What does the future hold for CDP technology?

Customer data is being generated faster than ever before, so it should come as no surprise to learn that 64% of marketers agree that data-driven marketing is crucial to business success in this hyper-competitive global economy. Enter the importance of customer data platforms, or CDP, for short.

Customer Data Platforms (CDP): A unified approach

Over the last two years, many businesses across the globe have hopped on to the CDP bandwagon in order to gain a better understanding of customer behaviour. This has helped combine anonymous digital data with the identity of an individual, creating one single customer profile.

By using a more comprehensive data-driven marketing strategy, marketers have not only been able to increase the level of personalisation experienced by the end customer but have also been able to collect this data in real-time.

Here are just some of the way’s businesses have been using CDPs:

• Clickstream analytics;
• Audience targeting;
• Real-time advertising and communications;
• Campaign and journey optimisation;
• Business intelligence;
• Data governance.

The CDP roadmap: Where is it heading?

It may seem that CDPs can do no wrong, but just like most software platforms it does come with limitations. CDPs only handle customer data for example, which means any other information that may affect your customers’ behaviour cannot be added into the record and will have to be accounted for separately. The good news is that CDP technology is evolving, and many limitations are likely to be addressed – and here’s three areas where we think it’s heading:

1. Building an omnichannel marketing hub

Omni-channel means that a customer can consume content seamlessly and instantaneously across all an organisation’s touchpoints – and we expect this to feature in CDPs in the future. This will evolve into a Master Data Management (MDM) system, CDPs will be hubs for all marketing data, distributing information in real-time at the point of need.

2. Master Data Management (MDM)

MDM provides governance around all data that enters an organisation’s eco-system. All data is pre-defined by a set of rules that ensures only quality and qualified data is being used throughout the business. It holds all a customer’s information and updates instantly if anything is changed. Though this does not come cheap, this is the direction that many CDP providers are heading towards.

3. Rise of the Robots: the AI revolution

Just like many technologies, AI will be increasingly central to CDPs allowing for customer needs to be identified sooner than existing models. It could be used to power personalisation journey techniques like Customer Activated Response Optimisation. Alternatively, you can deploy it within content strategies that use algorithms to connect pieces of information about an individual’s content journey.

As marketing continues to evolve it’s increasingly clear that it can’t be all things to all people. Adopting a CDP to govern data whilst ensuring the customer experience is personalised is the option. In short, it will keep your business competitive in an otherwise crowded market.