CDP Assessment: 3 Proven Strategies to Evaluate a CDP
As the need to drive enhanced customer experiences accelerates, it becomes imperative for marketers to utilize data points across the customer’s journey. This includes online behaviors, purchases, profile information, offline interactions, and a slew of customized data that varies among brands. Think loyalty points, membership information, social proliferation, warranties, app usage, and more. While the need to capture and utilize this information expands, so do the challenges that come with managing an exponentially growing volume of data. In most organizations, data lives in multiple places, including data lakes, homegrown systems, ERPs, CRMs, ecommerce tools, marketing technologies, and more. In some cases, data is somewhat organized within a data warehouse, but the ability to utilize it becomes difficult without access to advanced IT resources. Marketers can often feel overwhelmed and frustrated. Even if the data is available, it’s not accessible.
That’s where a Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes into play. If you are interested in learning how to properly choose a CDP, you’ve likely already determined that you need one to manage your data and orchestrate customer profiles. It’s also highly likely that you’ve gone through a rigorous process of identifying how a CDP can benefit you, your revenue ops team, and your organization. You may even have a handful of CDPs that you’re investigating. It can be a daunting project to review all of your options, narrow down your choices, and eventually, pick the tool that’s right for you. The ultimate choice will depend on a number of factors that only you and your business can determine. That said, there are key capabilities that you’ll want to investigate as you travel this path.
Three Critical Considerations when Evaluating a CDP
Data Management
Data management is at the heart of every CDP. Each tool will have its own way of ingesting, storing, manipulating, and unifying data. Each one of these areas should be explored in-depth to ensure they meet your requirements. For example, data ingestion can happen in several ways, including through pre-built direct integrations or applications, data transfers, and API connections. It’s important to know the specifics of each method, especially in relation to the platforms housing your data. Ask questions related to ease of ingestion, limitations, time constraints, processing, and data requirements. Understanding the knowledge and skills required to create, update, and manage these data transfers is also critical to know.
Similarly, it’s important to understand a CDP’s ability to cleanse and standardize data from various sources. Data hygiene is important when it comes to utilizing information for marketing orchestration and segmentation. Ask detailed questions on a CDP’s ability to transform and unify data as it’s ingested, along with its ability to create unified customer profiles. Be sure to fully review these profiles, how they are created, and how they can be utilized for downstream action. Understand your options for deduplication, promotion, and identity-stitching. You may also need to analyze how that cleansed information is exported back to your other technologies if that’s required for your business.
Data compliance and privacy is another area that you need to explore. Ensure the CDP you choose can support your organization’s privacy and compliance policies. From a marketing standpoint, it’s always imperative to understand how communication compliance can be managed. This includes cross-channel subscription management spanning email, SMS, in-app messaging, etc. Review how these tools assist with compliance regulations across the globe, including CASL, GDPR, and CCPA to name a few. Consent management is a key factor when building full-scale orchestrations across devices and platforms.
Segmentation and Orchestration
Once you’re ensured that the CDPs evaluated meet all of your data requirements, you’ll want to dive into segmentation and orchestration capabilities. Not every CDP is built the same when it comes to its ability to build audiences or create cross-channel campaigns and messaging workflows. Make sure to fully understand the audience and segment creation process for targeting directly within the CDP. Again, it’s important to know the skills required to query multiple sets of data or a unified profile. Some CDPs will be more marketer-friendly than others and, in some cases, could bypass the need for iT resources. Suppose your team is not skilled in SQL or other query languages. In that case, you’ll need to lean toward an interface that provides visual builders, natural language processing abilities, or an audience-building wizard.
With orchestration, it’s important to understand where and how these workflows are built within the tool, and how they collaborate with other technologies such as Email Sending Providers (ESPs) or Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs). Make sure to know which tools are natively integrated and which would require a more advanced API connection. In some cases, content can be managed in the CDP and in other cases, it needs to be managed in the sending tool. Depending on your requirements, you may need to lean in one direction over the other. Again, make sure you understand the skill sets required to make a “simple” workflow build happen. You want to make sure that the orchestration tool utilzed within the CDP can handle the logic, decisioning, and metrics required.
Trigger-based marketing is another area you need to explore. Understand how each CDP provides you the ability to send real-time, trigger-based communication to your audiences. This may be done through the CDP or through a connected ESP/MAP. As the importance of real-time communication grows, make sure you understand the timing around these communications, including any lags in processing or send time restrictions.
There may be additional areas you want to investigate for your campaigns and messaging, including personalization, offer codes, promotions, and the like. As with any messaging and orchestration platform, ask all of your questions regarding the who, what, and how. See it happen in real time. Go through a few real-life use cases, so you can see exactly how it will be done.
Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is everywhere, or at least it can feel that way. CDPs and data management tools are no different. As with any marketing technology you’re reviewing, it’s important to ask about current and planned AI capabilities. AI can impact and augment all kinds of CDP-related capabilities from data cleansing and security to audience segmentation and messaging. No two CDPs will function alike when it comes to these AI functions. From a sheer marketing orchestration perspective, you’ll want to know how/if each CDP has a recommendations engine and/or a way to utilize next best action messaging. Get a good understanding of how AI and analytics comes together to enhance messaging pathways and decisioning.
Weaving in analytics, you should probe on things like lifetime value predictions, revenue attribution modeling, cohort analysis, affinity audiences and more. Dive deep into the analytics provided by your CDP, and make sure you know how well the tool integrates with your current BI stack. Again, know the skills and resources required to access this data and make visualizations from it. AI is driving analytics to be more marketer-friendly, using natural language processing and written questions to generate reports and dashboards. Get to know the capabilities of the tools your investigating so you can see where you can enhance your reporting measures.
If you’re familiar with how AI can change your marketing efforts, you’ll know where to probe when you’re meeting with various CDP providers.
Choose the Best Option
When investigating any new technology, you need to go through your due diligence. Make sure to start with a deep review of your current marketing technology stack and where this CDP will fit. Document and audit all of your use cases, requirements, pain points, and ideal capabilities. Know the skill sets on your team and the resources at your disposal to implement, manage, and capitalize on your CDP investment. Prepare for not only your current state, but also your future state, choosing a CDP that can scale and grow with your business. If you’re considering a CDP, Relationship One is here to help.
