Do you want to understand your customers better and make your data-driven marketing campaign impeccable? Here is the solution in the form of a customer data platform or CDP to solve your customer experience and marketing hurdles. However, before elaborating on the importance and pros of CDP vendor integrations, let’s get started with a better understanding of a customer data platform(CDP) and its importance.
What is a CDP?
Customer Data Platform – A customer data platform or CDP provides a complete customer database that other systems can use to connect, track, evaluate, and organize customer interactions with products and services. Integrations and vendor neutrality can be analyzed in a CDP both from your current stack requirements and use cases as well as from your future needs, which are changing rapidly and wildly as we move into web 3.0, the metaverse, and a whole new digital age.
Why are CDP Vendor Integrations Needed?
CRM-based marketing cloud CDPs can be pretty helpful for integrating existing client data into your databases. However, companies who have made significant investments in CRM, email marketing platforms, and other similar tools as a foundation for CX will want to invest even more in those systems in order to construct a single image of those customers.
The issue emerges when these vendors claim to be able to grow your account by providing a complete customer database. Still, their methods only function with available client data, leaving out crucial information about behavior prior to purchase.
Vendor-neutral CDPs (using technology like tag management and API hubs for data collection) can much more efficiently collect and consolidate data relating to both new and unknown customers without relying on complete, inflexible customer identity data, resulting in a richer and more relevant customer perspective. This allows for a more realistic representation of the entire client base and improved audience generation and activation into marketing campaigns that interact smartly and generate ROI. It’s also useful for several purposes during the client or a buyer journey (pre and post-purchase).
Why are CDP Vendor Integrations Important?
Given the abundance of similar and supplementary data platforms on the market, you might wonder why CDPs are so crucial and act as the backbone of a brand for marketers and product managers. CDPs have a number of advantages that other data products (such as the one we mentioned above) do not, which is a plus point for the leading organizations in the market. These advantages include:
- Customer’s Single View: CDPs gather data from a variety of sources and combine it into a holistic, unified view of the consumer—across devices and channels—before making those comprehensive customer profiles available to other systems. To put it another way, CDPs break down the data silos that traditional data collection and storage platforms usually establish.
- Data Democratization: CDPs empower all teams—from marketing to product to customer support—to put customer data to work by breaking down silos and making data more accessible.
- Efficiency in Operation: Compared to resource-intensive specialized solutions, CDPs save companies much time building customer data solutions and connecting them with other essential software to get more effective results.
- Better Customer Experience: Finally, CDPs enable enterprises to provide a better customer experience. By centralizing consumer data into complete, lifelong profiles, CDPs eliminate potential blind spots and streamline every marketing attempt. They enable marketers to provide more targeted, practical, and valuable messages to customers.
How to Choose the Best CDP Platform?
There are a few but most crucial things to keep in mind when it comes to evaluating the CDP platforms (and others).
- Use Case: Every search for a data platform needs to start with your use cases. For what purpose do you intend to use the CDP or any platform? What business problems your CDP needs to solve for you?
- Integrations: The whole point of any CDP is to connect and synchronize all your customer data with your campaign, so choose a platform that can handle all your upstream and downstream integration needs. The ease with which a CDP may be integrated has an impact on how soon you can implement it and, ultimately, perceive its benefits. It would help if you also thought about whether you require a customizable data connectivity option.
You can construct an initial list of platform possibilities after you know what capabilities and integrations you require from a CDP.
Conclusion
Data landscapes are emerging today. Every month, every quarter, organizations become more adept at harnessing and democratizing customer data to further their business objectives. Customers Data Platform is no exception to this.
Even though it is hard to predict how many technical resources will be required to onboard a new CDP platform, the key is to involve any internal technical resources in evaluating possible CDP vendors.
Ask for extensive demos, proofs-of-concept, and perhaps a trial to narrow down your CDP vendor list. You can learn more about how and why CDP vendor integrations are important and their potential. Talk to us at MagicPixel by booking a short demo. Our team will provide you with the solutions your business needs and deserves.
