Most successful marketing campaigns, user experiences, or product launches require businesses to collect and use customer data. For example, Statista points out that 60% of marketers use customer data to help them in decision-making. This data allows marketers to correctly identify their target audience and provide personalized content experiences while making adjustments as necessary.

Given the importance of data to marketers today, it is clear that accessing and leveraging multiple data sources throughout an organization is vital to the success of a product or campaign. A key piece of technology that helps teams do just that, is the customer data platform (CDP).

Sitecore provides businesses with a host of products and features as part of its digital experience platform that helps to give an engaging end-to-end digital experience. Those products include a robust CDP. This article will explain what a customer data platform is and how it works, as well as how Sitecore CDP helps organizations get more from their data.

What is Sitecore CDP?

Customer data platform (CDP) is a tool that unifies data from multiple sources, including marketing and customer touchpoints, to create a single centralized view of the customer. That data can then be used to provide both a holistic view of an individual and segment audience members into different personas.  Doing so enables marketers and CX teams to personalize campaigns and experiences.

CDPs allow marketers and CX specialists to track customer behavior over time and integrate with other tools within the tech stack so that accurate and real-time data can be used to continually improve the customer’s experience.

With a customer data platform at their disposal, marketers are able to:

• Remove data silos: Connecting fragmented customer data sources from multiple locations.

• Personalize experiences: Leveraging historical, behavioral, and transactional data to deliver relevant experiences.

• Protect data: Complying with data regulations by transmitting data in a secure fashion.

• Increase efficiency: Focusing on specific customer profiles to avoid broad marketing efforts.

• Generate revenue: Improving speed to market and lowering customer acquisition costs by making critical data sources more accessible.

Key Features of a CDP

There are certain capabilities that a CDP must be able to satisfy. These characteristics include:

User-Friendly Interface

A CDP should have a user-friendly interface that allows customer experience experts, and marketers to operate and manage their day-to-day tasks without relying on IT support.

Data Collection

Data collection is the primary capability of a CDP as it must collect first-party data from various sources and provide a view of it in a consolidated format. This includes data from consumer transactions, social media, and other sources.

Profile Unification

A CDP should be able to consolidate customer data so that it can be matched to individual persons, even after it is aggregated from multiple touch points. 

Segmentation

A CDP’s users must be able to create customer segments using a CDP. This means subsets of users with similar characteristics or attributes can be segmented to personalize their experiences and filter audiences based on specific criteria or actions.

Decision Making

The value of a CDP can be found in its ability to improve decision-making. By using predictive analytics and ruling, a CDP should be able to provide its users with the knowledge of what content to send customers, what the customer is interested in, and the best time within their journey to contact them.

Activation

A CDP should support a business’s various teams in their campaigns, and application design by leveraging data found from segmentation and using it to trigger campaigns (via email, social media, and other channels), or unique user experiences.

Together these capabilities produce a 360-degree view of the customer so that companies can leverage that data effectively in any of their customer interactions.

How Sitecore CDP Works

Sitecore CDP offers a smart hub that provides the characteristics necessary for an enterprise-ready customer data platform. It includes three components: data management, predictive analytics & experimentation, and orchestration.

Data Management

This component removes data silos and connects customer data from multiple sources.

Predictive Analytics and Experimentation

The next stage of the CDP process is where data is used in predicting, testing, and optimization of the customer journey.

Orchestration

The third step in the process is where messages are delivered to the right customers at the right time within their journey.

Sitecore CDP provides a holistic customer profile that can be used to consolidate data from multiple channels, driving revenue and retention. With real-time segmentation, data from live audiences can be leveraged to roll out various campaigns. Data silos are also removed as data gets pulled from various sources within the tech stack. Finally, customers can be targeted with precise data, and customer data is also kept private with top-level security.

Some of the core features of Sitecore CDP that make all of this a possibility include:

• Single Customer View: Create unified customer profiles with data from various sources.

• Real-Time Segmentation: Track not just customer behavior but also intent.

• Data Ingestion: Pull data from every source within the organization using APIs.

• Identify Resolution: Get a complete picture of your customer across all channels.

• Data Lake: Store large volumes of data and use it when ready.

• Batch Sync: Share data with other tools in your ecosystem. 

Get More from Your Data with Sitecore CDP

Sitecore CDP enables organizations to get more out of the data they already have at their disposal by making it easier for businesses to cohere data from different customer touchpoints. Still, like any Sitecore product, you can get more out of the platform when you have a knowledgeable partner at your disposal.

Content Bloom provides that knowledge as a global Sitecore partner. Any innovative brand can receive a host of benefits from Sitecore’s extensive list of products, particularly Sitecore CDP. With Sitecore CDP, brands can unlock new personalization capabilities as they continue to optimize the customer journey by injecting real-time data and insights.

Want to get in touch with us to talk about a CDP implementation?  Do you have a lot of customer data that is underutilized?  We’d love to partner with you to take it to the next level. Get in touch.