Which CDP vendors should I consider?

First, you have to find the right vendors. Here’s how to do that:

• Inventory all your databases and martech applications and be sure all stakeholders weigh in on which data and system integrations are priorities. CDPs offer numerous out-of-the-box connectors and APIs to make the integration process faster and more seamless. Prioritizing the applications you want to integrate first, makes it easy to ID vendors with programs that already have native connections to them.
•  Speak to your marketing peers to find out who is using which CDP vendor and why. (Many of the vendors also provide whitepapers and interactive tools that can help.)
• Once you know which vendors meet your criteria, send them the list of capabilities you need and set a timeframe for them to reply.
• Decide whether or not you need to engage in a formal RFI/RFP process. This is an individual preference. However, be sure to give the same list of integrations to each vendor to facilitate comparison.

The next step is setting up demos.

Why should I schedule a CDP demo?

Demos are an opportunity to assess both the systems and the companies behind them. The second part is every bit as important as the first. You want to see who responds well under pressure, who has a fixed way of doing things versus who can adapt to how you need it done.

Schedule all the demos relatively close to each other to help make relevant comparisons. Also, make sure all potential users and stakeholders are on the demo call. Ask them all to keep in mind these questions:

• How easy is the platform to use? 
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs? 
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Blueconic, Tealium, Treasure Data and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer data platforms.

Click here to download!

Questions to ask the CDP vendors

To help you navigate the demo, here are a few questions to ask each vendor:

1. How does the platform provide identity resolution? How does it stitch data points together?
2. How does it handle both structured and unstructured data?
3. How does it ingest and manage offline data?
4. How does it monitor integration success and/or failures, and report on data variances or anomalies?
5. How does it handle connectors and integrations with outside martech systems?
6. Are your “must have” integrations rock solid?
7. What is the CDP’s approach to integrating with the specific martech systems that your company uses? Just because a connector exists doesn’t mean it will necessarily work for your organization and how you use that third-party platform.
8. How does the platform allow users to create customer segments based on behaviors and preferences?
9. How does it employ machine learning for data analytics, such as predicting customer trends and patterns?
10. How can we send personalized and targeted messaging from the CDP?
11. How can we use the CDP to coordinate and track multi-step marketing campaigns?
12. What data security regulations does the platform comply with?
13. What data security certifications does the platform have?
14. Can we pay the software license month-to-month? Or is an annual contract required? Is there a short-term contract or an “out” clause if things don’t work out?
15. Will there be a price increase when I renew next year — if so, how much? Will the vendor commit to capped increases over a period of years?
16. What are the additional fees? (i.e., set-up costs, add-on features, API, quotas)?
17. How long is the onboarding process typically? Will we have a dedicated resource? Who will be the day-to-day contact?
18. What is the level of support included in the price? What support is additional?
19. Who pays if your system/team makes an error?
20. Will our support team work with us to test new features and assess the results?

Our new report, “Customer Data Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” is now available for free download.

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Deciding whether your company needs a customer data platform (CDP) means understanding its benefits and your organization’s capabilities.

CDP benefits include:

• Expanded enterprise collaboration. A CDP fosters cooperation among siloed groups because it gathers data from throughout the enterprise and supports customer interactions across many touchpoints. This lets enterprises see how strategies for audience, customer experience and execution all fit together. At the same time, it enables marketers to build audiences and reach them across multiple platforms. This ensures a more consistent, informed customer experience.
• Improved data accessibility. A CDP is a centralized hub that collects and houses customer data from every corner of the enterprise. Data are normalized and stitched together to build unique, unified profiles of each individual customer. The result is a persistent customer database whose main purpose is to gather and share data more easily and efficiently across the organization.
• Streamlined systems integration. A CDP unifies data systems across the enterprise, from marketing and customer service, to call centers and payment systems. By creating a single “system of record” for first-party customer data, data redundancies and errors can be minimized, and data can flow more quickly into — and out of — marketing automation platforms, email service providers (ESPs), CRMs and other martech systems.
• Increased marketing efficiency. A CDP unifies individual data with unique IDs that create robust customer records. Many manual tasks are also automated by the CDP, allowing marketers to focus on high-value creative and analytical tasks. The result is more accurate modeling, targeting and personalization in marketing campaigns, and more relevant customer experiences with the brand across channels.
• Faster marketing velocity. In many cases, CDPs are “owned” by marketing, minimizing the need for IT or developer intervention to collect, analyze and act upon data. With control in marketers’ hands, the time to segment and build audiences, execute campaigns and analyze results decreases. That said, engineers may still be needed to perform deep data analysis and facilitate integrations. This is especially true as CDPs extend beyond marketing and into sales and customer service functions.
• Stronger regulatory compliance. A CDP creates greater internal control over customer data, streamlining data governance to comply with the many regulations now impacting brands worldwide. Marketers in the healthcare industry must comply with both HIPAA and HITECH regulations. Businesses that handle European data or serve customers in the EU must also comply with GDPR, and those dealing with Californians must deal with CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). The majority of CDP vendors are both ISO and SOC certified for best practices in handling personally identifiable information (PII).

Assess needs, capabilities and resources

Knowing all this, you need to next do a comprehensive self-assessment of your organization’s business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources. Use the following questions as a guideline to determine the answers.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Blueconic, Tealium, Treasure Data and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer data platforms.

Click here to download!

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Marketer interest in CDPs increased significantly — by 32% — between 2021 and 2022, according to Gartner. And interest in the category among CIOs, which may represent the involvement of these technology leaders in buying committees, rose by 91% between 2020 and 2021.

Our new report, “Customer Data Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” is now available for free download.

One factor driving this trend is the increasing importance of customer experience, which is improved through timely data gathering, AI-assisted segmentation and the personalization of interactions. At the same time, marketers are facing the gradual, but seemingly inevitable, extinction of third-party data as fuel for their marketing programs. Therefore, businesses are looking to CDPs to bolster their first-party data and engage in privacy-compliant practices like sharing through data clean rooms.

CDPs enable marketers to create a single view of the customer by gathering data from software deployed throughout the organization. High expectations, along with the proliferation of possible customer touchpoints, make cross-device IDs and identity resolution — the ability to consolidate and normalize disparate sets of data collected across multiple touchpoints into an individual profile that represents the customer or prospect — critical for helping marketers, sales and service professionals deliver the ideal total customer experience. CDPs offer this consolidation and normalization and also make the data profiles freely available to other systems that deliver campaigns, webpages and other interactions.

What is a customer data platform (CDP)?

A CDP provides three core features that make it unique from other systems.

• A unified, persistent customer database that provides data transparency and granularity at the known, individual level. A CDP can identify customers from many different data sources by stitching together information under a unique, individual identifier. The CDP then stores its own copy of the data.
• Control over customer data collection, segmentation and orchestration through native (out-of- the-box) integration that minimizes the need for IT or developer involvement.
• Data integration of both known and anonymous customer data with any external source or platform, including CRM, point of sale (POS), mobile, transactional, website, email and marketing automation.

CDPs can be used as systems of record, storing both known and unknown customer profiles in a central repository that integrates data from all of the organization’s software and operational systems. The data is accessible for marketing analysis, segmentation and insight discovery, with the goal of increasing the velocity and effectiveness of omnichannel marketing campaigns.

A CDP is not a CRM, DMP or marketing automation platform. A CDP provides a unified, persistent customer database that provides data transparency and granularity at the known, individual level. A CDP can identify customers from many different data sources by stitching together information under a unique, individual identifier. The CDP then stores its own copy of the data.

CDPs also give marketers control over customer data collection, segmentation and orchestration through native (out-of-the-box) integration that minimizes the need for IT or developer involvement. And lastly, CDPs offers data integration of both known and anonymous customer data with any external source or platform, including CRM, point of sale (POS), mobile, transactional, website, email and marketing automation.

The CDP Institute’s definition of a “RealCDP” requires it be able to do the following five things:

• Ingest real-time data from any source.
• Capture full detail of ingested data.
• Store ingested data indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints).
• Create unified profiles of identified individuals.
• Share data with any system that needs it.

