beyond a cdp - landing.qbase-info.netlanding.qbase-info.net/qdp/pdf/beyondacdpwhitepaper.pdf ·...

Beyond a CDP The evolution of Customer Data Platforms into omni-channel marketing hubs.

Rob Jones - CEO, Qbase

BEYOND A CDPTHE EVOLUTION OF CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORMS INTO OMNI-CHANNEL MARKETING HUBS.

WWW.QBASE.NET | [email protected] 2

CDPs are the new ‘must have’ initiative in businesses andmarketing departments across the globe. The market forthem has exploded.

If you haven’t come across the acronym CDP before, honestly, you’re not alone. It was a term coined way back in 2011 by David Raab and it means “Customer Data Platform”. But in the last two years it has articulated a growing movement in the data marketing and data management industry to finally combine previously anonymous digital behavioural data with the identity of an individual to create a true single customer view. It’s a technique called identity resolution.

CDPs are the new ‘must have’ initiative in businesses and marketing departments across the globe. The market for them has exploded and companies who previously offered products as diverse as DMPs (Data Management Platforms), Data Warehouses, SCVs (Single Customer Views), Tag Management, E-mail Service Providers, Analytics platforms, Content Management Systems, Marketing Data Lakes… the list goes on… they are now all redeveloping their platforms and rebranding themselves as CDPs. Add to that list the significant number of start-ups competing for your CDP

business and in just two to three years, an entire industry has sprung up, even supported by its own institute and it’s caught many marketers, IT managers and CRM professionals completely on the hop.

In this white paper you will learn about CDPs, the problems they solve, the use cases for your business but also where they are heading next so you can ensure if you decide to invest in one, you have a platform that is enabled for the future of marketing and isn’t a tool that will be out of date before it’s even live.

Forward


For many years now, marketeers have been commissioning data management solutions such as SCVs (Single Customer Views), Data Warehouses and CRM Platforms to manage customer data. These platforms provide a means to centralise customer and prospect information, apply data quality and use them to analyse and predict customer behaviour. They are often the source of marketing business intelligence KPI reports and many of the more recently implemented platforms are likely to have some level of integration with at least one direct marketing channel such as e-mail, call centre or the mailing house.

If we take the most popular of these initiatives, the SCV, you will see in the illustration the kind of data that is being aggregated and managed in these platforms:


PURCHASE HISTORY

ENGAGEMENT HISTORY

PROFILE SENTIMENT

Frequency & Value

Products

Tenure

Channel & Method

Demographics

Geographic

Historic Segmentation

Channel

Digital Consumption

Time & Frequency

Location

Surveys

Social Media

Customer Services

Focus Groups

Background


In addition to the expected customer information, transaction history and communications history, you will also notice that digital and social are both listed in this diagram (page 3). Although many marketeers sought to load this data into their SCV, the sheer scale of digital data would cause most SCVs to grind to a halt as they aren’t designed to handle this volume or velocity of data. Instead, marketers would hold an aggregated view of their digital engagement or social interactions in their SCV and would manage the raw data in a completely separate platform called a DMP.

Data management platforms (DMPs) are the engine behind digital advertising. They run your ad tech program to display personalised content on websites, emails and mobile apps. Generally, they build audience segments and personas to target advertising for your customers and prospect look-alikes who share particular demographic or behavioural attributes. Crucially, they work at speed and scale and aren’t burdened by the rigid structure of traditional marketing databases.

The role of a DMP can be summarised in three functions:

1. Import data - The DMP takes information from a number of different systems sources such as websites, apps, ad tech, e-mail, both internal and external, and organises it at the individual level based on cookies or machine IDs.

2. Find segments - The DMP is programmed to identify and target segments that share particular attributes such as females in Manchester under 25 who use an iPhone and recently browsed your website. Additionally, the DMP can access data vendors and sync up cookies and other IDs from different places to help you target the right audience.

3. Send instructions - The DMP alerts ad networks, web sites and other places about who to target, with what message, on which channel or device.

