How Marketers Can Leverage CDPs with Real-Time Analytics

For marketers, data analytics is their currency. The challenge is stitching all of that data together. Marketers have access to more customer data than ever before. Customer data platforms (CDPs), help them optimize those analytics and leverage them into actionable marketing efforts.

Although customer relationship management platforms (CRMs) are still a player in the marketing world, they only capture part of a customer’s journey. CDPs have the capacity to construct a 360-degree profile of a customer’s interactions with your brand. Implementation of CDPs is on the rise, too. According to interviews with 150 senior and mid-level marketers, 67% of respondents were currently using CDPs or planned to implement them in the next six months.  

CDPs offer brands a plethora of benefits and capabilities to elevate marketing performance and accessibility to data. But, CDPs can be enriched with real-time analytics and customer intelligence tools–which take CDP insights and marketing efforts to the next level. 

Read on to find out how CDPs are integral to successful marketing and customer experience analytics–and how to improve yours with real-time analytics and customer intelligence.

Key components of CDPs vs CRMs

CRMs are still firmly entrenched in most companies, but CDPs are rapidly gaining traction. Simply put, CRMs are inherently limited in scope. They store structured data about a user’s relationship with your company, capturing web, inbound, and outbound activity. 

CDPs, on the other hand, pull in significantly more data about your customer. CDPs include every touchpoint in your customer’s experience, from multi-channels to IoT data. CDPs can pull in both structured and unstructured data and encompass direct interactions, transactions, and behavioral trends.

No two CDPs are identical, but there are a handful of key components that separate them from other tools like CRMs, data management platforms (DMPs), and data warehouses:

• Data ingestion: CDPs break down departmental silos and collect data from across the enterprise. They ingest your company’s first-party data–structured and unstructured, online and offline–and capture the full detail of all touchpoints and interactions.

• Data storage and management: While some systems like DMPs usually only store data for a few months, CDPs are the opposite. They store customer information indefinitely, resulting in increased value over time. To that end, many CDPs have baked-in features that facilitate compliance with data regulations.

• Unified profile creation and identity resolution: Building a 360-degree view of your users is the core pillar of CDPs. They compile every piece of a customer’s experience into a unified profile–showing how, when, and where they’ve engaged with your marketing campaigns, bought and used your product, and any other interactions with your company. Most CDPs also offer identity resolution features, stitching together semi-identifiable information from disparate sources.

• Vendor-neutral integration: CDPs don’t exist in a vacuum. Along with ingesting information, they need to easily integrate with other systems and tools in your company’s marketing and technology stacks. Many CDPs have built-in integrations with popular Martech systems, and others offer robust APIs to facilitate custom data exports. 

• Accessible UI and features: Data storage and management have traditionally been firmly in the domain of engineers and data scientists, but CDPs are disrupting that norm. They’re designed to be owned and managed by marketing departments, with intuitive and accessible feature sets. While the initial setup and advanced functionality might require resources from other departments, marketing professionals can use CDPs without assistance from engineers or data scientists.

With these features in mind, there are several ways a CDP–with the help of real-time analytics– can help take your marketing to the next level.

How real-time analytics elevate & enrich CDPs 

The digital world moves at lightspeed, and your marketing needs the right tools to match that pace. CDPs are an important component, but they still don’t enable your brand to reach its full potential. Depending on your data sources and integrations, you might only be seeing near-real-time information. A customer intelligence platform, like Scuba, can elevate your CDP and analytics. 

Real-time analytics can help CDPs deliver more impactful marketing and improve your ROI in several ways:

• Increased marketing agility: Real-time customer intelligence allows marketers to view data in one platform–with comprehensive analysis. By centralizing your company’s data,  you can accelerate reporting and analysis in real-time, and foster rapid decision-making. By ingesting data as it literally comes in, customer intelligence enables marketers to view how customers interact with their products in the moment. In fact, companies that invest in real-time customer journey analytics can increase their new customers and revenue by 44 percent.

• Improved understanding of your audience: Every marketer dreams of having a comprehensive understanding of their customers. CDPs deliver on that idea, especially with identity resolution, to help you dive into granular levels of detail and get a firm grasp on your users. Real-time enhances your ability to understand customer behavior by providing up-to-date analysis, such as engagement, form completions, and DAU.

• Multi-device personalization: Multi-device marketing is critical for delivering a sterling CX. CDPs facilitate more customization across all of your channels, providing your customers with a more personal (and consistent) experience. Real-time analytics allows you to view which marketing efforts on each channel are performing (or not). Leveraging that information, marketers can quickly tweak or make adjustments to ad campaigns.

• Analytics democratization: CDPs with real-time customer intelligence empower marketers to leverage data and analysis tools without depending on other departments. They can do their jobs faster and more efficiently, so engineers, analysts, and data scientists don’t end up as bottlenecks in providing insights. Scuba’s no-code query system allows anyone on your team to dig into insights, whenever they need to.

• Better segmentation and optimization: Behavioral segmentation is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. With the 360-degree view of your customers that CDPs provide, you can better understand their habits, desires, needs, and trends. Customer intelligence platforms, like Scuba, can elevate segmentation, optimization, and provide actual analyses. For example, Scuba’s Signals feature offers real-time alerts customized by what users want to track (whether it's a big drop-off in DAU or cart abandonment).

• Regulatory compliance: As data storage and usage regulations grow stricter, regulatory compliance will become more critical to your marketing efforts. Whether you’re subject to regional guidelines such as GDPR or CCPA, health industry rules like HIPAA and HITECH, or PCI DSS requirements in the e-commerce world, platforms like Scuba can help ensure you’re protecting your customers’ data. With Scuba, brands manage their data entirely behind their firewall, elevating their data security.

Get better real-time insights with Scuba

CDPs bring your data together, but customer intelligence in real-time is what completes the puzzle. That’s where Scuba can help. Connecting your CDP to a customer intelligence platform, like Scuba, will unlock the real-time insight and analysis you need to maximize your marketing performance.

Want to learn more about how to supercharge your CDP and elevate your organization's CX? Request a demo today or talk to a Scuba expert.