Virtually all of the CDP vendors that meet that criteria provide the following core capabilities:

• Data management (collect, normalize and unify customer data in a persistent database),
  often after IDs have been matched by other systems.
• Features designed for use by the marketing organization and other departments, without the
  aid of IT or data science resources. (Though some functions, like building connections to other
  platforms and performing sophisticated data modeling, still require additional resources.)
• Connections to and from all external systems on a vendor-neutral basis.
• Structured and unstructured data management.
• Online and offline data management.
  

CDP vendors differentiate by offering more advanced capabilities that include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Native identity resolution to stitch customer data snippets from disparate sources.
• The number and breadth of robust pre-built connectors to other martech systems. The near-universal availability of APIs means connections are always possible (with more or less developer involvement), but offering pre-built, tested integrations adds value.
• User interface (UI). The vendors differ in the user-friendliness of their interfaces and the methods people use to do things like create segments, view profiles, etc.
• Analytics, including those powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, that surface insights, enable journey mapping, audience segmentation and predictive modeling.
• Orchestration for personalized messaging, dynamic interactions and product/content recommendations.
• Compliance with vertical industry and international data regulations.

Different types of CDP

Though CDPs share a category name, systems differ substantially in terms of their primary focus. Because of this the CDP Institute has divided up the market by “types” of CDPs — data, analytics, campaign and delivery.

These specializations are a legacy of CDP vendors’ origins in other spaces. For example, some Data CDPs began as tag management or web analytics providers, leveraging the data they gathered to expand into linking data to customer identities, assembling unified customer profiles and storing them. While these systems allow users to extract audience segments and send them to external systems, Analytics CDPs do all this and more. Their capabilities can extend to machine learning, predictive modeling, revenue attribution and journey mapping.

Campaign CDPs, according to the CDP Institute, “provide data assembly, analytics and customer treatments,” which are closer to one-to-one addressability than segments. They also offer features to orchestrate campaigns across channels. Similarly, Delivery CDPs focus on delivering profiles and messages through email, websites, mobile apps, CRMs and more. These players sometimes began as systems to deliver messaging, later adding CDP features.

It’s worth noting that a new type of CDP is emerging, one which lets marketers “compose” a CDP to suit their needs by yoking together software from different companies, or assembling modules from the same vendor. It’s similar to what some are advocating for in digital experience platforms (DXPs), where a business can be more agile by picking and choosing modules with different functionalities (and swapping them out as needed).

Customer data management

Real-time data collection and maintenance is a core CDP customer data management platform function. All CDPs provide a central database that collects and integrates personally identifiable customer data across the enterprise. From there, however, CDPs vary in their abilities to manage the following:

• Data ingestion capabilities: CDPs use various mechanisms to ingest the data that goes into the unified customer profile — mobile SDKs, APIs, Webhooks or built-in connectors to other platforms. Identity resolution: The platform “stitches” together customer data points, such as email addresses, phone numbers, first-party cookies and purchase data, from various channels matching them to create a single customer profile.
• Identity resolution: The platform “stitches” together customer data points, such as email addresses, phone numbers, first-party cookies and purchase data, from various channels matching them to create a single customer profile. Some players partner with other providers for this capability, while others have their own systems.
• Online/offline data: The platform leverages identity resolution or an identity graph to stitch together behaviors in order to create a unified profile.
• Data hygiene: The platform enables users to clean and standardize customer records.
• Structured/unstructured data: CDPs differ in their capabilities to manage unstructured data (i.e., social media feeds, product photos, barcodes), which may comprise up to 80% of all data by 2025, according to IDG.

The importance of each of these data management capabilities will depend on a particular organization’s business goals, and whether it has a significant mobile presence, direct mail budget or brick-and-mortar stores and/or agents.

Analytics

CDP vendors offer analytics capabilities that can do some or all of the following: allow marketing end-users to define and create customer segments, track customers across channels and glean insights into customer interest and intent from customer behavior and trends.

