What are CDPs?

Posted in Cloud for Marketing
Jennifer Killian • February 4, 2020

A CDP (Customer Data Platform) is a platform that unifies a company’s customer data from multiple sources including CRM, transactions and marketing sources for more targeted and engaging communication with your existing and potential customers.

CDP

To qualify as a CDP, the platform must have: 

Identity resolution

The ability to consolidate data at a personal level from different sources to create a unified view of customers, including personally identifiable information such as email, device ID’s and other demographic information. 

CDP Data Centralisation 

The ability to ingest first-party customer data from multiple sources in real-time. 

Scalable architecture

Customer Data Platforms need infinitely scalable storage and compute capabilities, a CDP must be able to store large amounts of data that will persist for the duration of a client lifetime with business. 

Non-technical Interface

CDP must feature a marketer-friendly, web-based interface that enables data collection, profile unification, segmentation and activation*.

Audience Segmentation

CDPs must contain at a minimum the ability to surface, create and manage rule-based audiences. More advanced CDP platforms should include ML and AI capabilities for more advanced audience segmentation such as propensity, churn and lifetime value models

CDP Activation

They must have the ability to schedule and send audience segments (matched to the destination required schema) into execution platforms to ensure the relevance of the Audience and the ability to execute against it.

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