With a lot of marketing and customer satisfaction endeavors being made in the direction of improving the customer experience, technology has come to be of utmost aid. The data gathering innovations have led to a lot of revelations in the recent past. The availability of a huge amount of data has also led to remarkable improvements for the organizations optimizing it and has become an indicator of differentiation in the industry.  

According to a recent Customer Data Platform Institute report, more than 27 vendors now offer CDP solutions with capabilities ranging from basic to advanced. 

However, data acquiring is not a concern anymore. Its accessibility to the team and how it can be actioned is what determines its optimization. Let’s find out how Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can be put to use in the coming future?

Decoding Customer Data Platforms

A single database that is customized for complete and accurate storage is called a Customer Data Platform. In order to improve marketing interactions, organizations gather first-party customer data from sources like websites, CRMs, advertisements, into a single place. The sole purpose of a CDP is to enhance customer relationships and provide for the selective data when need be. 

This consolidated data enriches the customer profiles and helps in serving them better given the marketing personnel utilize it in an efficient manner. 

What distinguishes CDPs from Data Management Platforms (DMPs) is that they accumulate customer-specific and middle-of-the-funnel data while the latter focuses on high volume and top-of-the-funnel data.

Customer data platforms provide features like:

• Collect data from multiple sources
• Make the data accessible to the marketing systems 
• Acquire history, browsing, shopping cart, and other data information
• Audience segments, profiling for marketing campaigns
• Allows real-time interaction management with predictive customer analytics
• A centralized customer profile view for ease of management 

Visibly, the new vendors entering the industry made the most share in the growth. Also, the new funding for existing vendors dropped sharply compared with earlier periods, suggesting that most have already raised adequate funds for their immediate needs.

How can Specialized CDPs help?

The total CDP revenue will reach $1 billion by 2019. 

These figures are an indicator that organizations across domains have started realizing the magnitude of CDPs and are prioritizing the digital transformation that leads to personalized customer engagement. Initiatives like big data, analytics, and other strategies are extracting the foundational capabilities of CDP. To remain competitive and float above the market, organizations have to indulge in CDPs that assist them to broaden their market coverage along with provisioning to all sizes. 

We can further move in the direction of specialized CDPs with specific industries in the next phase of CDPs. 

The results-driven content push concentrates on giving insights that are effective for a particular category and the customers also get a real-world solution at the same time. 

Specialized CDPs are also helpful in giving behavioral data and creating content that a specific category of customers can feed on. As you learn more about your audience, you gain confidence in your content that can be offered and what can lead them to subscribe to your gated content.   

Organizations that run on the subscription model can use the more informed, calculated and analyzed decisions with the help of CDPs. 

Cloud is another spectrum of this technology where huge volumes of data can be stored. The CDP can be integrated with the cloud to build segmented campaigns for marketing systems.   

Adopting the cloud for enhancing the CDPs emerges as the one-stop solution to stronger customer data and better marketing in the future.

Doing Business with CDPs in future

Designed to handle the scale and security that the businesses seek, CDPs hold a promise of better tomorrow. With the improving data and its capabilities, customer engagement will surely witness a rise to compete with the cut-throat global market. The ambitious challenges of the economy also demand a calculated and prompt response from the industry. 

With these assumptions in view, here are a few future business expectations with CDPs:

• To bring utmost customer loyalty on the table
• To foster rich vendor partnerships across domains 
• To cater to better opportunities for the market

The CDP may also help marketers get closer to achieving a 360-degree view of their customers, as cited by 54% of marketing executives in the Forbes Insights survey.

Global Customer Data Platform Market is expected to reach USD 3.3 Billion by 2023, at a CAGR of over 30% during 2019-2023.

From the current scenario and industry insights, activated customer experience is what looks like to be the spearheading in the future with CDPs. Digital marketing is a common use case for a well-structured data requirement where CDPs have delivered targetted benefits. However, other sectors are yet to realize their data dreams with CDPs. 

Additionally, CDPs will solve the vertical growth demands of sectors like banking and finance. 

Surpassing the barriers of infrastructure and scalability, organizations will get a chance to scale up their product reach with the well-versed market knowledge and dynamics. 

It’s almost time for CDPs to move beyond the e-commerce space and start picking newer industries to explore their capabilities. 

As a global phenomenon, the CDP market is expected to face an equal amount of challenges in terms of infrastructure and scalable solutions.  

Conclusion

In case you are in the outlining phase of accelerating your marketing limits or magnifying your customer experience, CDPs are your go-to. You should invest and indulge in the capabilities of CPDs and intensify your endeavors. 

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