The arrival of the CDP marks a new chapter in marketing and customer data management. Now the totality of the SCV is being combined with the immediacy and scale of a DMP to drive customer level personalisation initiatives across multiple channels. And it’s why the market for CDPs has exploded in the last 2 years.


The arrival of the CDP marks a new chapter in marketing andcustomer data management. Now the totality of the SCVis being combined with the immediacy and scale of a DMP.


ABOUT CDPs

A CDP acts as a hub for all your marketing data. It combines digital clickstream data with more traditional relational data such as customer data in your CRM and allows you to add ad-hoc sources such as marketing lists when-ever you need to. Crucially, they do all of this in real time.

Most CDPs will have analytics, business intelligence and marketing orchestration embedded into the application, or as distinct modules. This gives you the ability to analyse your data, build segmentation and models for deployment in campaigns and a way to instruct your channels on who to contact, what to send them, and when to send it. This orchestration isn’t anything new, but the speed of deployment enabled by techniques such as prescriptive analytics, is where the big difference occurs, as these decisions can be felt instantaneously by the end customer who gets an increasing level of personalisation as they engage with your activities.

Most CDPs will come with a pre-packaged list of integrations for both ingestion and broadcast. All the main social, search, email, ad platforms, CRM, CMS and DXPs (Digital Experience Platforms) are generally available out of the box, with varying levels of integration support for more specific marketing technology such as review sites, customer service helpdesk software and payment platforms.

Ultimately, the CDP is there to create a real-time, single view of your customers that you can use to power your customer engagement activities and deliver omni-channel personalisation. But that’s a rather sweeping statement, so let’s explore a few use cases to bring the technology and its purpose to light.

CDP Architecture

Typically, a CDP will operate within the following architecture:


CUSTOMER DATA

(Online, Offlice, Batch)

MARKETING CHANNELS

CDP

Data Management

Analytics

Orchestration

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE


Customer Data in the form of digital clickstream, back-office CRM or flat file batch will be integrated into the main CDP repository. The data management element will sort, organise and tag this data before applying data quality and making it available for use in both the analytics engine and the business intelligence tool.

Analytics will develop insight that is then made available to an orchestration engine to take action and automate your digital and direct marketing via micro-segments or on a one-to-one basis.

The loop is then closed as any engagement and response will be collected by the data stores relating to the channel engagement.

CDP Vs DMP


Capability CDPs DMPs

Customer data management Single view management of individual customers.

Manage segments of customers with anonymous profiles.

Data sources Work with both anonymous data (Cookie, device IDs and IP address) and known individual data (e.g. names, addresses, email, phone).

Work mainly with anonymous data (cookies, device IDs and IP addresses).

Data unification methods Sophisticated data quality rules and matching algorithms to provide unified customer profiles.

Use deterministic key matching to track customers and build anonymous profiles across digital channels.

Data updates Continuously processes batch, relational and streaming data to keep profiles up to date and accurate.

Updates customer profiles via batch process every one or two days.

Data maintenance Maintains customer golden records that persist over time.

Maintains an anonymous customer record for a short period of time.


USE CASES

The use cases for CDPs are many and varied and largely focus on helping an organisation deliver better customer engagement and personalisation. However, it is slightly more nuanced that this.

We carried out research of our own customer base and all the business cases we’ve been involved with for our QDP solution. What we found was most primary use cases revolve around six core business requirements:

• Clickstream Analytics• Audience Targeting• Real-Time Advertising & Communications• Campaign & Journey Optimisation• Business Intelligence• Data Governance

Clickstream AnalyticsClickstream analytics is the practice of monitoring streaming data that is being generated by users of your websites and apps and using this to understand individual needs. For example, you may want to create ‘click-path optimisation’ on your website, where if you are a retailer you are trying to get the visitor from their point of entry to the exact product that is right for them in as few clicks as possible. Why? Well the visitor experience will be vastly improved which reflects positively on your brand, but also the fewer the clicks means the higher the conversion for most retailers. Netflix employs this technique so the featured titles and recommended content are based on a user profile history and engagement.

