What is a good CDP? This is the question which is going on in your mind now and then. You are looking to know more about the CDP software and wanted to get that implemented in your company. And going through a lot of articles & videos, you might be tired of hearing again and again the two most used words in the entire world – “It depends”.
I know whenever you here those two words, it just pi*s*s you off. But getting a CDP on board, which suits your organization tech stack and having all the functionalities which you are looking for, is very critical for the growth of your organization. It’s going to be a long-term commitment, so having patience is adamant here. It’s going to be a daunting task, and frankly you can’t blame that, as most of the times, it really depends on a lot of factors. Like:
At what stage your business is in?
What features are you looking in the CDP Platform?
Problems you are looking to solve with CDP?
The cost of Customer Data Platform?
How to get the CDP Implemented in your organization?
Which CDP can get incorporated well within your company’s tech stack?
And many others like these, right!! Many of them you already figured out, many of them are still pending. After doing so much research, there is always one or the other thing which pops up from nowhere.
I have done research at my end and tested some CDPs as well. With my learnings, I will try to provide as much details as possible. Hopefully, you will get deeper understanding and help in choosing the right CDP for your business. Let’s start with the little basics here and then we can move forward for some detailed matters.
Page Contents
What is Customer Data Platform?
A CDP is an application which is used for creating a Single Unified view of any customer. CDP can identify and create a journey map of the customer/user based on all the touch points which he or she goes through either online or offline. CDP collects data from all the sources which is available such as CRM data, Website Behaviour, App Interaction, Events data, Customer Support details and many other parameters. Once that is done, it creates a unique customer profile and makes it available to various external platforms such as Marketing Automation Software, Email Management, Business Intelligence, Ad Platforms, Customer Service,etc.
Primary purpose of CDP is for effective, seamless and sequential personalized interaction flow, which can be done on all channels or mediums which user goes through. Based on customer behaviour, a customized and interactive interaction course can cater to the needs of the customer. This is certainly aids in increasing the customer engagement with your brand and thus increasing customer engagement and loyalty.
There are many other use cases of Customer Data Platform. You can go through this article to know more.
What does Customer Data Platform do?(Features, & Functions)
Data gathering & Integration: Data is accumulated from almost all available applications or data sources within the organization. This data is then processed and transformed into CDP and then mapped with the individual customer profiles. This helps in dealing with all data silos(data which is scattered across the organization with various departments, tools or applications) which can be used as a viable source of information for further development.
Identity Resolution & Unification: Data from all available sources is merged & linked with a customer’s profile to create a unified view of complete customer journey across all touch points. This data allows marketers to provide a consistent and personalized interaction across all channels and devices.
Advanced Reporting: For effective analysis and visualization of data, CDP provides robust and advanced reporting tools and customized dashboards. This reporting helps in identifying valuable insights about the customers and their journey. It also helps is understanding what is creating real value for the customer and organization and what is not working at all. Using these reporting, organizations can easily identify how effective is their marketing efforts, customer service, personalization, segmentation, etc.
Predictive Analytics: Predicting outcome & forecasting is very important for any organization to understand and keep track of their growth trajectory. Some CDPs which have capabilities of incorporating advanced technologies of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning can help in predicting many things, such as, churn rate of customers, Customer Lifetime Value(CLV), ROI at the customer level, creating an unique & personalized experience for each individual and presenting them with tailored messaging in real-time.
Privacy Compliance: CDPs store virtually all kinds of data, including the PII(Personal Identifiable Information) of the customers. It doesn’t mean it can use all these data for any type of requirement that suits the marketers needs. CDPs comply and adhere to many compliance policies. Compliance accountability is utmost important and its built-in governance tools help in processing customer data taking care of all Privacy Regulations, Whether it’s GDPR, CCPA or any other compliance policies.
Segmentation and Grouping: One of the major feature and function of CDP is to segment the users in various categories or groups based on certain actions, events, behaviour of the users. Segmentation can be rule-based as well, which marketers can create based on their hypothesis or any findings. This helps in identifying patterns in customer behaviour and uses that information for competitive advantage. It can export these segmented data to all marketing channels for tailored interactions with the users.
