What Is CDP and How Can It Help Your Business?

A modern consumer’s path to purchase is no longer linear. The truth is, customers today will likely bounce between your e-commerce site, blog, social media account, and physical retail store before they finally make a purchase decision.  

This means that millions of interactions happen across various channels, making it extremely difficult to keep track of all these customer touchpoints.  

Without a doubt, marketers, business owners, and marketing managers need technologies that can collect data from those interactions, consolidate them, provide insights, and facilitate successful campaigns.  

Fortunately, there’s customer data platform, or CDP.

As your trusted digital marketing agency in Miami, we will discuss the five benefits of CDP and why it’s absolutely necessary for businesses that want to thrive in this digital world.  

But, before we dive into this, first things first…

What Is CDP and How Does It Work?

CDP is a software that collects and organizes customer data from all touchpoints and then structures these real-time data into individual, unified customer profiles.  

To build customer profiles, it makes use of various data from different sources, such as your transactional systems, email, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Data Management Platform (DMP), social media activity, website behavioral data, and more.  

There are many different kinds of CDPs out there, but essentially, they’re all capable of doing the following:

• Collect and integrate all identifiable customer data across touchpoints
• Provide analytics where end users can define and create customer segments, track customers across different platforms, and provide insights
• Store data  
• Create consolidated profiles of identified individuals

• Share data with any other systems that require it
• Comply with a wide range of vertical market and international regulations that protect customer privacy  
• Streamline the integration of customer data from third-party sources

CDP exists because of the need to collect, organize, and optimize customer data. As a digital marketing agency in Miami, we believe that CDP empowers marketers and business owners to provide more personalized customer experiences, develop relevant product offerings, and so much more.  

4 Types of Customer Data

There are four main types of data that CDP collects and organize:

• Identity Data: Includes name, demographics, locations, contact information, social information, professional information, and account information.  
• Descriptive Data: Data that will give a more detailed picture of who your customers are, including their career information, hobby information, lifestyle information, and family information.  
• Behavioral Data: Allows you to understand how each of your customers has engaged with your business. Behavioral data includes transactional information, email communication, online activity information, customer service information.  
• Qualitative Data: Provides context or personality for customer profiles. Qualitative data includes motivation information (ex. why they chose your product over your competitor’s or how they heard about you), attitude information (ex. what their favorite color or food is), and opinion information (ex. how your customers would rate your product and services).  

CDP collects a wide array of data, depending on your business and industry.  

Now that we know what CDP is and the different kinds of data it gathers, let’s discuss their key benefits and why it’s important for your business.  

What Are the Key Benefits of CDP and How Can It Help Your Business Grow?

Eliminates Data Silos

Data silos refer to data that is readily available for one department but is inaccessible to the rest of the organization.  

They prevent the different departments within your company from collaborating to provide a seamless and unified experience for each of your customers or prospect.  

This can slow down the pace of your productivity, compromise the accuracy of your customer profile data, and ultimately affect your bottom line.  

CDP solves this by unifying data across various touchpoints and making sure that it’s accessible for everyone within your organization.  

Every key person in your company needs to have access to customer data.  

Your marketing team needs customer data to create highly successful marketing campaigns to attract quality leads. Your sales team needs customer data so they can close deals faster. Your finance team needs customer data to understand payment patterns. Your customer service team needs customer data to provide prompt customer service.

With CDP, everyone in your team can work together to provide a more consistent and positive customer experience - from the moment a user visits your website to the moment they convert and become loyal customers.  

Easy Access to Specific Data

Another benefit of using CDP is that it consolidates data across different touchpoints and third-party data sources. This provides a single, comprehensive view of your customers, making it incredibly easy to get specific data when needed.  

For example, if a customer complains that the product they recently purchased is defective, all your customer service team has to do is look up the name of the customer and they’ll know exactly what they last purchased.  

This enables them to quickly find the best solutions to help the customer troubleshoot the problem. No need to ask a million questions and annoy the customer anymore!

