5 Reasons Why a CDP is Critical to Drive Growth

Introduction

Gartner defines a Customer Data Platform (CDP) as “a marketing system that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels to enable customer modeling and optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers.” A CDP enables organizations build effective marketing campaigns at scale.

This blog post serves as the 2^nd article of a 4 part series.  

1.      Is Hyper Personalization Worth it

2.      5 Reasons why a CDP is critical to Drive Growth

3.      What is Sitecore CDP

4.      7 popular Personalization examples using Sitecore CDP

Whether there are thousands of customers or millions, marketing can drive highly granular campaigns using a CDP. Below are 5 reasons why an out-of-the-box Sitecore CDP is critical to drive engagement and growth.

1. Lack of personalization is costing businesses

As mentioned in our previous article, over 70% of customers feel personalization is a minimum requirement for a brand to earn their loyalty. This reflects in another metric referred to in the same article, high growth retailers drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization vs. lower growth retailers. In other words, organizations without effective personalization have lower revenue.

2. Personalization at Scale

A marketing team could manually manage 10s of campaigns. High-growth retailers are not only focused on large customer segments. They craft and run thousands of campaigns by identifying much more granular segments. Traditional static marketing reports are too time-consuming to build, and too high level to reveal fine-grained insights. This constrains marketing teams from expanding beyond a few tens of campaigns. Having a CDP on the other hand empowers marketing teams to deliver personalization and run thousands of campaigns.

3. Better Marketing Needs Good Data that's Accessible

Personalization, when done right, minimizes friction and gives customers what they want in fewer steps. To achieve this, Marketing teams need good data that provides a 360-degree view of customer interactions with the brand. Marketing needs to uncover opportunities at scale and design and run A/B tests iteratively in shorter time frames. Having fragmented data locked in siloes, with duplicate records missing attributes, while not being easily accessible when needed makes the marketer’s job impossible. This leads to subpar personalization, forcing customers to navigate a maze. CDP on the other hand enables capturing complete data to give a succinct and centralized view of customers in one place. Sitecore CDP addresses the above problems and provides a solid foundation for good centralized customer data.

4. Data Warehouse, Data Lakes – not Adequate

Building a 360-degree customer view requires few capabilities. Starting from the ability to ingest real-time data to batch data, or have a flexible data model to represent profiles at various stages of the customer life cycle (from anonymous to identified to VIP). Even the ability to merge interactions across devices or sessions and provide the right privacy and governance guardrails etc. A Data Warehouse is well suited for batch analytics on structured data, while Data Lakes help with structured and unstructured data. Neither of which offers the full range of required capabilities. On the other hand, Sitecore CDP is custom-built for this purpose, to capture the customer life cycle across the board.

5. Building an in-house CDP - Challenging, Time-consuming, and Expensive

Building and operating an in-house CDP requires enormous planning, time, and investment. Few organizations attempt it and fewer organizations have succeeded. Daunting challenges include required cross-dimensional skills, domain knowledge, time required to stitch together a minimum viable set of features, and so on. Sitecore CDP comes with a full set of capabilities to gather customer interactions from various sources, uncover insights, and build effective marketing campaigns at scale.

At XCentium have been digitizing and modernizing content and commerce channels for over a decade with award-winning results. Wondering how a CDP might help you? Reach out to us for a complimentary assessment.

In the next article, we will go over Sitecore CDP and its essential components.