Whether your company sells diamond engagement rings or diamond dog collars, the customer experience probably does more to sell the product than the other product attributes combined (i.e., color, price, quality. etc.). Customer experience is everything. Maya Angelou said it best when she said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And that’s so true. But to create a memorable customer experience, you must start with a customer data platform (CDP).
Marketers face an onslaught of siloed customer data from across the web: social media, ad platforms, review sites, their customer relationship management (CRM) system, email, SMS, their eCommerce site and mobile apps. Without a centralized system, it’s almost impossible to get a clean, holistic view of your customer. Let’s face it, without a centralized system, you get duplicates and triplicates of your data with incorrect phone numbers and fake email addresses. (You know this – that’s why you’re reading about the best CDPs of 2024!)
CDPs address this pain point by aggregating, organizing, and activating customer data across all touchpoints in real-time.
CDPs create a single customer profile that is accessible to marketers, sales teams, and customer support representatives. They enable marketers to tailor their marketing efforts with precision, enhance customer engagement, and drive more effective campaigns, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty, higher conversion rates, more revenue, and a stronger business.
What are customer data platforms?
CDPs collect, organize, and manage customer data across multiple touchpoints to create a single source of truth. They pull zero- and first-party data together to create comprehensive customer profiles, which can then be used for personalization.
A customer data platform collects personally identifiable information (PII) on users. Good CDPs give you the capability to ethically collect PII data, include top-notch data security, provide opt-in capabilities, and allow you to delete visitor data, if necessary. It will also allow your customers to request access to or deletion of their data, and some CDPs even let you set limits on how long your customers’ data is held.
CDPs are designed to provide a unified, consistent, and comprehensive view of each customer, enabling marketers to enhance personalization, streamline marketing efforts, and improve customer experiences.
The best customer data platforms of 2024
As businesses continue to prioritize customer experience and personalization, the role of CDPs have become increasingly important. Here are some of the best CDPs of 2024, each offering unique features and capabilities to meet the needs of modern businesses.
About Fresh Relevance
Fresh Relevance provides marketers with the tools they need to deliver personalized content, recommendations, and offers across all customer touchpoints. Fresh Relevance integrates seamlessly with existing marketing technology stacks, making it a versatile choice for businesses looking to enhance their personalization strategies.
A personalization campaign will only ever be as good as the data that’s fueling it. With the Fresh Relevance personalization platform, you can collect data seamlessly across all digital and offline touchpoints, unify it and use it to power your omnichannel marketing.
Fresh Relevance acts as a real-time CDP by enabling you to:
Collect and store real-time customer data from any source to create a unified profile of each shopper.
- Put those customer insights into action in personalized cross-channel campaigns.
- Identify and engage customers across their devices, in line with the latest privacy legislation.
- Create unique, granular segments based on behavior or stage in the customer lifecycle and purchase funnel.
- Surface insights about your customers and uncover new opportunities with our audience analytics.
Dotdigital CXDP (Going beyond a traditional CDP)
The Fresh Relevance offering now forms part of Dotdigital’s CDXP (Customer Experience Data Platform).
A customer data platform (CDP) is the foundation for building strong customer relationships. It unifies your data, giving you a complete picture of each customer. But a customer experience and data platform (CXDP) takes it a step further. It empowers marketers to not only understand customers, but also personalize their experiences across channels. It’s your all-in-one platform for creating unforgettable customer journeys.
Dotdigital is the tool that empowers marketing teams to exceed customer expectations with highly personalized cross-channel journeys.
With Dotdigital, marketers can seamlessly unify, enrich, and segment customer data. Breaking down data siloes, Dotdigital streamlines decision-making and paves the way for marketing creativity that delivers customer engagement at scale.
With a CXDP like Dotdigital you can:
- Identify the key drivers of customer satisfaction
- Create unique and personalized experiences
- Target your audience with segmentation tools
- View real-time performance metrics
- Build customer loyalty and trust
- Simplify your marketing platform
With powerful AI capabilities, Dotdigital makes it easy to automate deeply personalized experiences across web, email, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, push, social, ads, and more.
