Download Choosing A Customer Data Platform

Choosing
A Customer
Data Platform
Learn what makes a CDP work and
how it can bring customer-driven
marketing benefits to your marketing
team.
The Customer Data Platform
Built for Marketers
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction to Customer Data Platforms
Why do You Need a CDP?
What to Look for in a CDP?
How Other Companies Are Doing This
Get Started Now
Introduction
Marketers need a new kind of data platform.
Companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Amazon and LinkedIn build great
consumer relationships. They grow their businesses around
serving customers and fully understanding them through data.
Traditionally, companies have tried to understand and manage
customer relationships in two separate types of systems:
1. Channel-centric tools like email services, ads,
web analytics, mobile apps, etc,.and/or
2. Databases or Data Warehouses that store
various data sets in-house by IT
Both methods result in storing and using customer data in different
places. Siloed data is difficult to stitch together and makes a
customer-centric approach much more difficult.
Marketers seek building omni-channel experiences to cater to how
customers interact across multiple touchpoints when and where
they want. The traditional customer data management model leads
to a disjointed experience.
Not being able to act on the signals that your customers provide in
real-time is a missed opportunity to create delightful experiences.
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : Introduction
1
We Need a Definitive Customer Understanding
Many marketers continue to work with glimpses of customer understanding because they don’t have the means of putting the entire
picture together.
Most organizations connect customer data from different business
functions, like email, loyalty programs, web, and point-of-sale, to
name a few. They struggle to combine both static and real-time
signals to gain a better customer understanding.
Customers know what a great experience looks like from their
interactions with stellar, customer-centric brands like Netflix,
Amazon, and Pinterest, and they expect nothing less.
Companies must organize around their customer to deliver great
experiences in today’s data-driven world.
Enter: The Customer Data Platform
Growthverse defines a Customer Data Platform (CDP) as new
marketing infrastructure to pull data from disparate systems, create
and manage customer profiles, discover new customer segments,
and make these segments available back to all your marketing
tools.
A CDP delivers the next tier of customer understanding by
connecting data from various channels and siloes within your
organization and unearthing rich, holistic profiles built to power
your customer experience.
CDP’s make the data-driven customer-centric horsepower of a
Netflix, Pinterest, Amazon and LinkedIn much more accessible for
marketers.
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : Introduction
2
Use this guide to understand what makes a CDP work and what to
look for to compliment and empower your customer-centric
initiatives.
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : Introduction
3
“Growthverse defines a Customer
Data Platform (CDP) as new
marketing infrastructure to pull data
from disparate systems, create and
manage customer profiles, discover
new customer segments, and make
these segments available back to all
your marketing tools.”
4
Why Do You Need a CDP?
CDP’s are the advantage data-driven
marketers have been waiting for.
Connect Data From
All Your Channels
Unify & Enrich
Data with Lytics
Create Behavioral
Segmentation
Sync to
Execution tools
• Companies invest in many different touchpoint marketing tools.
• Yet, marketing doesn’t have access to all the customer data
because:
• Valuable customer data is typically available
as a report
• Customer profiles have been limited to
demographic data (e.g. location, age) and
transactional data (eg. when purchased,
amount) in an offline data warehouse
• Custom data has been siloed and locked
inside the organization
• Marketers optimize each one of their channels, but have no way
to unify all of this optimization to create a new competitive edge.
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : Why Do You Need A CDP?
5
What do you get from a CDP?
• Get your customer data together in a single, easy-to-use place
• Coordinate marketing around next-level customer understanding and use behavioral signals to reach customers more
effectively.
• A CDP brings together all of your customer
data
• Use predictive science to find audiences
that matter
• Sync those audiences with your marketing
tools
• Gain a holistic understanding of customers across touchpoints.
• Improve targeting and personalization using cross-channel
audiences with all of your marketing tools.
What are the benefits of a CDP?
• Efficient Marketing Operations: Create a centralized, customer
data asset that marketing can own and manage
• Data-Driven Performance: Apply predictive science to
customer segmentation to optimize ad spend.
• Right Content, Right Time: Coordinate campaigns in an
omnichannel manner with maximum effectiveness.
• Increase Conversion: Providing contextual ads or content
throughout the customer experience based on how customers
will likely engage.
• Increase Retention: Fully personalize and optimize loyalty and
support programs with a customer-centric approach.
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : Why Do You Need A CDP?
6
What to Look for in a CDP?
Use this checklist to make sure your CDP features the following:
A Marketer-Friendly UI
Visual custom audience builder
Pre-built integrations for many popular Martech tools
View universal customer profiles easily
A Wide Selection of Martech-related APIs
APIs for data collection, enrichment and export of data
Real-time profile API for personalization
Real-time notifications to see live changes in audiences
across tools
Platform Flexibility
Cloud-based, secure data service
Resolve and merge multiple user identities across
channels and tools
Collect structured and unstructured real-time event data
Dynamic, progressive user profiles - from unknown web
visitor to known via any identifier
Data Onboarding for multiple data sources and types
(e.g. loyalty database, web, email service provider,
point-of-sale, third party)
Support for real-time data streaming and batch
processing
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : What to Look for in a CDP?
7
Platform Flexibility (cont’d)
Customizable, adaptable data schema: no need for
predefined fields or long implementations
Automated data export to marketing tools for execution,
or Big Data tools like Google BigQuery or Hadoop for
analytics or visualization
Data Replay to incorporate historical and new data
sources
Predictive Analytics
Predictive engagement scoring and metrics gives you
next-level customer understanding
Classify content and determine customer intent to
influence your content strategy
Lookalike audience modeling finds current, best
customers from other data sources
Pre-built lifecycle segments so immediately predictive
marketing use
Progressive audience discovery via machine learning
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : What to Look for in a CDP?
8
How Are Other Companies Doing This?
Companies are trying many different ways to aggregate
customer data into a single place where they can view
and use it. Here are the primary ways that companies
attempt to do this.
Custom In-House Databases
Building and managing custom databases and data warehouses
is an enterprise-type solution that works well as a long-term data
storage challenge, but doesn’t support real-time marketing use
cases or provide API support for ongoing integration and export of
audience segments.
Tag Management
Tag Managers are used to collect and route event data from
websites and sometimes mobile, but do not transform various
events into user profiles or segments that can be used to support
marketing.
Marketing Suite
These marketing applications are loosely integrated with
specific tools to create limited user profiles and campaign
extensibility. They typically require ongoing custom services and
manual integrations to support customer data capture and export.
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : How are Other Companies Doing This?
9
Email Service Providers
Email tools store a small subset of customer data and only deliver
audience segments back into email, and not to other marketing
tools or systems.
Traditional CRM
CRM tools are limited in the types of data they can collect and
store and the primary use case is to manage sales opportunities
and sales accounts, not consumer relationships.
DMP
DMPs are designed to support ad tech use cases for targeting
by combining third-party data with a batch upload of marketer’s
first-party data. It’s not a true customer database since it has limited
extensibility to other tools and use cases.
CDP
CDPs are purpose-built to create a central repository of all your
customer data and to make cross channel audiences available to
all your marketing tools for coordinated targeting and
personalization.
Choosing a Customer Database Platform : How are Other Companies Doing This?
10
ABOUT LYTICS
Lytics is the Customer Data Platform
built for marketers. Connect all your
marketing data and create
behavior-rich user segments. Sync
these custom segments to your
marketing tools and improve
campaign precision.
Request a demo today.
The Customer Data Platform
Built for Marketers
Learn More
www.getlytics.com
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