Another big use case wrapped in the clickstream analytics area is next best action. Here you are analysing customer data from all channels to identify what product, promotion, content and channel you should use for your next customer engagement and when you should initiate this communication. Next Best Action is often the personalisation nirvana that many brands and marketeers are chasing and a CDP has the power to make it a reality.

Audience TargetingMany marketeers are using their CDP to help them identify and target the right audience and then formulate their communications plans. Audience targeting from marketing databases is nothing new. But now CDPs are allowing organisations to target people in real-time based on live engagement for activities such as retargeting which is a combination of on-line personas and off-line profiles.

Real Time Advertising & CommunicationsAn evolution from the days of DMPs, CDPs are allowing organisations to purchase programmatic advertising based on real individuals, rather than just a device or cookie. But more than this, they are allowing marketeers to apply bid strategies for this space based on the real value of that customer. For example, engagement with an e-mail is then being used to trigger social advertising where the marketeer will bid higher CPC rates for customers with a high lifetime value.

Campaign & Journey OptimisationAs a lead on from audience targeting and ad strategy, CDPs are allowing marketers to personalise adverts to individuals based on the design and content that is most relevant to them. For example, by connecting the CDP to Google, marketeers have been building micro audience segments that not only bids on keywords based on customer value, but manages both the ad content and content in the landing page to optimise conversion to goal.



They are also allowing marketeers to run sophisticated multi-channel journeys such as cart abandonment that doesn’t just recreate what was in the basket. Instead, they embed next best action to build a series of communications designed to maximise re-engagement and instead of just using e-mail, they are combining on-line retargeting with off-line direct mail and in-store prompts.

Business IntelligenceMarketeers have spent many years attempting to understand which part of their marketing is working and why. CDPs are making that process easier. They contain all the direct engagement activity data so they can understand the activities that are working for different types of customer and these can be reported and optimised. This is pushing the ROI up for many marketing departments and is helping to green light projects they have previously struggled to justify.

Data GovernanceIn an age of stringent data protection legislation, data governance has rocketed up the agenda of marketing, CRM and IT departments alike, particularly in Europe. It’s no wonder then that the CDP has been put up front and centre for many organisations faced with complex data protection challenges. With a CDP, organisations can track every piece of data held about a customer and trace it back to the origin. They can provide access to this data to customers and give them the facility to manage their own personal data, including permissions, at a granular level. Although not as glamourous as AI driven personalisation, it’s actually the only use case that was called out in every single business case for CDPs we’ve seen in the past two years.



THE MARKET

The market for CDPs is booming. According to the CDP Institute, since inception in 2013, the market has already grown to $1 billion in 2019. And this only covers pure-play CDP providers. It doesn’t also include CDP like functions in other software and platforms. In 2017, Gartner client inquiries about CDPs quadrupled over the previous year, and inquiries doubled between 2017 and 2018.

In 2019, in Europe alone, there is expected to be a 60% growth in CDP adoption with the majority of that expected in the B2C market sector as 62% of companies in this area are reporting they have disconnected martech systems and CDPs are offering them a chance to unify all customer data for the first time.

Right now, there are 78 recognised CDP vendors in the market, with over 50% of these operating primarily in a customer engagement capacity.

A study by Forbes Insights of over 400 marketing leaders found that nearly half of marketers that use a CDP believe that it helps drive customer loyalty - while a study by The Relevancy Group identified the top tactics enabled by CDPs in the graph below.

