Managing customer data is one of the biggest challenges we face in digital marketing. If this is also your case, a customer data platform may be the solution for you.

This new work improvement and optimization technology consist of a platform designed to solve the problems of integration, labelling and storage of customer data. In this way, we can have a unified view of all their interactions on the customer data platform and thus have more information to develop and execute our strategies. Do you want to know more? Keep reading!

What do we call "customer data"?
To define what a customer data platform (CDP) is, we have to start at the beginning: the “customer data". What exactly are they and why are they so important in digital marketing?

Today, companies have more data than ever before in history. We have transactional, demographic, and behavioural data. In addition, this data has different levels of personalization, from anonymous ad impressions to purchases of a specific customer, through the use of products and interactions with customer service.

All this data, taken as a whole, is what we call "customer data" or customer data. The problem is that this data is often siled for organizational or technical reasons, making it very difficult for companies to deliver consistent customer experiences across channels and devices.

What is a customer data platform?
Once we are clear about the data we handle, we can move on to the definition: according to the Customer Data Platform Institute, an easy to use customer data platform is a system controlled by the marketing team to create a unified and persistent database and to which other technologies can access.

That is, it is a system that labels and centralizes customer data from all channels and heterogeneous sources, unifies it in a repository and then enriches it with attributes to generate 360º audiences and profiles.

A defining characteristic of customer data platforms is the great diversity of data that can be stored and unified. Here are some common data sources:

• Transaction and Order Data – eCommerce, back office, and sales systems that generate data about purchases, order and renewal dates, customer and product value, abandoned carts, returns, etc. Without a doubt, this is very valuable information for marketing and sales initiatives.
• Behavioural data, web and mobile: products and categories visited by the user, clicks, information on interactions, number of pages visited and much more. This type of data is very important in discerning user behaviour and preferences, both current and anticipated.
• Profile data – Without customers, no business would exist. So, knowing who they are and what they want leads to more effective marketing. In this category, we can find contact data and data from forms, which can be enriched with psychographic information (lifestyle, context, preferences, personality).
• Product data – Although this is not strictly speaking customer data, it is highly necessary to have personalized and meaningful interactions with customers. Two basic examples are inventory levels and price.

7 key benefits of customer data platforms
1. They provide a unique view of the customer: Customer data platforms are specifically designed to collect data from a wide variety of sources, unify it into a complete view of the customer across devices and channels, and then make it available to other systems.

2. They allow companies to be more competitive: According to the recent Forbes "Insights/Treasure Data" study, the vast majority of marketing executives (93%) believe that using and analysing customer data for decision-making and campaign creation will give them a substantial change when facing disruptive and competitive challenges. Additionally, 53% believe that the transparency provided by the all-in-one marketing platform will enable their teams to react faster to changes in markets or customer preferences.

3. They are agile: A customer data platform is a tool for creating and connecting a flexible technology stack that adapts to ever-changing user behaviours and technology trends. By focusing on the foundation of the data, CDPs give businesses the tools they need to collect data from everywhere and use it anywhere to create better customer experiences.

4. They democratize the data: The benefits of customer data are not exclusive to the marketing team but extend to all departments of the company. Business intelligence and customer service, for example, depending on the availability of data to get ahead. The CDPs democratize access to all this data in the different departments and points of contact with the client.

5. They enrich relationships with partners and suppliers: The extended ecosystems of companies, including suppliers and partners, are among the first beneficiaries of the implementation of a customer data platform. According to the Forbes study cited above, the main benefit of CDPs is to offer more targeted and higher quality interactions with partners and suppliers.

6. They provide more effective marketing and customer experiences: Users today use more channels and devices than ever before, and they expect a unified customer experience across all of them. For example, they negatively value seeing an online advertisement for a product that they have already bought in a physical store. Thanks to the unified view of the customer provided by customer data platforms, the company has a complete view of customer behaviour that can be used to create a complete customer experience without blind spots. And in turn, improved customer experiences lead to increased loyalty.

7. They improve operational efficiency: In the past, integrating different point solutions and tools to view customer data used to be resource-intensive and difficult to maintain. Instead, CDPs centralize customer data with out-of-the-box integrations, saving tons of man-hours. Additionally, audiences and business rules can be centrally configured and applied consistently across different tools.