Best Customer Data Platforms – CDPs out there
- Tealium Audiencestream CDP:
From all the products which Tealium provides as Customer Data Hub as a Bundle, AudienceStream CDP is one of them.
It has a patented visitor stitching technology which builds an comprehensive and right customer profile.
AudienceStream is helpful in user segmentation, audience discovery, omnichannel orchestration and event tracking of the users which can be made available to marketers, all in real -time. It enables companies to generate rich customer insights that can be used across the entire tech stack leveraging integrated customer data infrastructure, and includes Predict ML, a paid feature enabling ML-powered customer insights.
Type of CDP: Analytics CDP
Key Features
- Get a full picture of your customer data across devices (web, mobile applications, IoT, servers, kiosks, and offline sources)
- Personalize every interaction by triggering actions based on real time customer data signals
- Create a single customer view by building comprehensive customer profiles with our patented visitor stitching technology
- Streamline and activate your data with over 1300 pre-built integrations
- Predictive Machine Learning.
- Customer Segmentation.
- Audience Discovery
Website: https://tealium.com/products/audiencestream/
Language Supported: German, English, French, Japanese
Pricing : Quotation Based
2. BloomReach(Exponea)
Exponea by BloomReach is a customer data and experience platform which helps in creating actionable customer intelligence using behavioral patterns of customers. There are many solutions provided by the platform such as marketing automation, product recommendations, email marketing, personalization, full channel automation, predictive intelligence, visitor profiling and life-cycle intelligence.
The platform has capabilities to create your own multi-step/fully automated campaigns with content editing feature to create relevant and personalized messaging for better engagement with customers. It also helps in doing AB tests across channels for website layouts and personalized content for one-to-one marketing.
Exponea Offers three tailored packages based on requirement :
- CDP: Which comes with CDP + AI powered.
- Campaigns: Which comes with CDP+AI+MA.
- CDXP: Which comes with CDP+AI+MA+CRO.
Type of CDP: Data CDP
Key Features
- Tracking of your customers’ behavior, be it online or through backend integrations and imports
- Advanced analytics and segmentations of the tracked data, boosted by AI-powered predictive capabilities
- Single customer view allowing your analyses to dig deep on a customer level
- Omni-channel orchestration that allows you to automatize communication with your customers through email, SMS, -web layers or notifications
- Personalization of your communication based on advanced custom conditions
- Product recommendations engines
- Comprehensive email management to design, send, evaluate and optimize your email campaigns
- AB testing capabilities enhanced by AI
- Easy integrations and APIs to link your favorite tools
Website: https://exponea.com/
Language Supported: German, English, Dutch
Pricing: Quotation Based, Based on the Package which you select.
3. Twilio Segment
Segment is a CDP which helps in simplifying data collection, transformation, sending and archiving of your first party data. They collect all user events data from various digital properties or user touch-points and make it available for your entire organization, providing valuable insights for better decision making and drive growth. They help organization to become analytics experts. Data which is captured in Segment is transformed and made available to all external tools such as Marketing, Analytics, Ad Platforms and data warehouses for targeting customers with personalized and engaging interactions as well as analysing data.
Segment also offers three main solutions to cater your needs:
- Connections: Collecting data from majorly all platforms which your organization uses – CRM, Websites, Apps, Ad Platforms, Analytics etc. integrates and unifies that data to build a single unified view of customers.
- Personas: It’s a Personalization platform that helps in creating unified customer profiles and that profiles are made available to marketing tools for targeting.
- Protocols: This solution helps in collecting user data and integrating it across various tools and destinations. It focuses on improving the data quality available at the organization with clean and consistent data which can be validated.
Type of CDP: Data CDP
Key Features
- Journeys: Design cross-channel engagement
- Functions: Customize your customer data pipeline
- Warehouses: Easily transform & load customer data
- Privacy: Protect users’ privacy
- GDPR: Accelerate compliance with GDPR & CCPA
- Catalog: Explore our 300+ integrations
- Twilio + Segment: Create intelligent, unified customer engagement
Website: https://segment.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Three Plans which scales with your growth.