The functionality provided can include predictive models, revenue attribution and journey mapping. To one extent or another, many of these capabilities may utilize machine learning or artificial intelligence to surface insights about audiences and proactively offer suggestions about the best next step to move a prospect through their purchase journey.

Orchestration

A select group of CDPs provide campaign management and customer journey orchestration features that enable personalized messaging, dynamic web and email content recommendations, as well as campaigns that trigger targeted ads across multiple channels.

The customer data platform often automates the distribution of marketer-created customer segments on a user-defined schedule to external martech systems such as marketing automation platforms, email service providers (ESPs), or web content management systems for campaign execution.

For example, the CDP could deliver targeted content to a web visitor during a live interaction. To do this, the CDP must accept input about visitor behavior from the customer-facing system, find the customer profile within its database, select the appropriate content and send the results back to the customer-facing system. A customer data platform may also facilitate digital advertising through an audience API that sends customer lists from the CDP to systems (i.e., DMP, DSP, ad exchange) that will use them as advertising audiences.

Data regulation compliance

CDP vendors vary in the support they provide for compliance with the wide range of vertical market and international regulations that safeguard customer data privacy. Some build compliance features into their platforms, while others rely on outside systems. The European Union’s GDPR was implemented in May 2018 and impacts all U.S. marketers and firms handling European data or serving customers in the EU. Brands marketing to Canadian consumers through email must also comply with the country’s CASL (Canada Anti-Spam
Legislation). Meanwhile, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect in January of 2020.

Marketers in the highly regulated healthcare market must follow HIPAA and HITECH regulations. In addition, all organizations that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information must maintain a secure environment that meets Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), as well.

Third-party systems integration

CDPs streamline integration of customer data by providing out-of-the-box (or native) connectors for many martech systems, including CRMs, DMPs, marketing automation platforms, DSPs, and campaign analytics and testing tools. Most marketing organizations have assembled a marketing stack that contains many of these types of platforms. But integrating the data that resides in the martech ecosystem is a huge challenge — one that costs U.S. brands millions of dollars annually. The majority of CDPs profiled in this report also provide at least a basic API to enable custom integrations.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Blueconic, Tealium, Treasure Data and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer data platforms.

Click here to download!

What are the benefits of using a CDP?

Marketing executives today are in charge of dozens of martech applications to manage, analyze and act on a growing volume of first-party customer data. But despite increasing efficiency, the emerging martech ecosystem has created problems with data redundancy, accuracy and integration.

Automating customer data accuracy and integration through a CDP can provide numerous benefits to marketers and to other functions across the enterprise.

These include the following:

Expanded enterprise collaboration. A CDP fosters cooperation among siloed groups because it gathers data from throughout the enterprise and supports customer interactions across many touchpoints. The unification of data allows enterprises to see how strategies for audience, customer experience and execution all fit together – and enables audience portability to ensure a more consistent, informed customer experience.

Improved data accessibility. A CDP is a centralized hub that collects and houses customer information from every corner of the enterprise. Pieces of data are normalized and stitched together to build unique, unified profiles of each individual customer. The result is a persistent customer database whose main purpose is to gather and share data more easily and efficiently across the organization

Streamlined systems integration. A CDP unifies data systems across the enterprise, from marketing and customer service, to call centers and payment systems. By creating a single “system of record” for first-party customer data, data redundancies and errors can be minimized, and data can flow more quickly into — and out of — marketing automation platforms, email service providers (ESPs), CRMs and other martech systems.

Increased marketing efficiency. A CDP unifies individual data with unique IDs that create more robust customer records. Many manual tasks are also automated by the CDP, allowing marketers to focus on the creative and analytical tasks they are trained for. The result is more accurate modeling, targeting and personalization in marketing campaigns, and more relevant customer experiences with the brand across channels.

Faster marketing velocity. In many cases, CDPs are “owned” by marketing, minimizing the need for IT or developer intervention to collect, analyze and act upon data. With control in marketers’ hands, the time to segment and build audiences, execute campaigns and analyze results significantly decreases. That said, engineers may still be needed to perform deep data analysis and facilitate integrations. This is especially true as CDPs extend beyond marketing and into sales and service functions.

