5 ways to save with a CDP

An integral part of a businesses' technology stack.

Businesses all over have been raising their game like never before, especially when it comes to investing heavily in their digital marketing strategies and getting the most of their technologies. According to Gartner, marketing leaders are only utilizing 58% of their Martech stack’ potential. This is where a CDP comes in. Your technology and data infrastructure may be underperforming, leaving traces of siloed data and poor integrations. A powerful CDP brings all the data that result in the customer experience together in order to improve all of those efforts. Besides the fact that businesses can generate revenue with a CDP, they can also save with a CDP, but first let’s go over some of its features.

Typical CDP features 

Here are the most common features of a Customer Data Platform  

• Integrated data collection allows you to easily gather information. 

• Profile unification creates a unified view of the customer.  

• Identity resolution layers in first- and third-party data to complete the 360-degree view. 

• Enable operational efficiency and business agility by connecting a tech stack that is flexible to adapt to the ever-changing consumer behavior with various integrations. 

• Segmentation allows you to slice the customer database on the expanded catalog of facets only available in a CDP and use it to trigger valuable automated experience personalization.  

Cost-saving benefits of a Customer Data Platform 

Centralized customer data management improves data consistency and reduces cost in several ways. For instance, with a unified repository, data storage is less expensive due to cost breaks associated with scale and reduced duplicated data stored in multiple point solutions. However, these savings are incremental compared to the investments in human capital related to maintaining enterprise solutions. 

After two decades of helping enterprise organizations through digital transformation, the most consistent mistake we see is a fundamental misunderstanding of the total cost of platform adoption. Business organizations typically understand how to calculate a cost-benefit analysis against capital expenditures but woefully underestimate or ignore the cost of adoption required to recognize any value.  

The number of systems an organization manages increases the cost of customization, evangelization, training, community building, and the ongoing measurement of usage and outcomes. 

But even when combined, the expense of data storage and platform adoption still only tell part of the cost-saving story associated with a customer data platform. Frankly, one could write a book about the many ways technology proliferation will increase costs, but that would be outside the scope of this post. Instead, let us consider one everyday use case scenario: Marketing performance reports. 

Here at XCentium, like most businesses, marketing provides periodic performance reports to help the company make informed decisions. Without a customer data platform, these reports must somehow combine data from disparate sources. All too often, the method for preparing data for analysis comes down to copying and pasting data from different tools into one or more spreadsheets. To tell a story that attributes revenue to specific tactics, this includes, at a minimum:  

• A customer relationship management platform 

• One or more social media platforms 

• One or more email platforms 

• One or more paid advertising platforms 

• A marketing automation platform 

• A website analytics tool 

• One or more digital commerce channels 

• An accounting solution 

With a customer data platform, the task of collecting, integrating, and preparing data is done once and then carefully improved over time. This efficiency makes analysis and reporting more accessible and less time-consuming. It also mitigates the risk of costly mistakes by reducing data variability, copy-paste errors, and other common data-integration problems. In Ponemon Institute’s 2020 “Cost of Data Breach Study” shows that the average cost of a customer data breach in the U.S is $8.64 million.  

With CDP, businesses can reduce their marketing costs by improving audience targeting, enhancing omnichannel engagement, and shortening conversion times.  

In Ponemon Institute’s 2020 “Cost of Data Breach Study” shows that the average cost of a customer data breach in the U.S is $8.64 million. This brings us to our final, and perhaps the least obvious benefit is data ownership. A customer data platform can save organizations money over the long haul by increasing their negotiating power with individual platform vendors. An organization can store its customer information separately in its data lake using a customer data platform. Avoiding vendor lock-in creates the freedom to abandon a point solution quickly and easily if contract terms become unfavorable.   

Data ownership also gives the organization far more agency in protecting the privacy of their customers, mitigating the risk of costly leaks. Data protection is a top priority for a good reason. Beyond staying ahead of shifting regulatory concerns, a customer data breach will create high costs in terms of litigation and brand reputation.  

Inside Sitecore CDP 

Sitecore CDP consumes and activates behavioral data from all channels to create a unified source of customer intelligence for your digital ecosystem. Behavioral data is blended with enterprise customer data to surface insights and power targeting, segmentation, and audience delivery to your marketing, commerce, and CX tech stack. 

Sitecore CDP is a cloud solution optimized to operate in real-time. Deploying it to a website is quick and easy with a simple JavaScript tag. Integration with any channel, or data source, is achieved via secure and well-documented APIs. 

XCentium is the 2021 Sitecore Partner of the Year for North America and a certified Platinum partner with extensive training on Sitecore CDP. If you have questions about how Sitecore CDP will create value for your organization, we'd love to connect. Don't hesitate to get in touch with us for a no-cost/no-commitment consultation. 

Download the full report here.