- Free
- Team: $120.0/Month
- Business: Quotation Based
4. Optimove
Optimove CDP is a Science-First Relationship Marketing Hub which helps you drive measurable growth through smarter orchestration, measurement and optimization of campaigns, at scale. Beyond providing a Single Customer View and in-depth analytical reports, Optimove leverages AI to foster emotionally intelligent relationships that maximize the value of every customer via true 1:1 personalized multi-channel customer communications.
The software is based on a combination of technologies, including predictive customer modelling, customer micro-segmentation, multi-channel campaign automation, real-time campaign triggers, and systematic campaign optimization using scientific control methodologies. A science-first approach means bringing together all customer data into a single customer view that enables you to fully understand your customers, while allowing Optimove to autonomously surface valuable insights and optimize campaign effectiveness.
Type of CDP: Campaign CDP
Key Features
- Dynamically segment customers into micro-segments.
- Predictive Analytics
- Calculate Customer Lifetime Value(CLV)
- Predictive behavior modeling
- Realtime Customer-Messaging
- Multichannel Campaign management.
Website: https://www.optimove.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Monthly Subscription Model. Quotation Based
5. TreasureData
Treasuredata is an enterprise Customer data platform which is helping brands to push their customer experience boundaries. The CDP allows you to pull first part data from your data sources and also you can ingest 2nd and 3rd party data which can be helpful in data enrichment.
The data can be collected from numerous sources such as PII(Personal Identifiable Information) data which is available within the organization, Website Events, App Events, Ad Platforms data, and any other data sources and made available for external tools.
The platform helps marketers to understand their customer behaviour across any devices, locations and time. Ready-to-use connectors make it straightforward to collect and ingest data from any available sources.
Using Enterprise CDP, marketers can get a 360 view of customer interactions across all touch points, and this can be really helpful in acquiring valuable insights for effective decision making.
Type of CDP: Data CDP
Key Features
- Customer Profile Unification.
- Segmentation
- Audience Building
- Predictive Scoring
- Multi-touch Attribution/Customer Journeys.
- Recommendation Engines
- Predictive Modelling/Analytics.
- Persistent Identity Unification(Online + Offline)
Website: https://www.treasuredata.com/
Language Supported: English, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Spanish
Pricing: Quotation Based
6. mParticle
mParticle is the customer data platform which provides seamless and secured data integration and management solutions for multi-channel brands. They encourage creating a comprehensive and strong customer data infrastructure within the organization, which will not only help marketers for their marketing efforts but also help other departments in the organization for ensuring data quality, governance and drive better customer interactions.
Founded in 2013, mParticle is headquartered in New York City with offices in Delray Beach, London, San Francisco and Seattle. Sophisticated marketers at companies like Walmart, Starwood,NBC Universal, Spotify, and Airbnb use mParticle to integrate and orchestrate their entire growth stack, allowing them to win in key moments of the customers’ journey.
Type of CDP: Campaign CDP
Key Features
- Customer Segmentation
- Customer Data Management
- Mobile Data Management
- Multiscreen Identity Resolution
- Third-Party Data Enrichment
- Real-Time Data Streaming
Website: https://www.mparticle.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Quotation Based on Monthly Tracked Users(MTU), data storage and features selected.
7. Blueconic
The company was launched in 2010 and is based in Boston with branches in Europe. Blueconic is a pure-play customer data platform which helps companies to aggregate and ingest their first-party data from different data sources and activate it on any external tools required. It helps in creating a complete marketing ecosystem where data is synchronized, and made accessible to marketers for better customer engagement, deriving actionable insights and improvise personalization across channels.
Type of CDP: Campaign CDP
Key Features
- One Profile, One View
- Real-Time Segmentation
- Commerce Data Driven Marketing
- Sophisticated modeling & analytics.
- Powerful lifecycle orchestration & personalization
- Modelling & Analytics
Website: https://www.blueconic.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Quotation Based, Free Version is also available called Pyxis.
