The path to purchasing is never linear. As a marketer, it can be difficult to understand how a buyer went from point A to Z. With individual users jumping from a cell phone to a laptop, from Facebook, then to Google, then to your website, it can be impossible to pin down your ideal consumer.
This is where a Customer Data Platform, (CDP) comes in. Here, we break down what a CDP is and why your team should be using them to maximize business outcomes.
What is a CDP?
CDPs consolidate details about prospective customers from in-house, 3rd party applications, and databases in a unified repository to promote and drive the most relevant ads. The key thing about CDPs is that they’re purpose-built for a specific type of use and interaction.
Unifying customer information has been the holy grail of CX for many years, and during this time we’ve been expecting it to come from CRM. But the exploding volume of data and apps has made the creation of a single customer database with comprehensive details, more elusive. Given this, a growing number of enterprises are turning to the CDP model for purpose-built repositories.
What does a CDP do?
A CDP collects data from clients across a myriad of touchpoints, such as social media, Google searches, website visits, etc, and consolidates them into a unified customer profile. CDP’s collect:
- Identity Data: Identity data is the backbone of the profile. It is considered information like name, email and company.
- Behavioral Data: Behavioral data, or quantitative data, provides information on actions such as recent purchases, customer service details and email communication.
- Descriptive Data: Descriptive data expands on Identity Data. Descriptive data gets more granular and can provide information around lifestyle choices like family and hobbies.
- Qualitative Data: Qualitative data provides context for the information gathered in the identity and descriptive stages. It measures metrics such as opinion and motivation
Why Should You Use a CDP?
CDP is integral to improve your organization and improve your customer relationships. Investing in software with CDP capabilities will unify your omnichannel efforts.
That’s why Acqueon has built a CDP for customer engagement on top of our campaign management data ingestion engine. This enables us to federate customer details, along with privacy compliance information. It also allows us to leverage the CDP not just for building campaigns but to feed our analytics and predictive models while providing agents rich customer contexts to make the most of every contact.