A customer data platform (CDP) collects and unifies first-party data—from multiple sources—to build a single, coherent, and complete view of each customer. It is the most valuable marketing asset that helps enterprises bring both known and anonymous data from multiple sources under one platform in order to create unique customer identities that can be used to provide personalized customer experiences across all channels and devices.

You can seamlessly set up campaigns for your target audiences and deliver great customer experiences across all channels, from on-site or in-app personalization to email, web push, mobile push, call centers, connected devices, and more. The sources include:

Behavioral Data: Action performed by the customers while visiting a website, using the mobile app, or through other channels such as live chat or digital assistants. The number, length, and frequency of those interactions as well.
Transactional Data: Customer orders and returns, from e-Commerce or point of sales system.
Demographic Data: Comprises an array of socioeconomic information, including the breakdown of a population by gender, age, ethnicity, income, employment status, home ownership, and even internet access.

How Does Customer Data Platform Works?

Customers are interacting with businesses in new ways and over a multitude of channels. What they leave behind is bits and pieces of information— known as first-party data— during every single interaction.

A CDP ingests this first-party data and then creates individual customer identities from each system (that is channel_id) and combines them into a single consistent and accurate customer profile (customer_unique_id). Enterprises use them for a variety of marketing campaigns, including marketing automation, A/B testing, content creation, personalization, and social media promotions. The process doesn’t fall under the “one and done” category. The CDP keeps ingesting new data from different sources and updates the history of every single customer interaction.

The Impact of a CDP

Primarily, a CDP is marketers’ cup-of-tea; however, it doesn’t completely downplay the importance of IT. Any organization can highly benefit from first-party data to improve its overall CX, analytics, and customer support.

What CDP Helps Drive

Higher percentage of revenue generation from existing customers by personalizing customer engagement and journeys based on their purchasing behavior and unique preferences.
Improve customer satisfaction by focusing more on what customers’ values the most, anticipating their tendency to buy certain products, shopping patterns, offers they like, suitable deals, etc.
Optimize campaign spending by:

Keeping a check on customers who just purchased from the physical store in order to segment the digital campaigns.
Re-targeting the online shoppers intelligently.
Understanding the cross-channel influence.