8. Blueshift
Blueshift SmartHub CDP is a platform created for marketers to have a 360 degree single view of the users. The platform provides a seamless one-to-one experience in real-time across all channels. It’s flexible and scalable architecture provides easy-to-use connectors for data integration and activation.
Blueshift’s solution enables marketers to engage with a segment-of-one at scale, on multiple channels including email, websites and mobile apps. Blueshift also provides near-real-time reports on end-to-end campaign performance and supports attribution and custom goals that marketers can customize.
Type of CDP: Campaign CDP
Key Features:
- Cross-Channel Marketing Automation
- AI-Powered Predictions & Decisioning.
- Recommendations
- Orchestrate connected omnichannel customer experiences
- Real-time segmentation
- Trigger-based automation.
- Visual Journey builder for multi-channel journey flows.
- Auto-Responders.
- 1:1 Personalization.
- CAN SPAM Compliance.
- Channel Attribution.
Website: https://blueshift.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Custom Pricing based on tailored package.
9. Zaius, by Optimizely
Create highly tailored, relevant and memorable personalized experiences for your customers with Zaius Activated CDP. The platform can ingest any type of customer data whether it’s online or offline, integrate that data with customer profiles and activate it across channels. It can provide omnichannel and personalized interactions on all touchpoints, whether it’s on website, in email, push notification, SMS, etc.
Get complete customer lifecycle view, dynamic segmentation, derive powerful insights and deliver hyper-personalized interactions to your customers for enhanced engagement and customer loyalty. The platform is best suitable for ecommerce and retails brands which are looking to increase their average order value, reduced churn rate, cross-selling and upselling, as well as increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Type of CDP: Delivery CDP
Key Features:
- Unified Customer Profile.
- Segementation
- Analytics & Predictive Recommendations.
- Customer Lifecycle
- Personalization & Relevance
- Data Activations & Automations
- Connecting In-Store & Online
Website: https://www.zaius.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Quotation Based.
10. ActionIQ
ActionIQ’s robust Customer Data Platform provides activation of customer data across channels with agility. It’s highly scalable platform integrates with your existing IT and business systems to remove fragmented customer data and siloed systems, while increasing security and governance.
Some customers of ActionIQ include top brands such as, the New York times, Verizon wireless and HBC. They built the ActionIQ CDP for scalable digital transformation and deliver premium customer experiences that unify data and empower marketers with real-time actionable insights.
ActionIQ has three product offerings for customer-centric solutions.
Customer 360–Unify your data and build a single comprehensive view of all your customers
Customer Intelligence–Explore your data and gain new insights from a single source of customer intelligence truth
Customer Experiences–Orchestrate authentic customer journeys and real-time experiences across all your channels
Type of CDP: Campaign CDP
Key Features:
- Cross-channel campaign management and measurement
- Audience Builder: Flexible Audience Creation.
- Data Orchestration
- Multi-step Marketing
- Customer 360 – 360-degree Customer view
- Data Agility & Governance
- Comprehensive testing and measurement
- Actionable intelligence
Website: https://www.actioniq.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Custom Quote Based.
11. Calibermind
Calibermind’s Customer Data Platform is built for B2B marketers from medium to large enterprises who are looking to effectively manage their customer data and organize their marketing stack for better communication with the customers and augment their experiences. They provide marketing analytics solutions which can flawlessly integrate with organizations tech stack such as CRM, Websites, App or any other systems.
Functionalities such as end-to-end journey builder, marketing attribution, profile matching and engagement scoring are major highlights of the platform. Garbage in Wisdom Out is what they aim for. They collect, deduplicate, transform, normalize and unify your data to provide the best solutions for driving business critical insights.
Type of CDP: Campaign CDP
Key Features
- Campaign Performance
- Multi-touch Attribution
- Account-Based Engagement
- Marketing ROI
- Automation – Automate Alerts, Segments & Reports.
- Predictive Modelling.
- GDPR Compliance.
- Trend/Problem Indicators.
- Visual Analytics
Website: https://www.calibermind.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Starts with $20,000 per year per user.