• 44% of organisations surveyed by ‘Forbes Insights’ report that a customer data platform is helping drive customer loyalty

• And according to ‘The Relevancy Group’ 62% of companies that leverage a CDP use it to enable individualised personalisation in email, 55% for advertising and 53% for real-time targeting


80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

Top Tactics Enabled by CDP Utilisation

Individualised personalisation

in email

Addressable advertising

Real-time targeting

Individualised personalisation on our website

Suppress online advertising based on purchase data

Change ads and or offers based on purchase or behaviour data

Change the channel that

we market the customer to, e.g. mobile,

versus onlineQuestion asked: Based on your utilisation of CDP, which of the following tactics, if any, do you utilise? Source: The Relevancy Group Executive Marketer Survey 6/18, U.S. Only Base: Those whose company currently have a CDP vendor n=204.

62%55% 53% 49%

42%

27%

10%


So far, it seems like CDPs can do no wrong. You would be forgiven for believing marketing data management evolution could stop here as we’ve finally got it nailed. But alas, many CDPs still suffer significant short-comings and if you are to make an informed decision on which one to choose, you need to be aware of these.

Only Customer DataThe clue is in the title here. One of the major issues with many CDPs that have evolved from previous tech, rather than being built from the ground up, is they often only manage customer data. For 90% of requirements this is fine, but not for all use cases.

Let’s take the example of a gardening company. One of the biggest drivers of marketing activities for this kind of business will be the weather forecast. Knowing it’s going to be a sunny weekend means they can ramp up marketing in the proceeding days and ramp it down when it’s going to be wet and miserable. Yet most CDPs couldn’t accommodate this data.

Take a minute to think about data and information in your organisation that doesn’t actually resolve down to a customer. Product specifications, stock market data, legislative information, images… there will be many examples of important data that couldn’t be managed by your CDP, yet they are needed in your marketing for driving

triggers, informing spend or deriving content.

Prescribed StructureFor efficiency, many CDPs will only ship with a predefined and completely inflexible data model. The reason is the integration, off-the-shelf analytics and reporting just won’t function without it. The vendors are trying to develop a repeatable process they can roll out to everyone else in your sector, so for them it makes sense.

The problem, however, is businesses are all different and although there are commonalities, it is often the difference where the competitive advantage lies. But CDPs are increasingly eroding this advantage by standardising everything. It makes it more difficult to do things your competitors aren’t if you all have the same data structures powering the exact same algorithms that are ultimately driving the same activities.

Off-the-shelf integrationsMost CDP providers come with a range of standard connectors and integrations into tools such as social, search, CRM, ESP, DXPs and DSPs (Demand Side Platforms that manage ads). This is great as it will have you up and running for most of your requirement in record time. The issue lies in those feeds, platforms and services that aren’t supported by the CDP. Many CDPs offer no flexibility to add an integration or


Their Limitations


will charge a significant sum to include it.

If you are researching CDPs, start by carrying out a cataloguing exercise of all your data stores, platforms, software and services where you need to integrate your CDP. Include this as part of your brief and compare each CDP against their capability to integrate with the list.

The whole solution issueAn increasing number of CDPs, particularly the larger players, have business intelligence, analytics and orchestration pre-built into their platform. Many of these providers make it clear these modules are mandatory. The problem occurs in that they are often inferior to software and platforms you have already invested in. For example, it’s pretty unlikely that their reporting is better than Tableau which you may have already sunk considerable investment into.

The solution here is to choose a CDP who will open their data model up to you to integrate with your existing platforms. This will allow you to only use the CDP to fill the gaps and replace the outdated elements of your existing solution, rather than having to rip up the road on your entire existing martech investments.

Out-of-the-box AnalyticsDue to the complex nature of what they do, CDPs will usually ship with a range of out of the box analytics features. Next Best Action, Product Recommendations, Persona Segmentation… you’ll usually get a good range of analytical tools ready to go. Of course, this will have you up and running in short order. But again, they are unlikely to meet all of your analytical requirements and as they are generic algorithms, they can’t be retrained and modified for your business and your customers.

The solution here is to look for a CDP that can integrate with an external analytics tool such as Databricks, SAS, FastStats or SPSS. You should be able to export data from your CDP to these platforms and your CDP should have the ability to ingest analytical results for use in your marketing orchestration and automation processes.



