Customer Data Platforms (CDP)

Customer Data Platform (CDP) Overview

What are Customer Data Platforms?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a customer database from which complete, accurate customer profiles can be built. The profiles support segmentation and building targeted marketing campaigns. The CDP is primarily a data store and not a campaign execution tool. It contains technologies to collect data from customer touchpoints and share information gathered across marketing systems. This improves marketing interactions and customer relationships.

The defining characteristic of a CDP is that it gathers all available first-party customer data from CRMs, websites, email marketing, ads, and point of sale systems into a single place. Tag management systems are responsible for collecting some of this data, such as cookie and user behavior data. The resulting customer profiles can be enriched with additive data such as lifetime value to provide a unified view of all customers. Consolidated data can then be sent to marketing execution partners in real-time, via data connectors.

The CDP has some characteristics in common with Data Management Platforms (DMPs). DMPs are also marketing data stores but are narrower in focus. Though they sometimes handle first-party data (i.e. data a firm has collected about its own audience) DMPs are traditionally third-party data aggregators and consist of behavioral data purchased from publishers. They are concerned with high volume, top-of-the-funnel data. CDPs, on the other hand, are concerned with middle-of the funnel data and customer conversion.

Customer Data Platform Features & Capabilities

Customer data platforms provide the following feature sets:

Collect and reconcile data from a multitude of data sources
All customer touchpoints generate usable data
Cross-device, cross-platform customer journey tracking
Purchase history, browsing, shopping cart, and other data included
Create a centralized 360 view of customer profiles
Accessibility of customer data to marketing systems
Marketing-defined business rules
Profile enrichment with product data matching
Person identifier to unify data across-platforms
Audience segments, profiling for marketing campaigns
Marketing technology integrations (e.g. MAP, RTIM, email marketing, etc)
Predictive customer analytics for real-time interaction management

Pricing Information

CDPs are generally available on a monthly or annual subscription. Pricing is tiered to the number of monthly tracked users (MTUs) or the number of identifiable profiles. Additionally, some CDP vendors bundle their CDP with other modules for advertising and retargeting, real-time interaction management, or other marketing activities.

76 Ratings

Arm Treasure Data manages customer data for global brands and Fortune 500 enterprises like Mattel, Subaru, Canon, LG and disruptive startups like Wish.com, Fivestars, and Zoom.

58 Ratings

Evergage’s cloud-based platform is designed to empower marketers to increase engagement conversions of website visitors and users through real-time personalization based on deep behavioral analytics...without the need for developers.

28 Ratings

Segment is an SF-based customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve significant time and cost savings on their data infrastructure. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams ...

12 Ratings

Listrak, headquartered in Pennsylvania, offers a customer data and marketing platform for retailers that features email marketing with social network engagement, abandoned cart rescue, and in-store data / information retrieval. Listrak is retail-specific and helps create an integrated and persona...

18 Ratings

The Tealium AudienceStream™ solution offers segmentation and data enrichment capabilities to help users drive real-time marketing actions using their existing tools. AudienceStream helps unify fragmented omnichannel and cross-device marketing data to allow marketers to better leverage their custo...

6 Ratings

ReachForce in Austin, Texas offers a suite of data quality products for cleaning and preparing marketing data obtained from lead forms or commonly used marketing platforms, with the goal of maximizing the reliability and sufficiency of aggregated lead data.

5 Ratings

The V12 Data Platform (formerly called the Launchpad Marketing Cloud) is comprised of a collection of online and offline marketing solutions that is designed to manage existing customer relationships and identify new prospective customers by granting users access to The V12 Group Data Cloud. It c...

5 Ratings

Blueshift Labs is a marketing automation software solution offered by Blueshift Labs. It tracks data for individuals, but does not have an attribution model.

4 Ratings

BlueConic is a customer data platform that is designed to harness the data required to power the recognition of an individual at each interaction, and then synchronizes their intent across the marketing ecosystem.

5 Ratings

Hull offers a customer data platform that promises to collect, transform, enrich, filter, search and segment customer data across various tools. It is a real-time rule and action engine that aims to provide SaaS and Ecommerce businesses with more control over their customer data. 1. CollectStore...

7 Ratings

FullContact provides APIs to support individuals, businesses, and developers in managing and enhancing their contact and customer data. The APIs can be used to provide social profiles in an app, improve contacts in address books, enrich CRM information, or create highly personalized marketing cam...

3 Ratings

Ensighten Pulse is a customer data platform from Ensighten offering multi-channel data collection and the ability to create robust, "360-degree view" customer profiles.

10 Ratings

Radius offers predictive sales analytics and lead scoring, as well as a customer data platform It helps businesses gather insights, create customer segments, and deploy campaigns.