Personalise Every Experience Along the Customer Journey on Salesforce CDP

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a marketing technology that consolidates and organizes customer data from various touchpoints. CDPs collect real-time data and create centralized customer profiles, enabling easier management and insights for your digital-first marketing team.

Typically, a CDP encompasses a customer database, marketing automation, multichannel campaign management, and real-time interaction management. In essence, CDPs are designed to provide a marketing database with user-level data. To grasp the significance of this software category, let’s delve into the marketing challenges that led to its prominence.

Companies nowaday set high expectations for personalized experiences and fast services. Customers expects the companies to understand their preferences, making this a basic requirement for companies to survive and connect with their customers.

In marketing, customers expect seamless transitions from websites to mobile apps and even in-store visits. However, many companies struggle because these environments operate on different datasets, despite dealing with the same customer. Customers expect consistency and real-time experiences across multiple channels like email, web, and mobile apps. Unfortunately, most companies lack real-time connectivity between these data environments.

The consequence is fragmented experiences for customers and a lack of a single, reliable source of customer information for marketers.

CDPs are designed to accomplish four primary tasks: collecting, unifying, activating, and pulling insights from data.

1. Collecting Data

Your CDP serves as a centralized hub for all customer data, allowing anyone in your company to access organized information in one place. It collects and consolidates data from various CRM platforms, customer databases, and even disparate systems like marketing platforms, service software, and e-commerce engines. This process, known as customer resolution, brings together and unifies diverse data to identify individual customers based on their complete engagement history.

2. Unifying Data

After gathering and creating customer identities, the CDP resolves these identities across devices by linking known customer information (such as email addresses and phone numbers) with anonymous data collected before they became customers (such as anonymous cookies and mobile device IDs). This cross-device identity resolution enables a comprehensive view of customer journeys. For instance, you can trace interactions starting from an email campaign, continuing to your website, and culminating in sharing information, downloading content, or making a purchase.

3. Activating Data

Once the CDP establishes fully unified customer profiles, it activates the data for real-time personalization of customer experiences. By connecting customer data within the CDP to various technology platforms like email-send engines, demand-side platforms, and content management systems, marketers can customize interactions in real-time, delivering personalized experiences to customers.

4. Pulling Insights from Data

With the unified customer profiles in your CDP, you gain visibility into each customer’s complete data catalog and their entire customer journey. This data can be leveraged to gain insights, segment customers into groups, and create lookalike audiences and personas, enabling targeted outreach to new audiences. Moreover, your CDP serves as a valuable source of information, providing evidence of the reach, revenue, and ROI of your marketing efforts.

CDPs offer solutions to key challenges that marketers face in their day-to-day operations, addressing the following areas:

1. Disorganised Data

Disconnected data hinders customer understanding and meaningful connections. With the growing number of data sources, a CDP serves as a single source of truth, seamlessly integrating disparate data. This consolidation enables easy access to customer insights whenever needed.

2. Customer Identification

Marketers often struggle to link customer identities across various data sources, resulting in fragmented views. By functioning as a centralized hub, CDPs effortlessly resolve customer identification issues, combining data from multiple sources to create unified customer profiles.

3. Simple Segmentation

Organizing and unifying customer identity profiles are crucial steps toward effective segmentation and targeting. A reliable CDP automatically identifies shared traits among customers, simplifying audience segmentation and enabling personalized engagement for all.

No, regardless of company size or budget, companies can select a package that suits their needs. There’s no need to invest in infrastructure or software setup and management. Start building customized cloud applications to drive business growth across all areas.