What is Customer Data Platform (CDP) ?

 Customer Data Platform

As the ways of communication and the touchpoints of customers have increased, the flow of data has increased considerably and especially for marketers, therefore it has become important to handle successfully these myriad and flowing data. The bogeyman came out of the closet, so to say. Herein, CDP has been one of the most important technologies to ease the marketers’ job. Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a relational platform managed by the marketer, which employs a unified, single database for all customer behavioural profiles from any internal or external source such as websites, emails, call centres and point-of-sale activity. Marketers can unify customers’ profile, determine a strategy based on these profiles, personalise, analyse and set the right marketing technology to run a campaign.

Each customer has his/her own journey both in digital and analog ecosystems, and this journey leaves its own footprints behind. A customer’s choice, demographic and behavioural information can be assumed by tracking these prints. CDP gives an oportunity to integrate these data and this worth gold to marketers while formulating a strategy. Because now marketers can directly target their customers not anonymous usersWhy CDP?

We have a lot of answers to that. For example, gathering all customers data on a single platform maximizes the likelihood of estimating the next move of a customer. CDP can be managed only by marketers. This gives the marketer an ability to easily determine which data to use and which customer to target, especially when setting a campaign. Individual, demographic, digital behavioural, transactional, mobile and IoT data are among the information to be harvested and to be integrated into this customer-focused platform. After harvesting and gathering the data, they are segmented based on their features. Afterwards, the harvested data are stored as segments. Imagine all these are integrated and converted into meaningful data for marketing. A wide range of segments can be created with each customers’ information and these segments can be used for email marketing, in social media platforms and for advertising.

Especially the real time data and the flow of this data worth to pay attention. Thanks to them, emails, mobile applications, texts can be sent to customers regarding their behavioural information. You can reach to not only digital data, but also in-point-sale behaviour of a customer.

What are the benefits of CDP?

For a marketer, integrating multiple data sources traditionally was a time-intensive, laborious, and often imperfect process. As the data flows faster and multiplies each day, it is almost impossible to think about the time that this process would take. But collecting myriad customer data into a single platform is not a dream anymore. On the top of that, you can get great results sooner!

• With CDP, you can create a unified customer profile with all the harvested data. Each customer/visitor has a definition of his/her unique information.
• Different types and formats of information can be integrated. When data gathered from multiple sources such as website, order history, social media interaction is integrated with other data, mentioned customer profile can be drawn more clearly.
• To target your customer, you can create segments. Creating multiple segments in one unified profile will help you to set your target audience properly. For example, a visitor didn’t complete a purchasing process even though she/he has the product in his/her shopping bag and left your website. You can send email to remind the process and after a while, you can send another email.
• Advertisements and campaigns are more customer oriented. For example, if someone you sent an email has spent some time reviewing the product in this email, you can send another email to him/her about the product. However, if this person hasn’t even opened your first email, sending another email about the product won’t make any sense.
• You can offer more customer-focused experience with the data you have gathered from them. This affects updates of your website and even your choice of a more customer friendly design and interface.
• As we mentioned before, you can integrate social media platforms. With the help of these platforms, you can advertise on Facebook Ads and Google Adwords. With the data and segments on CDP, you can set your target audience again and quickly reach to your possible customers.
• With CDP, you can have all the data you required on a single platform, which is an incredible treasure for marketers. However, this treasure can be used not only by marketers by also other business.
• One of the most important features of CDP is that the data harvested from different sources can be shared with 3rd parties easily.
  In addition to all these features, CDP puts control in the hands of marketers unlike other marketing strategies and tools. That means they don’t require external sources to organise and manage the data.

Key terms

We have explained what the CDP is, why it should be preferred and what the benefits are. Furthermore, there are some key terms to be known.

• Customer Lifetime Value: A term to define your relationship with your customer. This process starts when a customer first gets in touch with you, visits your website, adds a product to his/her shopping bag, and goes on until a customer breaks his/her connection with you. This is a map showing how valuable a customer is to you.
• Cohort: This term in Turkish defines someone who is a supporter, or a group of customers in the common attitude of the marketing process. For example, a group of visitors who purchased a product on your website on March is your cohort, and they purchase periodically.
• Frequency: This gives an answer to questions such as which customer purchase product from you, how often and how much money they spend purchasing.
• Retention: This term refers to gaining your customers’ loyalty and keep them for a long time.
• RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary: RFM is a segmentation tool and it is a method to determine the last time was your customer purchased, how often and how much they spend purchasing. With this method, these customers future behaviours can be estimated.
  You may encounter these key terms of CDP and now you will be able to understand for what purpose they can be used in the platform. With all these features of CDP, as a marketer the rest is up to you to decide how, when, and on which channels to use these data. Easy, right?