With more business scenarios going online, understanding customer behavior across channels and devices will be a major challenge facing enterprises. Enterprise match users are aware of the importance of customer data management and building CDP (customer data platform). Recently, one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world, Forrester has launched a series of CDP reports to provide a close look at CDPs’ usage both in China and globally.
A CDP centralizes customer data from multiple sources and makes it available to systems of insight and engagement.
—— For B2C Marketers, Customer Data Platforms Overpromise And Underdeliver（2018.10.26）
What CDP can do for enterprises
In the recent report “Getting Customer Data Right” launched by Forrester Consulting, among 337 surveyed marketing and advertising professionals in North America and Europe who are responsible for customer data, marketing analytics, and marketing/advertising technology.
They Found:
· Most firms have a version of a customer data platform (CDP) but don’t use it to its fullest capabilities.
· Marketers have an opportunity to improve their organization's customer data practices.
· Firms with better-unified customer profiles experience better business results.
Forrester created a Customer Profile Maturity Model that ranks survey recipients into three maturity levels; emerging, scaling, and leading. 11% of firms that effectively use a CDP were considered leaders.
Forrester concludes:
· 7.9 times more likely to see a revenue increase of more than 10% year to year compared to emerging firms.
· 2.6 times more likely than emerging companies to see increased business results, such as profitability, as a result of their unified data management.
· 2.5 times more likely to enjoy benefits like increased customer lifetime values.
These set of figures show that CDP can strongly power business growth.
CDP game changers
In their report “The Capabilities CDPs Need To Deliver Value For B2C Marketers”, Forrester concludes 2 core capabilities a CDP or CDP vendor should have:
- Functional Conpetency
CDPs must develop the ability to execute on core functions at a level that is comparable to or better than currently available marketing tools. It should serve a purpose beyond centralizing data, span the entire customer journey and connect the ecosystem.
- Automation and Intelligence
For a CDP to add value on top of enterprise marketers' existing tech stacks, they must have an AI foundation, can do automate decisioning and orchestration, and become a true open platform.
- Rising of local Chinese CDP vendors
In their another report “Your Global MarTech Stack Won't Cut It In China”, Forrester points out that more and more marketers at global brands in China, such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Volkswagen, and Walmart, no longer settle for working with the martech vendors that the global firm has contracts with. They have realized that deep localization is the only way to succeed. This requires not only China-specific marketing strategies and local decision-making power but also deep engagement with local partners including tech vendors. As a MarTech leader in China, DeepZero | iPinYou was also mentioned in that report.
DeepZero | iPinYou’s one-stop intelligent enterprise data management platform, AlphaData™ (DMP/CDP) is the first all-in-one enterprise data management solution in the Chinese market. in the past 12 years, we have built international leading-level data management platforms for more than 3000 clients across various industries including automotive, FMCG, tourism, and finance. Recently, DeepZero | iPinYou announced the hiring of Richard Wang, a CDP expert, to the role of Senior Vice President of its newly founded Research Center in Shanghai. Richard will be in charge of DeepZero | iPinYou’s data management products’ research and development, and building CDP products for clients across the Eastern China region.
How enterprise can maximize the value of a CDP and promote its business growth? To answer the question of how to manage customer data in the right way, we have concluded a few methodologies while we build CDP/DMPs for our clients.
- You need a purpose-built platform
The data management platform is a tool for enterprises, and the criteria to measure this tool is whether it helps enterprises achieve their goals. We set goals and KPIs before we start a marketing campaign to optimize results and boost growth. A series of data management platforms developed by DeepZero | iPinYou enables enterprises to solve the pain points of their business. It helps enterprises integrate the data of both private and public domains, including users, members, and followers on social networks, media, etc. and generates marketing strategies and supports marketing decisions through media value insight, crowd behavior insight, and a complete attribution model.
- You need valuable and useable data
As we all know, the important goal of building a first-party data management platform (DMP) and customer data platform (CDP) is to promote marketing growth. It forms customer insight through unified management of decentralized first-party data, combines the high-quality customer data owned by the enterprise itself with second and third-party data to create a 360° user profile, and enables business decisions with more comprehensive customer knowledge and more accurate analysis. But the foundation to achieve this ultimate goal is the possession of truly “valuable” data. Locating valuable data is essential for building successful CDP/DMP and realizing enterprise data management.
Metro China, the world’s leading member-based wholesale, is a typical company that collects data from multiple sources both online and offline. Metro’s data comes from multiple marketing contacts, including a brick-and-mortar shopping mall, WeChat, APP, online shopping mall, Tmall, official Metro website, newsletter sign-up, e-mail, SMS, and paid media. Metro has built its own tagging system “Super ID” and a system that has data management, hygiene, and enhancement as well as identity resolution to effectively connect data streams for profile building.
- Standardized products + customized programs + iteration= business growth
More and more advertisers now want to construct their own CDP/DMP for the purpose of data management and activation. When it comes to the platform, a big problem for them is to choose between customized and standardized products. customized projects are relatively more expensive and the cycle of implementation will take longer. However, standardized products are often unable to meet personalized demands.
In most cases, we would recommend our clients to identify their own application scenarios according to the complexity and commercial prospect of implementation and use the scenarios as the reference for choosing products. For example, for business scenarios like media evaluation/crowd analysis, which are not complex in implementation but high in commercial value, some powerful suppliers do have mature product modules, that can be directly deployed; demands that are based on specific business scenarios can be satisfied with offline operation support or phased-in functions. Service providers with a large customer base will be able to develop a host of customized functions and combine them into standardized modules.
- You need a useable platform that makes intelligent decisions
CDP/DMP works like the brain, tasked to drive the collaboration of other external tools. The fundamental value of CDP/DMP lies in its ability to connect data and decisions, form a closed loop of marketing data, and promote model iteration and optimization. In this closed-loop, each campaign can select TA from CDP/DMP to reach, accumulate first-party data assets, make TA more accurate, and obtain better transformation. Post-delivery data monitoring is a very important feedback link. The key step of intelligent marketing is to continuously analyze, optimize, and study the monitored feedback data.