About Nosto Commerce Experience Platform
Nosto Commerce Experience Platform makes it easy to quickly deploy fully personalized, integrated commerce experiences with fine-tuned control of merchandising rules — across product recommendations, content, triggered overlays and popups, category pages, and more.
Real-time data everywhere
- Nosto unifies your shopper’s digital interactions into a single behavioral data platform.
- Using commerce-specific ML models, Nosto builds real-time predictive profiles on every shopper based on behavior and affinities.
· A unified experience means more engagement, conversions, ROAS, and revenue from every new and returning visitor.
About Twilio Segment
Twilio Segment is a leading CDP that focuses on providing a robust data infrastructure for collecting, cleaning, and controlling customer data. It enables businesses to gather data from any touchpoint and send it to any tool for analysis, marketing, or customer service.
Collects real-time data across channels into a unified profile to activate more precise experiences. It’s really easy to collect lots of useless data or collect the right data in the wrong ways. Segment CDP automates and organizes data collection, so your data is always accurate and useful.
Segment CDP helps you capture data from every customer interaction, consolidate that data into centralized user profiles and audiences, and connect the right data to the tools your teams need to grow..
About Emarsys
The core of Emarsys’ capabilities is its robust CDP, which aggregates customer data from multiple channels, including websites, mobile apps, email engagements, and social platforms. Using this unified customer data, Emarsys creates a customer profile that gives marketers a holistic view of each customer, enabling personalized messaging and tailored marketing campaigns.
Emarsys’s sophisticated segmentation and predictive analytics tools allow marketers to understand customer habits and tastes and divide audiences based on distinct characteristics. Marketers can then connect with customers on a more personal level, thereby boosting involvement and improving conversion metrics.
About BlueConic
BlueConic: The customer data platform to liberate your data in the privacy-first era. BlueConic enables businesses to break down data silos and unify customer data into useful profiles. BlueConic puts unified, privacy-compliant first-party data into the hands of marketers who want to transform the customer relationship and unleash growth.
The platform supports real-time decision making and personalized interactions across marketing channels, making it a strong option for organizations looking to enhance their customer-centric strategies.
About Dynamic Yield
Dynamic Yield by Mastercard offers advanced personalization, optimization, and A/B testing capabilities. With Dynamic Yield’s Experience OS, marketers, product managers, developers, and digital teams can algorithmically match content, products, and offers to each individual customer to increase conversions and drive more sales. Dynamic Yield leverages machine learning algorithms to predict customer behavior and deliver optimized content and recommendations.
Customer data platforms (CDPs) vs. customer data management (CDM)
While both CDPs and customer data management (CDM) systems are focused on managing customer data, there are key differences between the two. CDM systems are primarily concerned with the storage, maintenance, and security of customer data. They serve as a central repository for customer information but may lack the advanced integration and real-time processing capabilities of CDPs.
On the other hand, CDPs are designed to manage customer data and to activate it across various marketing and customer service channels. CDPs offer more advanced features for data integration, analysis, and personalization, making them a more dynamic tool for businesses looking to leverage their customer data to drive engagement and growth.
Conclusion
The importance of CDPs in today’s digital landscape cannot be overstated. By providing businesses with a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their customers, CDPs enable more personalized, efficient, and effective marketing and customer service strategies. When choosing a CDP, look for capabilities found in the best customer data platforms. Top CDPs:
- Seamlessly integrate with diverse data sources in real-time.
- Enable deep personalization capabilities.
- Offer robust compliance with data protection regulations.
- Provide advanced predictive analytics and AI-driven insights.
- Have an intuitive, user-friendly interface.
As we move further into 2024, CXDPs such as Dotdigital — represent the forefront of innovation in customer data management, offering a range of solutions to meet the diverse needs of modern businesses. As impressive as some CDPs can be, with the everchanging expectations of consumers and need for highly personalized customer experiences, a CDP on its’ own may not be enough. It is arguable that CXDPs are the solution, putting the customer experience and preferred channels at the heart of marketing strategy.
