Customer Data Platform Landscape: Different Types of CDP

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types of cdp


Data Ingestion and Identity is the winning feature of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). It didn’t stop there. Marketers need swift information distillation and processing for cutting-edge insights and recommendations. It requires a universal configuration of heterogeneous data into comprehensible formats. It needs to meet the goals of a customer experience strategy.

A CDP, with evolution, can bring more onto the table than what a marketer thinks it can. That drives you to understand the different types of CDPs available in the market and what each one means to your business.

Marketer’s Notes: Some CDP vendors provide solutions only for a few specific needs. However, the FirstHive platform allows you to choose for either a few of your specific needs such as data ingestion, or a combination of data and analytics, auto-segmentation, campaign management, budget management, and automated recommendation.

Different Types of Customer Data Platform

Data Assembly Line

Imagine this!

Car sensors, home appliances, credit card purchases, mobile transactions and aircraft flight systems, loyalty coupons, chatbot interactions, FMCG line extension product offers for new launches, distributor and retailer margins, email signups, in-store heatmaps, and the list can go on.  A marketer deals with more complexity than what you see in the prior statement. These varied data sources generate volumes of events.

The volume only increases data velocity to support automated or augmented systems. All this put together poses a single problem for a marketer. And 33% of elite marketers believe that the solution to this is to have the right technologies for data collection and analysis that is the primer and essential to understanding customers.

Beyond mere collection, all of these should communicate with each other on one platform — data hubs, information systems, sources of marketing interactions, and third-party sources.

The end result is that CDPs create unified customer identities, unique to each customer in your database.

Data Ingestion with Analytics

“What do you mean when you say systems need to talk to each other?”

Here is what CDPs do. Collecting data from different sources and storing them in consumable formats is the first step. But, CDPs also let this data be consumed by not just the marketing teams, but also other teams across the enterprise. They are available to be translated to a customer too.

Moreover, data needs to evolve and be enriched over time. Such data fuels machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics. It indicates the next steps, red flags, opportunities, and more. It makes not only your marketing systems but the entire enterprise into a large intelligent system.

Customer Experience At The Core

“Conversions and Better ROI is what concerns every marketer.”

Data collection and insight processing are implemented for a consequence. The subsequent outcome is to improve customer experience with targeted messaging, micro-campaign management, and customer lifecycle management. To truly enhance the customer experience a CDP equips a marketer with auto-segmentation and cohort management, single view of a customer across all touchpoints, seamless omnichannel customer journey orchestration, and more than obvious support systems for security and privacy.

Apart from these CDPs are also weighed for B2B and B2C marketers.

Customer Data Platforms for The B2B Marketers

To know exactly whom to target accomplishes half of the goal for a marketer. But to consistently achieve it over a large scale is extremely challenging. Especially when B2B marketers need to implement Account-Based Marketing (ABM) CDPs play a crucial role in creating a single view of customer behavior. The fragmented set of tools that come together to orchestrate an ABM campaign need to be managed over a single platform. The platform that successfully accomplishes this goal is a Customer Data Platform.

Customer Data Platforms for The B2C Marketers

Though B2C marketers promote products for highly individualized customers, their immediate mediators and influencers are the distributors, retailers, and wholesalers. So, for a B2C marketer, it is rather another round of marketing to the intermediaries. So, technically there are in charge of B2B2C marketing!

CDPs help in auto-segmenting the intermediary influencers are corresponding to their individual customers. This helps in promoting your product to only those who help you achieve a high ROI.

FirstHive, An Intelligent Customer Experience CDP

All marketers do not need everything. But, some need it all.

FirstHive is an Intelligent Customer Data Platform (CDP) that is helping Enterprises experience almost 6X times increase in Marketing ROI metrics. This testifies our passion to drive better customer experiences.

We are the world’s first CDP to imbibe Machine Learning to build unified customer identities, enriched by actionable campaign targeting recommendations which contribute to the large increase in ROI.

Leading enterprises across BFSI, FMCG, Manufacturing, and Digital industry sectors have used our platform to build unique Customer Identities on unified customer data sets. This rich data is used to orchestrate cross-channel campaigns.

Across over 30 Indo-Pacific customer deployments, we have helped them with data ingestion from all sources of their customer interactions and transaction such as ERP, CRM, Website, Social, PoS, Mobile App, Customer Care, and more to name. More and more businesses come to trust FirstHive as our platform is privacy by design, and GDPR compliant.

Today, CDP is essential and indispensable to a marketer. In the next section, we elaborate on how a cognitive marketer is fast-adopting a CDP as the central brain of the intelligent marketing systems.

Apart from this, Forrester also classifies Customer Data Platform as basic Data Platforms, Standalone CDP, and Embedded CDP.  Read the complete report here to understand what type of CDP suits your enterprise needs the best.