Customer data platforms are in the limelight right now for a good reason, and brands are not missing the opportunity to expand their business by taking all the advantage they can with the help of CDPs. To refresh your memory, let me briefly tell you about customer data platforms.
Customer data platforms are a tool for marketers that collect a particular user’s data from all touch-points, such as e-mail, social media, and others, to create a unified 360-degree view of the customer. That data can be used for multiple purposes. Still, at its core, marketers use it to build compelling campaigns, make improvements to existing products, and make better predictions for upcoming products. This means a customer data platform could mean a pivot point for how your business operates.
But knowing the customer data platform doesn’t mean your problem is solved because knowing which type of CDP is best suited for your brand is just as important, if not more. So, in this article, we will explore different options and the benefits of one or the other depending on your use case.
Different Types of CDPs
Categorizing each and every customer data platform isn’t an easy feat to achieve; in fact, it’s pretty much impossible to do so because of how they operate and their functionalities. So, we will focus on the four major types of CDP and try to understand how each works to get the gist of it.
Marketing Cloud CDP
Marketing cloud CDPs are the most recent customer data platforms. On top of that, well-established cloud providers are endorsing their own CDPs, which means you can choose from reputed brands.
Marketing cloud CDPs are the best bet for you if you are already using systems such as CRM and ESP and adding CDP would seem like a good choice. A marketing cloud CDP could be your best choice if your tech stack already contains tools from Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, or others.
Let us look at that reason.
Suppose your tech stack contains products from adobe experience cloud, which means you heavily rely on adobe’s products. Now the customer data platform from adobe will be the best choice for you because a lot of proprietary CDPs don’t usually play nice with other systems. If you’re using the whole package from the same company, the result is often better than expected. This same goes for other companies, such as Microsoft, Salesforce, or others. This points out the obvious: as long as these CDPs are within the corresponding system, they work wonderfully.
CDP Engines and Toolkits
Organizations can use tools to hyper-adjust their CDP to cater to their specific organizational needs that other pre-existing CDPs might not be capable of. Generally, in a typical scenario, companies do not need this tweaking for their needs. These engines are more oriented towards tech-heavy solutions that an IT team can use to build suited applications for the company on top of the existing CDP. If you are not a tech enthusiast, then this might be bad news for you because these solutions are not known for being very user-friendly. On top of that, they also carry a heftier price tag along with themselves. However, if you need custom-tailored CDPs that need to be highly specified for your specific tasks, then this can be worth your while.
Marketing Data-Integration CDPs
These types of CDPs thrive on data operations. This solution comes with powerful data manipulation and data governance capabilities which is enough to raise multiple ears. In addition, you will get all the functionality of this CDP without having to deal with the technical stuff, making this a user-friendly and a very compelling option. This means that your marketing and IT teams can access it without having to struggle while contemplating results.
It is best for activating and delivering segmented campaigns to several channels. However, it does lack the sweeping views of analytics which weakens your decision-making capabilities. Even though it has its ups and downs, the one thing most consistent with data-integration CDP is that it delivers on the core functions of the CDP-integrating first-party data to generate a single 360-degree view of the customer.
Smart Hubs
The smart hub CDP is perhaps the easiest to operate, customer data platform, which you can easily compare to a plug-and-play system. It has the capability to time and target responses based on the behaviour of the users and how they interact with the products. The smart hub triggers a reaction that caters to the user’s needs if they take any particular action. It offers advanced data processing and orchestration capabilities, which helps in decision-making from one centralized platform. They will enable marketing teams to respond to trigger-based events and deliver real-time personalized communication.
Conclusion
There are a lot of different options to choose from, and many of them seem like the right fit, but it is inevitable that if rushed into a decision without doing the proper research, it will only mean harm to the entire company. Teams should start by evaluating their needs and the most important feature they need to focus on. This can help trim the options to a minimum, making the entire decision process more manageable.
Then Why Axeno? Because, Here at Axeno, our goal is to provide professional services that we designed to facilitate the use of ever-evolving technology by enterprises and end users. We focus on improving user experiences and Digital Transformation services. Our services are designed to nurture your specific business needs and user requirements.