Why do most people in the world attempt to start a business? Conventional wisdom would say that most people try entrepreneurship in order to make money for themselves and their family. In order to do that, the business owner has to first attract clientele, consolidate the clientele then expand the clientele base. A task that might start as a simple one, with a handful of customers and manageable record keeping, could transform overnight into hundreds – if not thousands – of people baying for a product or service, each requiring individual attention and specifications. Customer data platform (CDP) is a tool created specifically to solve that problem – the good kind of problems, the ones that come with success. Technically, CDP is a software platform that collects, processes, and manages customer data so that companies can market their products and services more effectively. This is done by creating a single centralized customer database containing data on all touch points and interactions with that company’s product or service. That database can then be segmented in a nearly endless number of ways to create more personalized marketing campaigns. Amazing, Right? Well, as amazing of a process as it is, CDP still requires quite a few components to be present for it to run at optimal levels:
- Customer data infrastructure (CDI) – CDI serves three primary purposes: data integration – CDI is supposed to take customer data from varying platforms and integrate them into a single cohesive data structure; data governance – this is a framework for ensuring the data is high-quality, reliable, and accurate. Each company must come up with its own practices and policies for sorting, scanning, and cataloging data; and customer management – customer management is about turning the data into actionable information. The way to do that is by creating unique user profiles. The more specific the profile, the better. As these are the customers that companies should spend their resources on to take further along the sales funnel.
- Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) – is to ingest data from third-party data sources then move raw data from a source system to a destination resource. ELT copies or exports the data from the source locations, but instead of moving it to a staging area for transformation, it loads the raw data directly to the target data store, where it can be transformed as needed.
- Identity resolution – is a data management process that links a customer’s online behavior to their unique identity by gathering different data sets and identifying relationships that might not be as obvious. It contains software that integrates consumer identifiers across channels and devices in a way that is accurate and scalable.
- Visual audience builder – where companies increase their prospecting pool by selecting desired demographics, content consumption, interests, and actions made up of first, second, and third party data collected and segmented.
- Data storage – CDP stores a copy of the data in their own data warehouse and makes the data available for future consumption.
- Reverse ETL – with reverse ETL, qualified members within companies can actually harness data in an operational capacity. So that they can act on the data in real-time, and use it to make key decisions.
Once they define their goals, companies are able to determine the specific needs of a CDP then they can integrate a CDP with company strategy to create a positive, personalized customer journey. However there are ways to make the most of the customer data collected for a company’s CDP, ways which will be explored here
What Are The Ways To Enrich A Company’s CDP
- Build the single customer view – companies customer data that serve specific areas of the business, such as accounting and marketing. Data from these areas must be unified in the CDP to get a complete picture of the customer. Companies should connect all data sources to their CDP and see the single view of the customer come to life.
- Add data to enhance each customer’s profile – one of the most powerful aspects of a CDP is the ability to build and maintain a golden customer record at the speed of the consumer. Golden customer records combine meaningful, reliable data from multiple systems into a single view. All the behavioral and transactional data should integrate into the golden record in real time to ensure that analytics, personalization, and engagement are relevant and up to date.
- Add in-line analytics and machine learning – a company should use advanced analytics to understand individual and segment-based customer behavior to improve their marketing and customer engagement decisions based on predictions and goal-based optimizations.
- Personalize experiences across channels – companies should use the single customer view to power messaging and actions that will align with the customer’s expectations. For instance, create cross-channel campaigns with personalized real-time messaging.
- Optimize the CDP’s use across the enterprise – Ultimately companies set up their CDP to maintain customer profiles in real time, while also allowing marketers and other users to access that real-time, unified data whenever they need it. One of the ways CDP data is enriched, is providing the ability to continuously maintain clean, current customer profiles created from unified data.