CDPs by their very nature are complex and will be a significant investment. Before you take the plunge and purchase one for your organisation, it’s important to take the time to identify the platform that will best meet the requirements of you and your organisation. In this section we’ve composed a process to go through which will help.

1. Research the technologyClearly, you are already engaged in this task by reading this white paper. But find others and read them. Read the CDP institute website. Check out what organisations like Gartner and Forrester are saying about CDPs and there are lots of blog articles out there about CDPs. Make sure your level of knowledge is good enough to be able to write your own elevator pitch about a CDP, what they do and the benefits they bring. You are going to be rolling that pitch out a lot as part of step 3!

2. Audit your marketing landscapeBefore you go anywhere near a CDP provider or start introducing your organisation to the idea of a CDP, you need to catalogue and document what you already have in place. Start an audit process to identify all your personal data stores, your customer and prospect feeds, your internal data management technologies, your marketing channels and your existing martech platforms and services. Record important metrics such as customer counts, website hits, social engagement levels, email volumes and frequencies.

Having these will help you to quantify the undertaking, identify gaps in capability, spot new opportunities and get a better handle on potential use cases. It will also help you brief CDP providers when you are ready to break cover and start introducing yourself to them.

3. Define your use casesPurchasing a CDP is not a small undertaking. They are likely to involve a considerable investment so you need to be clear about why you need one for your organisation and the use cases it will solve. Identify stakeholders, hold workshops and be very clear about why you need a CDP and what you want it to do. Then get their input into other areas where it could help as CDPs aren’t just the domain of marketing departments. This consensus will help you expand the business case for investment.

4. Prioritise your needsTake all your identified use cases and try to prioritise them based around the quantifiable benefits they will deliver to your business. Then compare these to your existing capabilities to see what your savings or uplift will be. You will find that different CDPs specialise in different areas so this will be useful to help you to shortlist them.


Choosing a CDP


5. Create a briefYour brief should contain clear instruction to a potential CDP provider about what you have now, but more importantly, what you want to achieve. It should centre around your use cases. A good brief will never prescribe exactly what you want or how you want it. Give the CDP providers some room to demonstrate to you how their solution will achieve your goals within the constraints of your existing landscape.

6. Research the vendorsYou’ll notice we’ve left this until stage 6. This is very deliberate. Taking your use cases, your data stores, your existing technology and your desired integrations, start researching CDP providers. Consider building a scoring system and research the proposition of at least 10 providers. It sounds a lot, but each one will only take 15 minutes to research via their websites and due to the diversity of propositions out there, you will need this many to identify the 3 or 4 you should invite to tender.

7. Shortlist & invite to pitchAt this stage you should have a handful of CDP providers who you think are well aligned around your requirement. Contact them and arrange an introduction call. Have them run a ‘credentials’ web conference with you and a few team members to get a feel for them culturally. You are likely to be working closely with them in the future so it is good to check the chemistry. You should also call out anything you haven’t been sure about from your original review. If they scored low in a certain area, ask them about it.

8. Invite to tenderFrom the suppliers or vendors you liked, send them the brief and create a set timeframe around your decision making process. Although you shouldn’t prescribe too much, if you have specific questions you want to ask, do this in the brief and

have all suppliers answer them. You should also ask for clarity on pricing. CDPs all have different pricing models. Some will charge by usage, others by volume, some by module or even by value. Be as clear as you can as to what you have now and include customer and engagement counts. Ask for total estimated year 1 and year 2 pricing. If the CDP provider is worth using, they will have ‘reckoners’ that estimate your customer data footprint which includes volume, velocity and growth. They can use this to give you clear pricing.

Ensure you create a scorecard for submissions and do share this in advance with the suppliers you are inviting to tender. If you construct the score card to weight towards what is most important to you, it will help them focus their response in the right areas for you.

Finally, a trick we like is ask the vendors as part of the pitch to leave you with a single slide that explains who they are, what they do and why you should choose them. It forces the vendor into distilling the important messages and you can use these slides to summarise the responses you’ve had to your stakeholders.

