CDP: Real-time vision and personalisation

Would you like to have a unique view of your customers and be able to achieve hyper-personalisation in real time across all your channels?

Due to the multitude of data sources and channels with which our customers interact, CDP platforms have become an essential piece of technology for all those organisations that want to offer personalised and differential experiences in real time to their customers. You may have heard the term CDP before and more or less understood what they are and what they are for, but in this article we want to go a step further and tell you things you may not have heard before.

What is a CDP and why are they booming?

You will have heard it many times and it will already be more or less clear to you what a CDP is, but in case you are one of the few who haven't, let us give you a brief introduction. A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a platform that collects customer behavioural data in such a way that allows us to know what they do in all our channels and on our social networks, and whose objective is to use this data to carry out certain actions to get the most out of them and/or benefit from them. But... why are they booming? Here are the main reasons:

• Cookieless: One of the reasons for the rise of CDP systems is the news that Google is going to eliminate third-party cookies by mid-2024. The reality of a cookieless world has accelerated a need that was already in the minds of ecommerce managers, CMOs and CEOs: to have a complete and solid omnichannel customer database on which to carry out actions such as recommendations, remarketing or specific campaigns, among others.
• Increase in digital interaction: How to identify and trace a customer in each of the channels is becoming increasingly difficult because the possibilities are almost infinite. With a CDP, we will be able to build a 360º view of the customer that will allow us to generate hyperpersonalized experiences, regardless of the channel through which we interact with "our" user.
• Loyalty: We are no longer just placing importance on the increase in sales, but companies are increasingly giving more importance to the retention and loyalty of existing companies (you may be familiar with the concepts of cross-selling, up-selling, etc.). The problem is that companies are "rushing" to renew their loyalty programmes because they have not adapted as quickly to how user behaviour has changed, so it is essential to know what interests and concerns each user has in order to respond quickly to their needs.
• Privacy: An issue that we are increasingly concerned about and that many companies are not knowing how to resolve. The CDP allows us to have that user acceptance centralised.

What are the main characteristics that a CDP must have?

Data Collection. The CDP helps you to store all the information you need and of different types, acting as a large container of information from which to draw conclusions. It has to allow you to enter data from different sources in different formats, in different variety (structured, unstructured, online, offline, etc.) and at different frequencies, and it has to allow you to do it in a simpler way than doing it yourself through code, i.e. it has to be scalable.

Profile Management. Once we have all our customer data, it should allow us to work with that data and help us to unify all that information to generate our unified customer profiles (data models) and with them we can easily generate segments that help us to personalise our campaigns, ultimately resulting in an increase in conversion.

Activation. In line with what I have just mentioned, the CDP will allow us to implement marketing actions based on the information collected, the segmentation carried out and the insights extracted. In this way, it ceases to be a passive element and becomes an active one, which works entirely for the business.

In addition to these, which are the main characteristics, we should not forget what:

• The CDP must have the capacity to respond in real time to both data intake and activation.
• It must have the ability that these solutions give us to manage and govern data at the enterprise level.
• Many of today's leading CDPs have the ability to generate predictive models to help us determine which action is recommended (NBA).

What challenges do the CDP solve?

Although CDPs are primarily geared towards "solving" the problems of marketing and business teams, they also solve many of the "headaches" of technology teams, which require a major effort to respond to the needs of these teams in a timely and timely manner. The following graphic illustrates some examples of some of the challenges that CDPs solve for different teams in an organisation, many of which are common:

How should such an initiative be addressed?

With experience in this type of initiative, our recommendation is to follow the steps below (which will last longer or less in time depending on several factors we explain below):

• Initial discovery: Before going out to look for CDP as if we were shopping in the sales, our recommendation is to start by documenting the business requirements, what KPIs you expect with this project, analyse the current situation (AS-IS) of your data and your technological and marketing stack and plan what you want to do (TO-BE) over X years, that is, have more or less landed the use cases in time. This will help you look for the CDP solution that best fits your organisation, since thanks to that exercise you will have the ability to discern what you need and therefore what type of CDP suits you most.
• Platform selection: Based on your previously defined requirements, select the platform that best and most easily meets your needs and use cases. We must make sure that the platform fits technologically in the company's technology ecosystem. We recommend that you request a series of demos and PoCs from your trusted partners that are grounded in a real use case of yours (of course one of them is us).
• Perform the initial implementation of your "first" use cases and measure the results they give you, make adjustments, improvements, etc. until you achieve your goals.
• From there, it implements new use cases and performs the same measurement and evaluation process continuously. Initiatives of this kind "never stop", there is always room for improvement.

How can we help you from SEIDOR?

You've probably asked yourself some of these questions:

• How should I approach my marketing and business strategy when Third-Party Data disappears?
• How can I have a unified view of my customer if I have information hosted by several sources?
• How do I currently address the privacy control of my clients if I have information from several sources?
• What are the benefits of implementing a CDP and how do I know if I really need to implement a CDP platform?
• Is my organisation really prepared for such an initiative? What impact will it have?
• How should I approach such an initiative?
• How can I design the roadmap to effectively implement a CDP?
• How do I set up a Roadmap for my use cases?
• In which channels can I activate it in real time? 

If the answer to any of these questions is YES, sign up for our webinar "Harness the power of CDPs to personalise the customer experience" where we will answer these questions and many more.

At SEIDOR we have the capabilities to cover the end-to-end of this type of initiative and help our clients in any of the "steps" necessary for the correct implementation of this type of initiative, from the most "embryonic" parts of platform selection, as we have mentioned, through the definition of use cases, the development of ingestion processes, generation of predictive models, definition of segments, activation in the different channels (marketing automation tools, content personalisation tools, paid media, etc.), issues related to data governance and we can also help you with the generation of the creativities of marketing campaigns and the modelling and governance of this type of initiative, which tend to cross different entities within an organisation and that need an important management layer.