Enables You to Establish Customer-Centered Marketing

Getting to know your customers on a deeper level is crucial because it’s key to creating customer-centered marketing.  

Customer-centered or customer-centric marketing is a long-term business strategy. It aims to continuously improve the customer experience at every touchpoint by focusing on the needs and interests of your customers.  

CPD equips you with all the data you need so you can provide value to your customers at every touchpoint. You’ll be able to continuously improve your customer experience and cultivate stronger customer relationships.  

Plus, it presents an opportunity to provide compelling and relevant content at every stage of the customer journey, and run highly effective campaigns that establish a connection, drives inspiration, and build loyalty.  

Provides Accurate Data of Your Customers

What’s amazing about CDP is that you’re sure the data it provides is accurate. It collects data directly from your customers, website visitors, subscribers, and social media followers.  

This means you can be confident that your CDP reflects only the most accurate information about your audience.

More Effective Marketing Efforts

With the right data, you can boost the efficiency of your marketing efforts.  

How? Well, CDP automates a lot of manual tasks, such as analyzing lifetime customer behavior and segmenting audiences. This frees your marketing team time and lets them focus on the creative and analytical assignments that cannot be automated.  

And, with CDP being a marketer-managed system, your marketing team will no longer need an IT or a developer to help them collect and analyze data because the system does it for them.  

This, paired with accurate and consolidated data, results in more targeted and highly personalized marketing campaigns and more sophisticated customer experiences across all channels.  

Facilitates Stronger Regulatory Compliance

CDP helps you gain better control over customer data, which makes it easier to comply with data governance regulations.  

Those companies that are dealing with Californians, for example, need to comply with CCPA regulations. And, marketers in the healthcare industry should adhere to HIPAA and HITECH regulations.  

Empowers Your Company to Achieve Scalability

CDP streamlines the different systems within your organization, from marketing automation platforms and email service providers to CRM and payment systems.

By creating a unified system of record, you can get rid of data errors and redundancies. This gives your organization access to more sophisticated algorithms and data consistency. As a result, the different units within your organization can make better and more informed decisions.  

A unified data system also paves way for better organizational alignment and an increase in quality of performance, ultimately empowering your company to achieve scalability at a much faster rate.  

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs CDP

1. CDP helps you comply with various data privacy regulations and better keep records of customer data. It also helps reduce the cost and simplify the process of data privacy regulation implementation.  

2. People are doing everything online, from browsing to shopping up to making payments. This shift has made it evident that CDP is indeed necessary for businesses to thrive in this post-pandemic era. It plays a major role in collecting, unifying, and activating customer data in real-time.

3. Modern consumers expect brands to provide personalized experiences. General and vague marketing messages no longer work. Personalization is the new standard when it comes to providing a positive customer experience. When you’re able to anticipate what your customer wants and needs before they can even ask, you’re giving them a one-of-a-kind experience they won’t forget.  

4. Third-party cookies are slowly disappearing. In fact, Google announced that it will be getting rid of third-party cookies in its browsers. This means that there's less third-party data to work with, leaving you no choice but to turn to your first-party data. This makes CDP an essential technology, as fewer and fewer companies depend on third-party data-driven marketing.  

5. CDP supports machine learning and artificial intelligence. If you’re engaged in machine learning projects focused on using customer data, using CDP ensures that you’re feeding your AI quality, consistent, and clean data.  

Looking for a Digital Marketing Agency Miami?

Customers are the lifeline of any business. So, it just makes sense to put them at the center of everything you do, especially in your marketing efforts.  

However, to build a customer-centered business, you need to have accurate, real customer data. This is where CDP comes in. It’s what you need to improve your organization’s productivity, quality of work, and success.  

Digital Resource is your go-to digital marketing agency in Miami. We believe that by striving to constantly improve the kind of experience you provide your customers at every touchpoint using quality customer data, your company will endure changes in buying behaviors and industry trends.  

Do you want to take your digital marketing to the next level and have your business thrive in this modern world? We got you! Contact us to get started!  

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