12. Leadspace
Leadspace CDP provides a single source of truth for your marketing and sales data to create excellent go to market strategies, actionable insights and effective personalized communication with your customers. Their flexible and scalable system can unify not just first-party but third-party data which can provide you detailed information about your user behavior. It can then export those actionable segmented user data for multi-channel targeting in all marketing platforms, for personalized messaging, which leads to effective customer engagement.
Combination of 1st Party and 3rd Party data, along with applying AI-driven Predictive + Persona Modelling, makes sure that you get top-notch, qualitative actionable intelligence to act on and provides clear communication to your ideal customers. Increase efficiency of your sales and marketing efforts with real-time enrichment of your customer data.
Type of CDP: Analytics CDP
Key Features
- Data Management.
- AI Powered Unified Profiles:
- Predictive Scoring,
- LookAlike Discovery,
- Semantic Profiling
- Personalization.
- Data Agnostic Ingestion.
- Engagement Tracking.
- Customer Segmentation.
- Cross Channel Orchestration.
Website: https://www.leadspace.com/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Starts with $25,000 per year.
13. SAP Emarsys
Emarsys CDP provides an unmatched customer-centric and outcome driven approach to their customers, to speed up their business outcomes. Their advanced system can provide seamless data collection, augmentation, personalized interactions, omnichannel orchestration, email marketing automation, actionable AI and fully integrated customer engagement platform(CEP).
They have a very strong customer base of over 1500 companies around the world. Their industry-specific approach towards solving customer problems and detailed analysis driven actionable measures helps customers with attaining ROI rapidly. Their system has capabilities to provide true one-to-one omnichannel personalized experience to customers. The platform is best suited for domains such as Hospitality, Travel, Ecommerce and Retail.
Type of CDP: Delivery CDP
Key Features:
- Customer Engagement Platform.
- Industry-Specific Solutions.
- Personalization.
- Marketer-Friendly AI.
- Omnichannel Automation.
- Analytics
Website: https://emarsys.com/
Language Supported: German, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese (Simplified)
Pricing: Quotation Based
14. Salesforce Interaction Studio (Evergage)
One of the suite from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Interaction Studio formerly Evergage is an one-to-one personalization and marketing analytics platform. They provide an easy-to-use, fully integrated solution for marketers, so that they don’t have to be too much dependent on the IT department for data and can do all kinds of analysis and activation of data from their end itself. They provide solutions to their customers using which they can delight their customer, increase customer engagement and foster long-term valuable relationships with them.
Combination of advance artificial intelligence with behavioral analytics applies to customer data to make it insightful and enriched. Customer data is then segmented and exported to marketing channel to deliver efficacious personalized interactions across channels. What makes the platform unique is providing precise behavioral tracking and targeted testing capabilities.
Type of CDP: Campaign CDP
Key Features:
- Unified profiles for all customers/visitors/users
- Behavioral Tracking
- 1-to-1 cross-channel personalization
- True real-time segmentation and experience delivery
- Recommendation
- Deep behavioral data & advanced analytics
- Targeted A/B/n testing
Website: https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/customer-interaction/
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Quotation Based.
15. Oracle Unity CDP
Unity CDP is becoming one of the strongest contenders in the CDP Market. It’s one of the product available in the Oracle CX Marketing suite. Unity CDP is the enterprise customer data platform which provides a single view of the customer in real-time. It merges data-driven intelligence with AI and Machine learning to dispense scalable and seamless integration of customer data to deliver highly personalized and captivating interaction to the users.
The platform is suitable for both B2B and B2C type of customers. Omnichannel orchestration is made available across channels and data integration which can be done with online, offline or any third-party sources, and can smoothly be done with Oracle and Non-Oracle platforms. You can create customer-centric campaigns leveraging over 50 pre-built, intelligent attributes, such as customer lifetime value, days since last email open, days since last purchase, and more.
Type of CDP: Delivery CDP
Key Features:
- Unified Profiles.
- Enrichment
- Smart Segmentation
- Customer Analytics
- Personalized Experiences.
Website: Unity | Customer Data Platform (CDP) | Oracle India
Language Supported: English
Pricing: Quotation based
How to Choose best Customer Data Platform?
