Your Guide in Selecting the Right CDP

How to choose CDP | Selecting the Right CDP Platform Software for your business

It’s no longer a mere buzzword in marketing and analytics circles. A customer data platform or CDP has today evolved into a sophisticated piece of software, the lure of which few digital marketers can ignore.

As digital marketing has become more and more dependent on customer data platforms, delivering exceptional customer experiences has become more and more important.

That trend is likely to continue. Chief Marketing Officers now have the CDP in their arsenal to serve customers in an even better, faster, and more granular manner.

A CDP is a “data unifying software”, & introducing it in your company helps manage your customer experience across every touchpoint.

But before that, you need to know the innards of a CDP; how it works, what does it take to get it going, and so on. You’ve come to the right place for that. Here is your guide for selecting a customer data platform (CDP).

By the end of this guide, you will definitely know more about how to choose a CDP platform/customer data platform.

Adding a CDP on top of your MarTech stack helps manage your customer experience across every touchpoint – marketing, customer service, and product.

It absorbs an enterprise’s data from all sources – batch, streaming, structured or unstructured, transaction or demographic – and makes it available 24X7 to all users within the enterprise.

But in a post-COVID-19 world, as enterprises prepare themselves for a largely digital world to operate in, many are prioritizing CDP investments.

They are spoilt for choice since there is now a variety of CDPs available. But, the way CDPs have evolved over the years, finding the right one and deciding which one is the best in 2022 can be a challenge.

So prior to committing to a vendor who provides customer data platforms, there are a few important things you should consider. To begin, it is important to understand what a CDP is and what it does.

According to the CDP Institute, a CDP creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems, putting marketing indirect control of the data unification project.

No, a CDP is not to be mistaken for a CRM, a data warehouse, or a data lake; the latter is where data is merely stored.

A CDP is much more than that. It’s a sophisticated data hub where all things related to data converge – from data sources to customer information.

Overall, a CDP is supposed to help brands make intelligent decisions around the right audience, giving them the right content at the right time using the right channel for the purpose.

Okay, but what does it really do? To cut a long story short, a CDP enables brands to make intelligent decisions around the right audience, giving them the right content at the right time using the right channel for the purpose.

Here’s one example – A CDP helps marketers to customize highly personalized marketing messages across engagement channels from email to social media.

As every CMO will vouch for, one of the main challenges in one-on-one marketing is the requirement to activate huge data volumes when you scale to millions of customers across multiple touchpoints, and that’s something that CDP handles. It is, in fact, the perfect medicine that the doctor ordered for those who are under-utilizing their big data

So what do I need to do to get it? Getting a CDP for your enterprise’s digital transformation requires some serious thinking.

A few years ago, we used to call it the 5-step guide but things have moved on since then. Today, in order to zero in the right CDP for your business, you need to ask yourselves these 10 questions.

Going through this process will eventually help you select the right CDP for your marketing team.

Not to mention the fact that at last count, there were over 60 CDPs available in the market, adding to the overall confusion. But first and foremost, you need to understand if your enterprise is ready for a CDP.

Quick Checklist for Choosing an Enterprise CDP

1. Are your business goals in place?
2. Do you want to meet these goals with technology such as data analytics?
3. Does your data sit in silos?
4. Is your data accessible to a majority in your organization? If not, can you make it accessible?

There are more steps to this due diligence but once you answer in the affirmative to the above, you can start contemplating a CDP.

5 Steps on Choosing the best CDP

1. Decide what do you want out of your CDP
2. List out all your tech stack and find out if the CDP you are contemplating can assimilate all that tech
3. The interface is another key factor – does the CDP have a user-friendly interface?
4. Does it accept inputs from multiple sources or not?
5. Does it offer predictive scoring and machine learning; the latter is needed for accurate pattern establishment and analysis

A CDP will eventually become the mainstay of an enterprise and its digital transformation, enhancing customer engagement strategies. This deep customer understanding enables brands to deliver consistent, relevant, and highly personalized customer engagement.