Customer Data Platform (CDP): Step-by-Step Guide

Customer Data Platform is the latest marketing technology revolutionizing how businesses manage and use customer data. It is becoming increasingly popular in the marketing industry, with 86% of marketers reporting that they are either increasing or maintaining their use. 

Customer Data Platform allows businesses to centralize and manage customer data from various sources, creating a single customer view and enabling more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.

In this Complete Guide to Customer Data Platforms, we’ll walk you through the Salesforce CDP‘s features and discover how they can help your business better understand and engage with your customers.

A Customer Data Platform is a powerful marketing tool that allows businesses to centralize and manage customer data from various sources to create a comprehensive view of their customers. This can include data from website interactions, email marketing, social media, and CRM systems. 

By combining this data into a single centralized database, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and their behavior, which can be used to inform marketing strategies and improve customer experiences.

A Customer Data Platform collects, unifies, and activates customer data from various sources to deliver personalized experiences. The CDP’s primary tasks include:

1. Data collection

Salesforce CDP helps businesses collect and manage customer data from various sources. This data can include information about customer interactions, purchases, and behaviors. The Customer Data Platform gathers this data from various sources, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, service software, marketing clouds, and e-commerce engines. Businesses use these tools and platforms to interact with and track their customers.

2. Data unification

A Customer Data Platform uses various techniques to reconcile identities based on what is known about the customer from different sources, such as their email and mobile numbers, anonymous cookies, and mobile device IDs.

The Salesforce CDP creates a single customer ID by aggregating data from these different sources and linking it to a unique identifier for each customer. 

3. Data Activation

Customer data Platform – Salesforce aggregates customer data from multiple sources and makes it available in real-time. This allows companies to use the data to deliver personalized experiences by connecting it to demand-side platforms, email-send engines, and content management systems. 

There are several ways in which a Customer Data Platform can be used by businesses to improve marketing and customer service efforts, including:

1. Personalisation

Customer data Platform – Salesforce can be used to deliver personalized experiences to customers by making a unified customer profile available to all addressable channels. For example, suppose a customer visits a company’s website and browses a particular product. 

In that case, the CDP can make this information available to the email-send engine, triggering a personalized email marketing campaign to the customer promoting that product. Customers who see content tailored to their interests are likely to engage with a brand, so personalisation can effectively improve the customer experience and drive business growth.

2. Suppression

Salesforce CDP can also be used to optimize a company’s marketing spending by suppressing consumers who have already made a purchase and redirecting those dollars toward new customers. 

By connecting marketing and purchase data, the CDP can help companies identify customers who have already made a purchase and prevent them from being targeted with other marketing campaigns. This can reduce marketing costs and improve the overall effectiveness of marketing efforts.

3. Insights

Customer data Platform – Salesforce can be used to provide insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can be used to inform marketing and customer service strategies. For example, by analyzing a customer’s marketing interactions, e-commerce data (such as purchase history), and website interaction data (such as products viewed multiple times), a CDP can provide a more complete and accurate view of the customer. 

Additionally, the Customer data Platform – Salesforce can provide insights into customer satisfaction and support needs, which can be used to improve the customer service experience. By making this information available to customer service reps, a company can improve the effectiveness of its customer service efforts and increase sales.

In conclusion, a Customer Data Platform is a powerful tool that can help businesses to deliver personalized experiences to their customers and improve marketing and customer service efforts. By aggregating customer data from multiple sources and making it available in real-time, a CDP can provide a more complete and accurate view of customer behavior and preferences, which can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns and personalized recommendations.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of the benefits of a CDP and want to work with an expert in this field, we encourage you to contact Manras. We have a team of skilled professionals who can help you to implement a Salesforce CDP and use it to drive business growth and improve the customer experience. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to use a CDP to boost your business – contact Manras today!