An Introduction to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

Online marketing today is data-centric. Without data, we are blind to our digital customers behaviour, interests and insights on what draws them to our brand

As such, marketers today rely heavily on data capturing, analysing and insight generating platforms to find the most valuable information about their customers which can be used to deliver the best service to them. And right now, there is no platform more valuable than the Customer Data Platform (CDP). 

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What is a CDP?

CDPs are one of the most powerful marketing technologies currently available. Yet, they are still not widely known or adopted. Everyone is aware of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform and DMP (Data Management Platform). They're all data related and all promise to help businesses better understand and market to their customers. 

David Raab, who coined the term CDP in 2013, describes them like this: 

‍"A customer data platform is a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems."

‍While this may sound familiar, we assure you it's quite a step ahead from other data related platforms. Where CDPs shine is in bringing together all types and sources of your customer data and stringing it together into unified customer profiles for marketers to be able to work with it more easily.

This includes, but is not limited to: 

• Profile data
• Behavioural, web and mobile data
• Transactional and order data
• Product data
• CRM and offline data sources

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What is Segment

Segment.com is one of the leading CDPs on the market at present; a single platform which collects, stores and routes user data to hundreds of tools via an easy to use interface. Rather than requiring an in-house analytics expert to set up and manage your data, Segment.com does this for you and frees staff to focus on using the data, rather than spending all of their time tracking it down.

Understanding that all of your tools - analytics, marketing automation, email, user testing, error reporting, and support - require the same data, Segment.com has been built to make routing this data more manageable. Rather than sending the same data to each tool separately, the Segment.com platform translates and routes all of the data to these tools from the one place, eliminating time and effort setting each one up. 

With a single view of the customer, you can target the right customer with the right message at the right time, by building audiences and creating realtime campaigns. You can also activate Segment.com in more than 300+ marketing tools, in realtime, with the flick of a switch. This includes Facebook, Salesforce, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Amplitude and a few hundred more. 

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How Businesses Can Use Segment

As a Mixpanel.com integration, Segment.com, in unison with Mixpanel, gives businesses the most comprehensive product, user and customer data analytics suite of tools to guarantee the best products, solutions or services are going out to customers who are confirmed to be eager for them.