Choosing the right CDP is vital at the very start itself. There are many reasons for doing the same, such as –
- Security & Accountability: CDPs will have all the vital information and data about your organization and your customers as well. You would want a CDP which is secured and privacy compliant.
- Scalability: CDP should be scalable and flexible enough, so that it can customize its features as per requirement at any point in time.
- Features: CDP should have all the features which you looking to solve your current problems with it.
- Agility & Compatibility: CDP should be compatible with your current tech stack of your organization. It should be agile enough to adapt to any recent developments and changing technology. Even if it’s not for some applications, there should be connectors available to smooth integration.
- Usability: It should be able to increase the overall efficiency of your organization, ease of implementation and usage should be there.
- Activation: Activation of data on any external platforms to market or any other activity can be done with no hassle.
- Customer Service: It’s a must, to have a CDP which has incredible support at their end. If not 24×7 but working days support should be available. At the initial stage of implementation and usage, you might have a lot of queries and challenges. There should be a consistent support from the CDP vendor to help you float smoothly.
- Documentation and Training: You cannot ignore this that having a proper documentation can be of tremendous value. Proper documentation will not just help you with getting your queries answered but can help your team to go through the step-by-step process of implementation. Same way training also is adamant in the start for proper understanding of functioning of the platform.
- Pricing & Budget: CDPs come with different pricing structure and can be little expensive, if you are having limited marketing budget at your end. Any typical CDP can come with a cost in between $5,000 per year to $250,000. It all depends on what functionalities you are looking for and the CDP vendor brand value.
Evaluation steps for onboarding any Customer Data Platform
Defining your goals and requirement gathering: First and foremost thing is to be precise from your end about the things which you want to accomplish with the help of Customer Data Platform. Assemble everything which you need and want CDP to provide. Then you can divide those requirements into two groups – must-have and good-to-have. It’s important to do this because CDPs can provide many features at their end, at you can get jumbled in them. Having a goal will assist in clearly choosing the platform which suits your needs.
Jot down all your use cases: Once you clarify with your goals and requirements in mind, now it’s time to list down all the use cases which a CDP can assist you with. This will help in identifying what a CDP can or cannot do. There are different types of CDPs(Data CDPs, Analytics CDPs, Campaign CDPs and Delivery CDPs) and based on the use cases which a CDP can be used for, you can decide what type of CDP will be suitable for your organization.
Evaluate CDP Vendors against your use cases: Now, you have gained enough information about CDPs. It’s time to look out for various CDP vendors out there and shortlist vendors which seems good and can provide the solutions which you are trying to achieve. Select at least three to five vendors, so that you have adequate information about what each vendor can bring to the table.
Request demonstration for the platforms in your short lists: After selecting your contenders, now it’s time to contacting the representatives of those vendors and start discussion with them. Ask them about all the queries which you have at your end. Remember, it’s their job to sell their product and showcase the best side. Take the demos of all the shortlisted platforms and check which one suits best for your company. Check if they have free trials at their end or not. Also, check on the pricing structure, because based on the services which you are looking, pricing structure will vary.
Once you are through with all the steps, you can take an informed decision about choosing the right CDP vendor. You should have enough bandwidth at your end to take all these testing measures. Still, if you are not convinced with the evaluation, you can speak with consultants or an CDP experts to help you evaluate and choose the right CDP.
Conclusion
Having a CDP in your Martech arsenal can substantially increase the growth of your organization.
It’s a great tool which you can use the increase the performance for your marketing efforts, as well as enhancing the customer experience to a great extent.
The CDP vendors on which we have thrown the light in this article are among the best. Whether you belong to B2B company or B2C Company, CDP can help in creating marketing strategy which can have a win-win impact for both your organization and your customers. What type of CDP is going to work for you depends on the use cases which you are going to solve for your company and thorough understanding of platform working.
CDP market is evolving, and new capabilities are incorporated to the platform frequently. Your CDP should grow with your organization. Remember, just by implementing CDP will not solve all your problems and increase your ROI magically. Combining People + Process + Technology going to make your organization more data-driven and customer-centric.