your business. Besides providing you with a complete perspective of your customers, here are some other benefits you can get from CDPs.
Keeping Customer Data Organized
The entire process of customer data management involves collecting, organizing, and using the data of your customers. The function of CDPs is to make this multi-step process seamless by organizing the data in a usable way.
Though it may take some time to set up a CDP, you do not have to worry about its maintenance once you get started.
Customer Analytics Data
Customer data analytics helps you understand customer behavior, and thus you can make better business decisions on product development, marketing, and sales. The prime elements of customer analytics are collection, organization, storage, and analysis.
These components may not be useful separately, but you can combine these using a customer data platform for powerful customer analytics. Moreover, CDPs will be a great help to improve customer loyalty and retention rate.
Improved Data Privacy
The world has become more conscious about consumer data protection and privacy than ever before, and hence, you need to respect customer data privacy. When you use a customer data platform, it limits data collection for marketing and protects data privacy.
Higher Revenue
Increasing revenue is the ultimate aim of every organization. A CDP will ensure a rise in revenue by intelligent targeting and better customer satisfaction if you can use it through the right approach.
As it shows you a complete view of the customer, you can pitch the right marketing message to them at the right time. All these will result in increased customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and not to mention, increased revenue.
Optimized Campaigns and Long-Term Insights
Companies can also gain insights into specific campaign performance using a CDP. As it lets you see the efficiency and outcome of the campaign, you get to know how to improve your campaign strategies.
Besides solving immediate marketing problems, it will benefit you in the long run by saving your budget and helping you develop better campaigns.
Compliance
If you use CDP to store customer data, you do not have to worry about ensuring GDPR compliance of different platforms or tools. Besides letting your company anonymize contacts, it also supports data portability and data insight requests from a source platform.
While there are many customer data platforms, here is a list of the top platforms with highly beneficial features.
Salesforce
For the marketing team, real-time customer data is highly valuable. Salesforce lets you unlock it for assured success. This platform saves time and money by automating engagement, segmenting intelligently, and activating in real time.
It unifies all the necessary data for a complete view of each customer. This scalable software also makes every engagement personalized and cost-effective.
Using its AI analytics, you can make better and smarter decisions in less time. This software lets you enrich your customer profile by activating first-party ad data and your AI integration.
CareCloud
CareCloud creates a true 360-degree customer view thanks to collecting both digital and offline customer data with a strong focus on retail and e-commerce.
Native apps allow you to filter target audiences and execute email, SMS, or PUSH campaigns immediately. You can automate the whole customer journey with automation workflows. The great advantage is the pre-made workflow package that gets you started with automation quickly.
Robust analytics and prediction features help you to stay on top of the customer data and monetize them correctly – a great advantage of CareCloud is native RFM segments complemented with recommended actions to drive up CLV and retention rate of the whole customer base.
An extra sweet app is the Loyalty Engine, which lets you set up a customer program based on points or membership levels in a user-friendly environment.
CareCloud is an ideal CDP for businesses seeking to directly monetize the data in the platform without a need to utilize external marketing systems.
Segment
Segment is a customer data platform that lets you collect, clean, and activate your customer data and routes them to multiple integrated destinations. Seamless setup, real-time tracking, and customizable dashboards are the features responsible for its popularity.
A significant feature of this platform is its powerful integrations, using which you can effortlessly include a new service into your company analytics. Apart from these, you can enjoy facilities such as customized data pipelines, manual analytics, loading and converting customer data, and cross-channel engagement design.
Heap Analytics
Business organizations often fail to see the actual digital experience of their customers due to misleading data. Heap Analytics can help you in this regard by providing you with a complete picture that includes every action by a user on your website or product.
The behavioral data collected by this customer data platform will give you direction to improve your business by offering a better customer experience to your users. It also comes with intuitive visualization tools empower that let teams quickly locate the insights they need.
Tealium
Tealium AudienceStream is an ideal CDP for companies that want to gather the fragmented chunks of data from all sources in one platform. By providing you with predictive insights based on Machine Learning, it assists you in strategical decision making.
This customer data platform implements consent management and regulatory compliance to keep your company safe legally. Moreover, it can effortlessly identify visitor behavior patterns and helps you increase customer interaction with Audience Emotional Intelligence. You can use any of its 1300+ turnkey integrations to incorporate any tool into your system.
CustomerLab
CustomerLab is one of the no-code customer data platform companies you can use to collect first-party data across websites, CRMs, and servers. Besides, it combines all data to create a unified profile for a customer and sends the synced data to any tool of your MarTech stack.
Based on traits and events, you can also create granular user segments. Whether you belong to eCommerce, SaaS, agency, B2B/B2C lead gen, or SMB industry, your company can benefit from this CDP.
WebEngage
Customer retention plays a vital role in business growth. WebEngage is a seamless full-stack retention OS that works as a powerful customer data platform, personalization engine, analytics engine, and cross-channel campaign manager as well.
By bringing the data and analytics to the forefront, it assists you in building a strong data culture so you can design your marketing strategies based on the insights. It is also possible to send the right message to the right audience with marketing campaigns.
SALESmango
SALESmango is an AI-driven customer data platform that lets you make the most of first-party data to achieve optimum growth for your organization. It collects data from various touchpoints and sources to create a complete customer profile in an ongoing customer database.
On this platform, you can readily manage structured and unstructured data of a customer using a single customer identifier. It also lets you perform personalized omnichannel communication depending on customer preferences and behavior. You can also use its AI Predictive Analytics feature to find your next move.
Autopilot
Autopilot is one of the best customer data platform companies that bring all customer data, marketing channels, audiences, and data analytics together on a single platform. With the 360° view of each customer, you can find out the most valuable audiences and target them.
This CDP supports integration with platforms like Facebook, Shopify, Zapier, WooCommerce, Recurly, and HelpScout to connect your customer data. Look at the insights on its dashboard and take actions using its analytics and reports.
BlueConic
Using BlueConic CDP, companies can convert customer relationships and reach their target revenue by accessing first-party customer data from anywhere, anytime.
It can turn each collected data into an actionable attribute and store it in a unified customer profile. This platform uses a unique identifier to represent every customer and provide you with high-quality data to improve business outcomes. Here, you can also create multi-dimensional segments and deploy predictive models.
BlueVenn
Do you want to create personalized 1:1 marketing for your customers? If yes, go for BlueVenn. This customer data platform combines all customer touchpoints to deliver a single customer view with no duplicate record.
You can easily visualize a customer’s journey through reliable records of each click, open, visit, transaction, like, and engagement activity. The unified view will eliminate any data silos and ensure access for every team. Moreover, it enables you to manage customer preferences and consent centrally.
Jitsu
If your organization consists of modern data teams, you should go for the fully-scriptable data ingestion engine named Jitsu. To create a real-time data pipeline on this open-source CDP, you’ll need only a few minutes.
It supports more than 140 external data sources, including Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Redis, Amazon Ads, and Amplitude.
It means this platform can build 100% accurate profiles for your customers. Jitsu can also filter bots and locate geo-location by analyzing the IP address. It can also route data to various destinations like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, and different popular databases.
Since Jitsu is open-source and also available as a self-hosted solution you can deploy it to your favorite cloud hosting platforms. It also supports Docker deployment.
Conclusion
If you’re having trouble managing multiple legacy systems for customer insights or not getting desired results, moving to a customer data platform is a better idea. These platforms function as a centralized hub that procures data from multiple sources and clubs them into a unified database.
Leveraging the vital data, including user feedback, customer service data, and campaign metrics gathered by CDPs, your company can develop a tailored digital marketing strategy.
To utilize the data better, you might want to know about data analytics courses.
