Customer Data Platforms offer marketers the promise of a unified customer view, but in the Wild West of Martech, no one is there to hold vendors accountable for their promises. This makes the process of finding a solution difficult and has led to the industry earning a somewhat muddy reputation.
CDPs aren’t the first technology to go through the hype cycle, and they won’t be the last. But the lack of definition and clarity in this space is making it difficult for marketers looking for a technology solution to solve their customer data difficulties.
Companies are making important strategic choices about their customer and prospect data right now, and if they want to exist in 5-10 years, they know it’s imperative that they become customer-centric. The overarching business goal of customer-centricity through personalization cascades down to middle management and their teams, who are then faced with one main challenge: they can’t unify and activate the customer data that promises to deliver the perfect customer experience.
This data challenge is the driver behind the current need for data management solutions, and thus the rapid growth of the CDP market. Businesses – and marketers in particular – are beginning not only to understand the massive potential hidden in their first-party data, but to accumulate enough of it across enough different channels to make unifying and activating it a worthwhile business endeavour.
This is precisely where marketers are getting stuck and start looking into solutions like Customer Data Platforms. Their customer data is spread out across all of the many touchpoints in the customer journey, and without a way to unify and organize it, they are unable to orchestrate the perfect experience.
“Right now, we see many businesses looking for a cross-channel marketing solution", says Anthony Botibol, CMO at Relay42. But that isn’t the whole picture, either. “Cross-channel marketing automation is highly focussed on known customers and prospects, while the 98% of your anonymous website visitors also demand a great CX! You therefore need a platform that allows you to unify and activate ALL your data.”
With our extensive background in the DMP (data management platform) and TMS (tag management system) space, Relay42 has many years of experience helping businesses manage all their data more effectively. We have continued to ensure that our technology evolves with the needs of our market, and that’s why today we offer a platform for Intelligent Journey Orchestration. It still provides all of the data unification and activation fundamentals that you require in a DMP (and now a CDP), but it takes it a step further to answer to what we believe to be the biggest gap in the market today: automation of anonymous prospects.
“Businesses have unified their known data, but they struggle to also unify and activate anonymous profiles,” says Anthony. “The ability to recognise these visitors as new or returning, and use their behaviours and preferences to personalize a website or paid media experience is where marketers can start to get ahead of their revenue KPIs.”
According to Anthony, businesses have two main challenges that are driving them to look at real-time CDPs in combination with their cross-channel marketing automation tools:
Do CDPs effectively answer the need for both automation to known customers AND personalized cross-channel messaging to anonymous prospects? CDPs were created to bring first-party data and identifiers together and offer the insights marketers need to come up with data-driven campaigns. But is that enough?
“It’s a partial solution,” says Anthony. “Marketers are starting to realise that their existing tools depend on an email address, phone number or other explicit channel-focussed identifier and without these they are unable to activate anonymous experiences. Instead, these tools provide functionality to only activate experiences for the 2% of known website visitors."
Of course, you can’t expect one platform to do everything. In fact, we would advise against that mindset. We believe wholeheartedly in investing in the right tools for the job! So while cross-channel marketing tools are great for providing great experiences for known customers, CDPs like Relay42 can help bridge the gap towards activating experiences for anonymous prospects, and doing more with paid media and paid social channels.
If you’re trying to answer the question of whether or not CDPs are the answer to your anonymous data problems, the unfortunate answer is maybe.
Our advice is to let go of the acronyms and look at the functionality a platform offers. Take a use-case-first approach. You can’t find the solution until you understand the problem, and putting use cases together will help you pinpoint the specific challenges you’re trying to solve.
Take your uses cases to different vendors and ask them what their technology can do to help you with your current data struggles. Then ask how they will be able to help you scale that solution in 1, 5, and 10 years’ time. You might end up with a CDP. You might end up with something else. The most important thing is that you end up with the right technologies to help you transform ALL your customer data into fantastic customer experiences whether they're known customers or anonymous prospects!