How Your CRM & CDP Can Work Together

It’s time to dig deeper into customer experience; the cornerstone of your brand’s success. These days ‘optimisation’ means far more than just understanding your audience segments. You need to set out to achieve a highly personalised experience for each and every customer.  

Thankfully, there are multiple tools that help you to do just that. And, you don’t have to choose one over the other. Many of them work together, and in fact, can unlock more useful insights when they are used in conjunction. 

Two platforms, in particular, are your customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platforms (CDP). For those who are less familiar with these, let’s take a closer look at each one and their distinctions, before delving into how you can use them in tandem.

CRM vs CDP

Your Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) is the platform that stores all the important information about your current and potential customers. It functions as a database and usually relies on members of your team to be inputting and updating data manually and giving this data context, with labels or pipelines.

A Customer Data Platform (CDP), on the other hand, is a platform that pulls data from multiple external sources and uses this to create a unified view of your customer and their behaviours.

Now, let’s look at some of the benefits you can experience when you use them together:

1. Data Sharing
Your CRM is the central source of truth for your customers. This information, once shared with the data in your CDP, is elevated to a new level as you are able to zoom out and see your customers through a different lens. By sharing data, you can spot trends, identify new areas of opportunities, or perhaps hone in on existing opportunities that aren’t being nurtured properly.

2. Actioning Data
If your CRM is the expert tool for managing relationships, then your CDP is the expert tool for managing the path to purchase. Together, these make for a formidable combination. Rather than simply collecting a lot of data, you can take action and make information, quick iterations to your online presence and cross-channel marketing to drive more sales and increase profitability.

3. Segmentation
Together, these platforms paint a clearer picture of your users. Specifically, which of your live advertisements are best performing with certain segments. You can then utilise this information to become even more granular with your audience until you’ve identified clear homogenous groups, and crafted highly relevant messaging for each of them. What’s more, this highly optimised segmentation can unfold in real time and be continuously improving as customers are interacting with your brand online.

4. Shared Functionality
The shared functions of your CRM and CDP allow you to compile more intelligent customer lists, look-alike lists and segments, and tailored campaigns. And this is just the basic shared functionality. You can do even more optimising and refining if your CRM has machine learning capabilities.

So we’ve learned that both CRMs and CDPs play a critical role in delivering a successful customer experience. Rather than pitting one tool against the other, have each of them work to their strengths and use them in conjunction to unlock deeper insights and new revenue opportunities.

If you’d like further support to better understand and nurture customer-centric experiences, the team at Wondaris is happy to help. Our cloud platform allows you to link all of your business and marketing data sources so you can better understand what’s driving people to your brand and how you can ensure they stay loyal to you long-term.

Want to try Wondaris? Get in touch.