9. Proof of ConceptAfter considering the submissions select your favourite and ask the vendor to construct a proof of concept project. You should expect to pay for this. This is your last chance to check your assumptions about the approach, technology and vendor. Base it on a use case and set clear success criteria in advance and don’t be afraid of going through the selection process again if your POC isn’t successful. Just be glad you found this out now and not after a full implementation has gone live.



10. ImplementationImplementing a CDP is a subject for another white paper and is too much to cover here. However, as a summary, ensure you build in acceptance criteria into your deployment plan and ensure as many costs as possible are only realised once milestones have been achieved and accepted. You should also consider a ‘change management’ programme. It is likely the CDP will bring wholesale change to the way you manage customer data and market to them. Change management will better equip you to deal with this change and adopt the CDP into your organisation faster and more effectively.



The title of this white paper is “Beyond a CDP”. We’ve already eluded to some of the limitations of CDPs and this should give you some clues as to where CDPs are heading next. In this section we look at the roadmap for CDP technology and you will learn that there are CDPs out there that already feature some, if not all, of the features below.

Building an Omni-Channel Marketing HubBeing omni-channel means a customer can consume your content or service through multiple channels at the same time and enjoy a seamless experience in doing so.

For example, having an item in basket and calling your customer services desk as they need some advice. In an omni-channel situation the customer services rep could see the customer basket and update it live so the customer sees those changes at the other end.

Another example is walking into a clothing retailer to buy a pair of jeans. But when they don’t have your size you can move channels. Launching the stores app will automatically know which store you are in. Taking a photo of the barcode will identify the product and a notification will ping to an assistant who will come over and tell you when they can have that size in the store and ask if you would like to order and pay

for it now for collection later or even delivery to your home.

The problem is, the word omni-channel has largely been hijacked by multi-channel providers. Unless there is a seamless and instantaneous synchronisation across all of your channels, as a new piece of information becomes known, you are not operating in omni-channel. But this is where a CDP will help.

Expect genuine omni-channel to be a feature of all CDPs over the coming years and it is likely this will be enabled by a process called MDM…

Mastered DataFor many years now, MDM, or Master Data Management, has been employed by forward thinking businesses to provide governance around all data that enters an organisation’s ecosystem. The principal of MDM means subjecting all data to a pre-defined set of data quality rules before it is allowed to be used and ensuring that data is synchronised into all corners of an organisations architecture. It’s a hard discipline to adopt and it takes significant commitment, time and expense. It usually needs a wholesale realignment of business processes and practices and the tools and services that underpin MDM are not cheap.


Beyond a CDP - What’s Coming Next?


CDPs can in themselves be MDM purely for your marketing data and this is a direction of travel many CDP providers are heading towards. In the future CDPs will be hubs for all your marketing data that applies data quality in real time and instantaneously distributes the data to the point of need or use anywhere inside or outside your organisation. They will also synchronise data held in different systems. So, if a customer removes a marketing consent in one system or channel, all other systems and channels will hold the same consent information, instantaneously.

And this is how omni-channel marketing can ultimately be delivered.

All data… not just relating to customers

Over the next few years more and more CDPs will start to ingest data that doesn’t need to resolve back to a customer. It will be data that is essential to a marketeer, but not necessarily something that is held against a customer. For example, if you are a gardening supplies business, the weather forecast is going to help you time campaigns and increase PPC budgets based on improved ROI. Why? Well, when it’s sunny, you will sell more gardening products than when it isn’t.

But this isn’t a lone example, think of data such as stock prices, news, legislation, timetables, pollution levels… the list goes on. These are all examples of data sets that could be essential to marketeers for devising campaigns, setting budgets, producing content or creating triggers, but they aren’t currently catered for in most existing CDP products. Expect this to change.

Rise of the Robots – the AI revolutionAI is already embedded into an increasing number of CDPs. It’s often being used to continuously learn and improve techniques such as next best action, automated PPC

bid strategies and click path optimisation.

