We’re living in a world where customers interact with every brand through various channels. It may be through the website, social media, support helpdesk, blog, online reviews, ads, emails, etc. How can brands keep up with all these customer touchpoints? How can they build a unified customer experience through every touchpoint?

It happens with a Customer Data Platform or CDP. Customer Data Platforms deliver a unique, unified view of your customers’ minds and needs. But how? Read on to learn more.

The best companies and startups in the world ensure that each customer touchpoint feels more personal than the last. In other words, they make sure that ads are relevant, web pages are tailored, and product experiences feel specially curated.

This is possible when you have good data. The best companies and startups in the world are using Customer Data Platforms to make good data available to the teams that drive the business and the customer experience.

What is Customer Data?

CDPs exist because customer data has become the most crucial asset of every business. But less than 0.1% of businesses benefit from their own data.

Your customer data is every piece of information that your customers leave behind as they interact with your brand online and offline. This information may be collected through forms, surveys, or through online behavior trackers. This information is highly valuable to businesses because it can provide important insights into customers’ behaviors, preferences, and traits.

How does a customer data platform work?

A customer data platform helps you capture data from every customer interaction, consolidate that data into unified user profiles and audiences, and connect the right data to the tools your teams need to grow. The following steps show how a customer data platform works:

Connect

A customer data platform helps you connect to all platforms and customer touchpoints.

Collect

A CDP will continuously collect data from all connected platforms and unifies this data. With all your data in one place, you can remove bad data and respect user privacy.

Understand

A CDP then uses this good data to build profiles and give you powerful insights into each customer.

Activate

Use your data, profiles, and insights to make decisions about the next actions you need to take. Activate your acquired knowledge anywhere your business needs.

Who needs a Customer Data Platform?

A customer data platform should empower every team to drive action based on the insights it provides. CDPs analyze your customer data to provide these insights.

• A CDP helps executives to make data-driven decisions and fuel better outcomes using customer insights. It also helps them personalize user experiences and accelerate the launch of new products and new markets.
• CDPs help product teams to move faster without analytics bottlenecks and measure and improve KPIs.
• Marketing teams use a CDP to understand the full user journey by connecting every touchpoint online and offline. CDPs also help marketers to build real-time audiences. Empowered by CDP features, marketers can improve their direct impact on business growth.
• CDPs help engineering teams easily collect data from everywhere using a single API. Using a CDP, engineering teams can integrate new tools in just minutes and query your data from a clean and ready-to-go data set.

The benefits of a Customer Data Platform

A CDP helps you clean and organize your customer data, build insightful customer analytics, and improve data protection and privacy. Using a customer data platform, you can collect data directly from your audience, clean it, organize it, and build insightful analytics. Therefore, it helps you understand your customers and provide them with relevant services, offers, and experiences.

In addition, businesses use a CDP to unify cross-channel marketing efforts. It helps them avoid wasting precious time and energy trying to communicate, share, and educate each other on the data you use for and collect from these efforts. CDPs unify multi- and cross-channel marketing efforts by supplying consolidated, accurate data. They also serve to collect and organize new data that may inspire other, ongoing marketing efforts.

How to choose a Customer Data Platform?

Choosing a CDP isn’t a quick process. You should make sure you’re doing your due diligence to find the right CDP based on your specific tools, use cases, requirements, and features. After that, you will be able to get more value out of your data and get a better understanding of your customers. Learn more on how you can choose a CDP here.

Next steps

Without customers, you wouldn’t have a business. They truly belong at the centre of all that we do, especially our marketing. Focusing on customer data is indeed choosing customer-driven marketing as your marketing strategy.

Ready to accelerate your growth with a customer data platform? Check out our guide to buying a customer data platform or get Formaloo’s demo to learn how our customers have achieved success with our customer data platform.

Get a Demo

If you have any questions, check out Formaloo’s support page to find ways you can contact us.

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