Brands are struggling with a myriad of forces, including disjointed omnichannel experiences, rapid consumer behavior changes, the sunsetting of third-party cookies, and Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection.

Increasingly, they’re realizing that a big part of dealing with each of those challenges is to bring all their customer data together in one place—a customer data platform (CDP). However, the CDP landscape is confusing, and many aren’t sure what the right choice is for them.

The first step is to understand the pain points that a CDP can address. There are four major ones:

  1. Siloed data. A CDP can eliminate disparate data sources, improve data strategy and corporate data governance, and ensure that your data is available across your organization.
  2. An incomplete view of the customer. A CDP can allow your business processes to scale across touchpoints and let you respond to customers in buying moments, and provide contextually relevant experiences.
  3. No actionable intelligence or decisioning. The centralized and reliable data from a CDP can power AI-driven customer experiences, predict next-best actions, and discover new customer insights.
  4. A lack of real-time personalization. With all systems working from a single golden record, you can create consistently personalized experiences across channels and touchpoints.

Four Kinds of CDPs

However, not every CDP can address all of those pain points. That’s because there are four kinds of CDPs, according to the Customer Data Platform Institute:

  1. Data CDPs gather customer data from source systems, link data to customer identities, and make this data available to external systems
  2. Analytics CDPs add on analytical applications, including segmentation abilities and more
  3. Campaign CDPs add on the ability to treat segments through personalized messages, outbound marketing efforts, content recommendations, and other possibilities
  4. Delivery CDPs, also called enterprise CDPs, have the most robust capabilities across data assembly, analytics, customer treatments, and message delivery

See how to anticipate customer needs with a CDP.

However, the added wrinkle here is that most CDPs don’t fit neatly inside those four definitions. The solutions from the more than 150 vendors in the marketplace tend to straddle these buckets. (We told you the CDP landscape is confusing.) Because of that, picking the best CDP for your company requires you to assess your specific needs and identify specific use cases that you want to be able to execute.

A Deeper Dive

In the following on-demand webinar, we discuss this all in more detail and walk through seven detailed use cases to inspire you.

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