Too Many Marketing Data Sources? How CDPs Help You Profit from Them All

Data is the backbone of marketing today. But with the volume of customer data growing exponentially every year, how do you integrate, update, and assemble all that data into a unified view of each customer? It’s a big challenge. That’s why marketing and IT executives are increasingly considering customer data platforms (CDPs) as a solution for bringing together information from diverse traditional and digital marketing data sources — everything from social media to loyalty programs to IoT — to create personalized customer experiences that sell.

Marketing Data Sources for Customer Data Platforms Fuel New Marketing Power

Taking data from a myriad of data sources, the best CDPs promise to integrate data points into a larger ‘marketing brain’ that enables organizations to make better decisions and design smarter campaigns across many different channels.
Early adopters like Atsushi Yasumuro, senior manager of digital marketing at Subaru, sing the praises of CDPs for their ability to provide millions of highly targeted, hyper-personalized customer experiences.

Data Unification Improves Customer Experiences — AND Sales

“By unifying our customer data, the possibilities to improve the customer experience are endless,” says Yasumuro, whose company uses Treasure Data’s CDP to integrate its customers’ online and offline profiles to boost sales and streamline the car-buying process. The company has seen a 350 percent increase in new ad campaign performance as a result of its CDP-fueled data integration.

With so much hype surrounding this promising new tool, it’s helpful to go over some basics. Like, what’s the value of a CDP to marketers? Does a CDP have other uses across an organization? And what types of data do CDPs bring together? What are the main customer data integrations?  Here’s a quick rundown.

CDP Basics

Essentially, a CDP unifies data from your organization’s disparate silos to create a single profile for each individual customer, who can be named or anonymous. While data platforms like CRMs specialize in aggregating data for one channel, a CDP weaves together everything from buyer personas to web and mobile browsing history, chat, customer service phone calls, social media activities (likes, comments, follows), loyalty program information, purchase records, IoT data, and more. The result is a robust customer profile, which includes deep behavioral data about what is likely to persuade your customer, based on previous interactions.

Understanding how individual customers behave is the key to making your data actionable. And that’s partly because a CDP doesn’t just store data. It’s capable of taking certain actions on the data in real-time — like triggering a personalized message in a mobile app or personalizing an experience on your website. For example, data collected as a customer browses for wireless speakers is matched to the customer’s profile. Then, this profile is used to trigger a push, email, or display ad for speakers.

A CDP isn’t just a marketing tool either. Because you probably want to use customer data elsewhere within your organization, a CDP is also capable of sending data to your other systems, like your CRM or marketing automation solution. As a result, your teams across product, design, innovation, and customer-support departments can each use the data to drive improvements throughout the overall customer journey.

How CDP Customer Data Helps Smart Organizations

By combining data from numerous departments to create a single view of every customer, a CDP can be highly instrumental in transforming strategic goals across your organization. Whether you want to track your products better, launch and optimize campaigns, or identify your next top ten customers through predictive lead scoring, a CDP will help you achieve your business objectives. While possibilities are practically endless, these are five uses for CDP customer data:

• Personalized advertising. Create cross-channel campaigns with personalized real-time messages that are sent to customers at the right moment as they move through the buyer’s journey, such as targeted coupons and display ads after they’ve visited specific pages on your website or interacted with certain social media campaigns.
• Lead scoring. Analyze data from thousands of buying signals to identify inbound and existing prospects who are most likely to convert, and take action to drive revenue and deepen existing relationships.
• Customer support. Track customer behavior across every channel over time to understand exactly how customers interact with your brand, and use this information to make strategic choices about where to focus on improving your overall customer experience.
• Business operations. Ensure better decision-making by having customer data in one comprehensive, searchable, and easy-to-analyze system. This removes the guesswork from questions like which products customers are buying and what services they prefer at specific locations. You can also run predictive models for other ‘what if’ scenarios.
• Internet of Things (IoT). Ingest IoT data from any connected device or machine, correlate data from multiple data sources, and leverage AI- and machine learning (ML)-powered insights to identify opportunities for performance enhancement, auto-replenishment, proactive service, and much more.

When It Comes to Data Integration, not all CDPs Are Equal

While traditional systems mostly focus on limited data types — like order history, social media activity, or website clicks — a CDP will support and accommodate numerous data types in multiple formats. CDPs connect all customer data types and sources, regardless of whether they’re structured or unstructured, internal or external, batch or streaming. To get a good idea about the types of data that CDPs can integrate, consider the 20 types supported by Treasure Data’s enterprise CDP. A few examples are listed below, but there are integrations with more than 100 vendors’ products, so be sure to check this list for whatever you’re currently using:

Different CDPs work with distinct partner ecosystems. As you evaluate CDPs on the market, examine their integrations and make sure they support the platforms and tools that matter most to your organization. Integrations make your customer data actionable and ensure the speed, scale, and accuracy of your targeting. They should be partner-certified, easy to implement, and have good documentation. If you overlook integrations, you’ll miss out on some important CDP benefits.

The Path Forward

The digital landscape is constantly shifting, and data sources are guaranteed to substantially multiply in the years ahead. Just take a moment to consider the upcoming avalanche of customer data generated by IoT applications. Treasure Data’s enterprise CDP supports 100+ out-of-the-box integrations to enable you to easily connect all your data sources. New partnerships are happening all the time. Check out the full list of our CDP integrations to learn more.