An Introduction to CDP: What Is It and Why Should I Care?

Data, data, data everywhere. Emails, SMS, order updates, notifications, devices, applications, preferences… So, how do we join it all up? The answer: CDP. This blog post is an introduction of CDP and why it matters to more people now.

The Sea of Data 

Everything has an identity: you, your car, your house, your devices, your applications, your messages. You can divide these identities into ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ profiles. 

• A known profile is ‘you’ – an individual identified by, for example, your name, your date of birth, your place of birth or your parents’ names
• An unknown profile is all the gathered information that is not connected to a specific individual – tags, serial numbers, product codes, IP addresses, etc.

Information from these profiles comes from multiple touch points: a website, a mobile phone, a computer, any other device. And all these pieces of information are in their own unique forms. 

Keeping on the Right Track 

Even with the undeniable decline of the high street, we must agree that one factor has not changed at all – the importance of customer experience. Even before the digital age, surveys showed that a customer’s perception of value was derived from their experience with the vendor. 

In order to be successful, the digital experience has to replicate the retail experience. It needs to give customers that familiar feeling of walking into your favourite store. 

And so comes The Era of Customer Data Platforms, or CDPs. CDP helps users create a unique personalised experience for every customer by taking all the digital information from various touchpoints and unifying it into common groups that help consolidate the information to known individuals. Armed with that information, you can create highly personalised interactive content or issue accurately segmented communications to your customers. 

Dangerous Underwater 

Before the digital age, any retail customer could choose to remain anonymous. Some stores tried solving that problem by adding value to their customers’ experience – exchanging pleasantries or recognising customers’ loyalty in the form of rewards for being a regular. Similarly, key to collecting digital customer data is capturing the customer’s preferences. At the same time, you need to carefully manage brand reputation from the outset by being compliant with your customers’ expectations and legal requirements. 

CDP unifies all the differing marketing consents and preferences for you. This enables marketing executives to confidently explore customer data, drawing calculated insights, defining more accurate segments and activating targeted interactions.  

This delivers value both to the company, in terms of compliance management and validated targeted communications costs, and to the customer, as they will no longer receive unwanted intrusive communications or offers. 

Look Around You: Customer 360 

But CDP doesn’t stop with marketing. What once was the reserve of the select few is now available through the open domain of CRM. With the unification of all the data, it is now possible for sales and service teams to see how a particular customer has been interacting with the company through various digital touchpoints. Knowing that, better engagements can be had when customers need to be communicated with directly, whether by sales, service or marketing.  

And all that – in compliance with their data and marketing preferences.

Salesforce Genie, previously known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud CDP, is the next evolution stage for the Salesforce CRM platform. It is the first-ever real-time CRM powered by intelligence and automation. 

Connecting the Dots 

With the power of CDP, we now can:  

• Unify the information that cannot be attributed to an individual 
• Analyse that information and create calculated insights 
• Create segments and activations on attributes of those unknowns 

The result could be as simple as different personalised offers sent to either Android or iOS users.  

But that’s just the beginning. What follows is nurturing, and as any good retailer will tell you, it all starts with a simple gesture, with the final goal of establishing trust through continued nurturing. And in time, the unknown profiles become known. Then, CDP can unify that unknown information with the known and disclose a previously ‘hidden’ history of an individual. Just like the retailer who always exchanged pleasantries with the returning customer until the customer finally introduced themselves. 

Are you considering taking Marketing Cloud CDP exam? Make sure you read this blog first on how to get a perfect score on the exam!

If you’d like to join BrightGen’s MarTech practice, send your CV to [email protected].