What CDPs are and the capabilities they should offer
Marketing is all about data. But pulling together customer data from all relevant sources, creating unified, regularly updated customer profiles and then using this customer data to achieve a range of business goals is challenging.
Customer data platforms (CDPs) are solutions that allow you to collect data, unify customer profiles, understand your customer segments and put your data to work. While organizations often rely on other solutions to manage their customer data – CRMs, DMPs, MSPs and data lakes – CDPs offer far more functionality and tangible benefits than these solutions.
When selecting a CDP, organizations have to pay special attention to the capabilities it offers. Specifically, organizations will get more out of their CDP when it unifies ALL available customer data, when it offers machine learning and data modeling features that make customer data actionable, when it provides meaningful reporting and when it ensures consistent data quality.