AI gives businesses the power to continuously improve decision making so that each and every marketing communication is relevant and timely for the customer. It will improve marketing ROI and has the ability to facilitate levels of personalisation that can get close to the types of conversations humans have with each other.

In the future, expect AI to be increasingly central to CDPs. AI will help you to identify customer needs far sooner than any existing methods. This means it’s likely to be used to power personalisation journey techniques like Customer Activated Response Optimisation where each and every engagement with a customer, automatically triggers the next engagement.

You should also expect AI to be central to your content strategies where algorithms are joining what was previously unconnected pieces of information into content journeys for individual customers which are influenced by social trending and current affairs. Finally, AI within CDPs will help you identify new opportunities for digital advertising that you would not have previously considered.

Modulisation and specialisationThe CDP institute is already starting to discuss three different types of CDPs (‘Access’ which are Data Management led, ‘Analytics’ which are insight led, and ‘Engagement’ which are orchestration led) so it’s clear specialisation is already taking place. Over the coming years you should expect that specialisation to polarise. Increasingly CDP providers will start to recognise their USPs and platform strengths and will open up to the idea of better integration with alternative tools in the areas in which they are weaker.



So, expect CDPs to start offering support for specialist analytics tools like SAS, FastStats or SPSS. Business Intelligence platforms like Tableau, Power BI and Sisense will all be plug and play. Even marketing automation and orchestration tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Kitewheel and Adobe Campaign will become integrated as CDP providers start to realise, they can’t be all things to all people.

This also means many CDPs will become modular. You will be able to buy the parts you need or like and integrate them into the architecture you already have in place. And this ultimately will create a new sector of CDP service providers and System Integrators whose job it will be to connect all this disparate martech. Already we are starting to see some of these organisations appearing and we expect these businesses to thrive over the coming years.




CONCLUSIONS

There is a reason CDPs have seen so much investment and growth over the past two years. They are the engine which great customer engagement is built around. They are moving brands closer to the customer and they are making each and every direct and digital marketing activity more accountable than it ever has been before.

But due to the infancy in the market, there is a huge delta of capability and vision across vendors and service providers. The levels of sophistication and cost of CDP providers vastly differs which means Marketeers need to take a considered and well planned approach to selecting the right CDP provider for their requirements.

Already the CDP landscape is advancing, and CDP providers are starting to introduce more capability around omni-channel marketing and data governance. AI is being adopted by even more platforms and we expect to see the crystallisation of more specialist tools that better integrate with existing technologies over the coming years.

Overall, the case for CDPs for any business is very strong and with the levels of hyper-growth that are expected over the next five years, it is likely that organisations that haven’t adopted the technology will be at a considerable disadvantage when compared to their competitors.

ABOUT QBASE

At Qbase we are data integration, analytics and orchestration experts. We help our clients develop richer customer engagement, omni-channel personalisation and marketing orchestration powered by analytics and AI. Our Customer Data Platform, the QDP, elevates marketing performance to record levels by making every customer communication and interaction relevant and welcome. Your entire digital and direct marketing activities will be optimised with channels integrated and processes automated.

The QDP goes beyond a traditional CDP. No more data type restrictions. No more need to replace your entire martech stack. With a QDP you’ll have a personalised solution designed to your needs that will deliver your objectives. Find out more >>

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In his 25-year career, Rob has headed up business functions for a number of UK companies and organisations. Since joining Qbase nine years ago, Rob has provided strategic guidance to many of the UK’s largest enterprises. Rob specialises in using technology, data and analytics to power innovative business processes. He is best known for his expertise in leveraging the latest marketing technologies but he has worked on some of the largest CRM and Marketing Database projects in Europe.

Rob JonesCEO, Qbase

beyond a cdp - landing.qbase-info.netlanding.qbase-info.net/qdp/pdf/beyondacdpwhitepaper.pdf ·...

Documents