A robust customer data platform (CDP) enhances the efficiency of data-driven marketing campaigns, customer service, and sales outreach. It helps marketers establish data governance policies and handle personal data with compliance.
CDP serves as the foundation for customer data. Thus, choosing the right platform is vital to achieving both short-term and long-term ROI. Marketers must ensure that the vendors have the right experience. They must also ensure that the platforms help drive real business value.
Here’s what marketers must do when choosing a CDP:
1. Build a Team of CDP Stakeholders
A CDP ingests data. Thus, marketers must engage the teams that already gather customer data. It would include analytics, customer service, and marketing operations teams. Businesses can also include stakeholders from security, product, and operations.
As per the internal staffing and data maturity levels, businesses can use external digital transformation partners to fill in skillsets. Companies can find a MarTech to support their internal team.
The right CDP vendor includes a team of CDP practitioners. They can help businesses with CDP integration and interconnectivity.
But, it is essential to include people who will work with the vendor having internal industry and customer expertise. These people can look after the CDP after its implementation.
2. Know the Digital Maturity Levels
Digital maturity is a company’s ability to respond to shifting tech trends. A digital transformation roadmap defines digital maturity. It helps companies understand how they can move forward in the long run.
Digital maturity depends on many factors. These include company size and age, current legacy tech, and processes. It also has internal resources that adopt and increase the new tech’s value.
3. Set a CDP Use Case Roadmap
What are marketers looking for a CDP to achieve? They must communicate with the stakeholders and ensure they discuss their needs. Value delivery across the company will make it easier to get compliance. It is better to model against easy use cases to start with.
Do they want to personalize the digital customer experience for higher loyalty? Is data privacy management their challenge? They must analyze market and customer-centric use cases to target new markets or pilot new products.
Focusing on growth opportunities enables model expansion. It helps marketers shift away from legacy business practices. It results in better investments in quality enhancements, automation, and operational benefits.
4. Understand Current and Future CDP Goals
Companies must consider the data types to choose the right CDP with the right features and integration capabilities. These include zero-party, first-party, and third-party data.
They must also determine the goals they hope to achieve after they analyze them. Marketers may use CDPs to accomplish goals like-
- Increase sales conversion rates
- Customer segmentation and categorization
- A better understanding of customer expectations
- Enhance marketing and sales messaging
- Determine Potential Gap Integrations
After businesses determine their CDP implementation goals, they must focus on the current IT infrastructure. They must identify the integration types a CDP can have with current data sets and applications.
Integrations use APIs to obtain siloed data from customer engagement platforms and feed it into a centralized CDP repository. Centralization offers companies a unified source of truth. It lets them evaluate customer data. It also provides granular analysis and vital business insights.
5. List the Needed CDP Features
Considering the key features of a CDP is vital. For example, a CDP ISO 27001- or SOC 2-certified is ideal if the company handles sensitive customer data. Other essential requirements include- data governance, quality enforcement levels, and CCPA/GDPR compliance.
6. Align CDP Features with Manageability and Cost
Although marketers may find one CDP that benefits them technologically, they must balance it against cost and manageability.
Commercial CDPs are expensive. Thus, companies must assess whether they can use more advanced platform features or must target their spending elsewhere.
Moreover, stakeholders must consider the type of external expertise they may need during the CDP’s integration with business infrastructure.
They must also consider CDP training and ongoing system management as it affects CDP’s operability and effectiveness. It helps companies to find the right platform to match their specific need.
7. Collate Request for Proposal (RFP) Needs
Marketers must define their top CDP use cases and where they stand for data maturity. It will help build a CDP roadmap. It will inform the queries marketers must ask while selecting a vendor.
The CIO and CDO must assess CDP vendors’ integration needs, compliance factors, and technology capabilities. They must also evaluate many CDP solutions’ scalability, security, and flexibility.
They can also identify self-service capabilities. It helps them align solutions with data governance policies and compliance.
In addition to achieving initial use cases, companies must also ensure they choose a flexible vendor to grow with the changing needs.
8. Use Scoring Criteria for Vendor Evaluation
Use cases do not tell more about the intangible qualities of what support a vendor can provide. Companies must look at the CSP vendors’ clients, executions, and history while reviewing.
They can seek help from consultants or industry analysts who can assess your goals and suggest vendors as per the criteria.
A CDP demo allows vendors to show their capability of handling the needs. Thus, marketers must ensure they have the framework to benefit from the demo meetings.
They can ask vendors how they would address the primary use cases. Companies can also demonstrate challenging scenarios they face.
Based on this, marketers can evaluate the vendor’s approach to addressing the issues. More importantly, they must collect RFP responses before setting up the demos. It enables them to identify and remove unqualified vendors. It makes the demo more efficient.
9. Set a Process to Gather Stakeholder Feedback
It is essential to keep up with collaboration and communication. Marketers must hold follow-up meetings to gather feedback from primary stakeholders. They can develop a scoring system to help teams to make easier evaluations.
Must-Have Factors to Look for in a CDP
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Identity Resolution and Data Integration
Identity resolution is a CDP’s ability to understand how customers interact across multiple channels, devices, and touchpoints. CDPs must use a customer’s history to build a user profile.
The CDP unites data from the martech stacks. Thus, the chosen CDP must ingest and activate data from the existing tools in real time.
Also Read: Can Blockchain, AI, and CDP Transform Marketing?
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Custom Audience Segmentation
The best CDPs must allow marketers to create custom audiences using any data point. It helps build personalized campaigns. This way, they can target customers across social media, email, and search engines.
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Advanced Analytics
Marketers have more data than needed. Thus, the chosen CDP must have advanced data analytics and AI-powered analysis. It helps companies create dashboards with relevant metrics. They must always ensure they can export this data to share with team members.
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Security and Privacy Compliance
Companies must ensure that the CDP is secure. They can check the CDP security and privacy standards ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, CSA Star, and GDPR Seal.
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