CRM vs. CDP: How to Get the Most Out of Both

What’s the difference between Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)? CRM vs. CDP is a very frequently asked question, especially as CDPs become increasingly popular for driving hyper-personalized customer experiences, targeting, segmentation, and even orchestration of many other types of martech.The following infographic offers an easy way to understand the differences and similarities between these two types of platforms.

CRM: An Operational Tool for Sales Management

CRM solutions are used to manage sales teams and pipelines, forecast revenue, and track day-to-day interactions and transactions with customers and prospects. They’ve been popular with sales teams since the 1990s, as a way to track sales performance as well as customer support calls and even complaints.

CDP: An Analytical Engine for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Experience Professionals

On the other hand, CDPs unlock value from more sources and types of previously siloed data, both structured and unstructured. They can even use CRM data, but also take data generated from many other parts of your customer journeys, including point-of-sales (POS) data, social media, web browsing histories, mobile apps, loyalty programs, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, advertising platforms, and much more. 

CDPs go beyond CRM sales management functions to unify historical and real-time data from multiple online and offline sources —including CRMs—for a deep and granular understanding of consumer behavior and to create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns.

So with a CDP, you get deeper insights and automation of compelling, personalized, omnichannel customer experiences, to handle every aspect of finding new and building customer loyalty. Some of the most common use cases are to:

• Analyze customer behavior across channels
• Know customers better with ID Resolution and ID Unification
• Implement predictive scoring for higher conversion rates
• Assess campaign effectiveness on key performance management metrics
• Acquire new customers and prevent churn
• Automate campaign activation and track ad effectiveness
• Orchestrate personalized omnichannel customer journeys and campaigns automatically
• Make better marketing decisions
• Improve and fine-tune campaigns quickly

The Benefits of CDPs

What’s driving the popularity of CDPs for customer personalization? Many CDP users are acutely aware that 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experience alone.

CRMs & CDPs—Better Together

The real answer to CRM vs. CDP is that these platforms can work in tandem. More than 93% of marketing executives say the use and analysis of customer data will enhance their ability to meet disruptive and competitive challenges. Many of these executives are seeking the average loyalty increase of 44% for companies using CDPs. If you’d like to learn more about CDPs, check out Treasure Data’s recently updated “Dummies Guide to Enterprise Customer Data Platforms.”