Stronger regulatory compliance. A CDP creates greater internal control over customer data, streamlining data governance to comply with the many regulations now impacting brands worldwide. Marketers in the healthcare industry must comply with both HIPAA and HITECH regulations. Businesses that handle European data or serve customers in the EU must also comply with GDPR and those dealing with Californians must deal with CCPA
(California Consumer Privacy Act). The majority of CDP vendors are both ISO and SOC certified for best practices in handling personally identifiable information (PII).

Our new report, “Customer Data Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” is now available for free download.

The post What is a CDP and how does it give marketers the coveted ‘single view’ of their customers? appeared first on MarTech.

Whether that’s taking place in something called a CDP or whether the category morphs as it grows is up for discussion, however. In its most recent report on the market, Gartner predicted that 70% of independent CDP vendors will be acquired or will acquire adjacent technologies to diversify by 2023. According to Gartner, these players will get into of personalization, multichannel marketing, consent management or master data management (MDM) for customer data. In part, this expectation arises from the fact that the number of CDP vendors is so high (approaching 100, according to Gartner) that it’s difficult to believe they will all remain viable as individual entities.

In any case, the core CDP technology and its functionality aren’t going anywhere, as the use cases that have brought it to the fore are more important than ever. Gartner notes that marketing technology leaders it surveyed see CDP as “an investment worth planning for, and protecting, in an economic downturn.” Respondents ranked CDPs as one of the technologies they would least likely cut from their planned deployments, when Gartner asked about the possibility of eliminating items from the martech stack.

The CDP Institute, an organization that provides vendor-neutral information about customer data management in general and CDPs in particular, expected industry revenue to reach at least $1.3 billion in 2020. It hasn’t released any more recent forecasts. Meanwhile, ResearchandMarkets predicts the industry will grow to $10.3 billion by 2025, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34% between now and 2025.

This growth is being driven by the proliferation of devices and customer touchpoints, higher expectations for marketers to orchestrate real-time personalized experiences across channels and the need to navigate complex privacy regulations. The COVID pandemic has also been a factor, as the importance of customers’ digital interactions has been highlighted by social distancing measures and stay-at-home orders.

For more about these factors and to view in-depth profiles of CDP vendors, check out our MarTech Intelligence Report titled Enterprise Customer Data Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide.

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These integrations are just the latest in a long string of such partnerships. Neustar already integrates with Treasure Data’s CDP and Quaero, while Merkury has a technology partnership with Adobe. Meanwhile, Infutor (IR) has partnered with Amperity (CDP) and this is, by no means, an exhaustive list. In fact, when we released our latest MarTech Intelligence Report on CDPs, every one of 23 profiled vendors boasted of identity resolution capabilities — either built-in or through partnerships.

What it means to resolve identities online is changing all the time, however. With the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, along with other changes that impact how easily marketers can access third-party data, it’s more important than ever to keep up with the changing landscape — and no one has more incentive to do that than identity resolution providers, given that it’s their main focus.

What does all of this mean? Will identity resolution become one essential function of a CDP? Will it be built into media buying, attribution or other solutions? And if these integrations become table stakes, will marketers be able to access any identity resolution provider through their CDP, or will these relationships have some element of exclusivity?

Looking at the martech space as a whole, we’re seeing a lot of instances of so-called “headless” martech, and this is another. For example, many of the headless and hybrid content management systems (CMSs) we looked at in a recent report featured built-in digital asset management (DAM) systems. And those CMSs, in turn, were often considered part of a larger digital experience platform (DXP). Some have even speculated that CDPs will eventually be subsumed into other solutions.

Why we care. All of these developments mean marketers have more choices than ever when putting together their martech stack. This is positive in that it means marketers can select best-of-breed solutions, and that they have a lot of options in how to assemble their operation. That said, it’s already difficult enough to make choices when there are industry-accepted ways of tying together technologies.

Find out more by downloading our MarTech Intelligence Reports on Identity Resolution Platforms, Customer Data Platforms and Headless and Hybrid CMSs. You’ll discover analysis of each space along with detailed vendor profiles in each category.

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