This is where the key lies to making your business successful in the face of an increasingly demanding , informed consumer, capable of moving fluidly between the offline world and digital reality . The consumer becomes the protagonist, the touchpoints of the customer journey
multiply , but above all, expectations grow on the brand's ability to offer increasingly relevant customer experiences thanks to timely data collection , advanced audience profiling and segmentation , and the personalization of communication and interactions .
But if on the one hand consumers increasingly demand personalized experiences, on the other hand marketers find themselves having to deal with the gradual and inevitable extinction of cookies and third-party data , which until now have been indispensable elements for profiling and segmentation activities .
This is precisely where Customer Data Platforms come into play , technological solutions capable of offering indispensable technological support for collecting and managing valuable data and information on your users and customers while fully respecting their privacy .
Customer Data Platform : between market and functionality
customer data platform features
We have to go back about ten years to find the first use of the term “ Customer Data Platform ”.
It was, in fact, used for the first time by David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute, who defined such solutions as “ a software package that creates a unified and persistent customer database, accessible to other systems ”.
It then took five years before this software classification was consecrated by the martech sector thanks to Gartner, which defined the CDP as “ a marketing system that unifies a company's customer data from marketing and other channels.”
Since then, the trend related to list of andorra consumer email Customer Data Platforms has been in continuous and constant growth . However, after an initial phase of real explosion, the market is now consolidating with a significant presence of even the most historic big vendors such as Adobe, SAP, Salesforce.
But what are the peculiarities of these platforms?
The definition reported by Gartner is certainly reductive: to fully understand the potential of these technological solutions it is perhaps appropriate to focus on their acronym itself which includes three fundamental concepts.
Customer : the customer or the person who plays an increasingly central and active role in the relationship with the brand;
Data: customer and user data, the new oil for effective marketing strategies capable of generating value;
Platform : that is, the technological solution, often in SaaS mode, intuitive and user-friendly.
We could thus define a CDP as a technological solution that unifies a company's customer data from multiple channels and sources (e.g. POS, Social, Web Site) with the aim of creating complete, accurate and real-time updated user profiles .
Collection, data normalization but not only: many platforms have customer analytics services integrated with AI and machine learning for even more advanced profiling and predictive marketing activities .
From data collection to data activation to customer journey orchestration : the most modern CDPs integrate marketing automation , marketing personalization and omnichannel campaign management features .
