How CDPs empower enterprise teams to achieve marketing success
It’s a bit like a never-ending repetitive sitcom when I connect with enterprise marketing teams. I often hear the same challenges playing on repeat. "We don’t have visibility into our customer data," they cry.
"We have to rely on our tech team to create audiences, and it takes so much time,” they grumble. "We use a lot of different tools that are as user-friendly as a Rubik's Cube in the dark," they lament. It's a universal truth, like gravity or the inevitability of someone hitting "reply all" by accident.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a retailer, a financial services company, a travel and hospitality business, or an airline… these are obstacles we hear across businesses of all sizes.
But they become particularly painful in the enterprise where there is often just more — more data, more identity challenges, more teams working to get campaigns out the door.
Just because these challenges are common doesn’t mean that they are unsolvable. Today, data is the lifeblood of successful marketing strategies. Every click, purchase, and interaction leaves a trail of valuable information that, when harnessed effectively, can drive business growth and customer engagement.
For enterprise marketing teams looking to navigate this vast sea of data, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have emerged as indispensable tools to help companies manage and utilize their customer information.
Understanding the evolving role of CDPs
At its core, a CDP is a centralized hub that collects, organizes, and analyzes customer data from various sources, including websites, mobile apps, CRM systems, social media, and more.
By consolidating this disparate data into a unified customer profile, CDPs offer marketers a comprehensive view of their audience, enabling them to deliver highly targeted and personalized campaigns across multiple channels.
We’ve seen a shift over the past couple of years where many enterprises have consolidated (or are in the process of consolidating) much of their data into a cloud data warehouse like Snowflake, Big Query, or Redshift.
Increasingly, data teams have beat the drum that there are risks to having multiple sources of truth for customer data. There are security risks, and it can be a heavy lift to ensure that data remains at parity on multiple platforms.
While many CDPs duplicate data into their own platforms for marketing use, some CDPs (including Simon Data) have aligned with the ethos that there should be one central source of truth — the Cloud Data Warehouse — and that the CDP should serve as an extension of those data investments so marketers can leverage customer data for audience creation and multi-channel personalization.
The term that’s emerged for this sub-category is “composable CDPs”. An added benefit of this approach is time to value. Because composable CDPs are integrating into the Cloud Data Warehouse versus replicating datasets, implementation tends to take weeks versus the months of heavy lifting we’ve seen with traditional CDPs.
As enterprise teams consider which CDP is right for them (and there are a whole lot of options out there), there are three capability areas that come to the forefront: identity resolution, the ability to leverage data for personalization at scale, and the ability to drive value quickly.
Identity resolution with a CDP
Now, let's talk about identity — not the philosophical kind, but the nitty-gritty, who's-who of customer data. Identity resolution serves as the building block on which good personalization must rest.
A core function of a CDP is to help resolve and stitch identifiers to a single customer record – or golden customer record. To understand your customers, you must be able to see how they have interacted with your brand — every browse session, every email open — and be able to pair this with their historical interactions like previous purchases.
In the enterprise world, identity can get very complex very quickly. It's crucial to have a CDP partner who can untangle the web of identifiers and stitch together a golden customer record. It's like playing detective but with fewer magnifying glasses and more flexibly customized identity business rules.
Beyond stitching together customer records, CDPs like Simon are also leaning into leveraging identity graphs to pair these customer records with more first-party identifiers.
For instance, products like Simon’s ID+ allows brands to identify more anonymous browsers that are actually known to significantly increase the reach of cart recovery campaigns.
And Simon’s Match+ appends additional HEMs and MAIDs to social campaigns to increase match rates in channels like Meta and Google. Expanding audiences and reach can provide immense (and quick) value to enterprise teams, especially when it comes to calculating ROAS and improving customer marketing metrics like CAC and LTV.
Personalization at scale
One of the most significant advantages of CDPs is their ability to facilitate personalized marketing at scale. By providing an intuitive interface for advanced audience segmentation, these platforms enable marketers to create highly tailored experiences for individual customers based on their preferences, behaviors, and past interactions.
Whether it's delivering personalized product recommendations, dynamic email content, or targeted advertising, CDPs empower enterprises to engage customers in more meaningful ways, ultimately driving conversions and fostering brand loyalty.
Launch personalized marketing campaigns faster
In marketing, timing is everything. CDPs allow marketers to create highly targeted and personalized audience segments in a fraction of the time compared to traditional methods.
These platforms offer intuitive interfaces and advanced segmentation capabilities that enable marketers to quickly identify relevant customer groups based on their preferences, behaviors, and past interactions. And, many CDPs, including Simon, use AI and ML to streamline processes across the entire org.
CDPs also provide real-time access to customer data and insights, enabling marketers to make data-driven decisions on the fly.
Whether it's monitoring campaign performance, tracking customer behavior, or identifying emerging trends, CDPs empower marketers with timely information that allows them to adapt and optimize their strategies in real-time. This agility is crucial in today's fast-paced digital landscape, where market conditions can change rapidly.
CDPs complement your MarTech stack
An ideal CDP partner will also help enterprise marketers better leverage the tools they already use. When enterprise teams are evaluating CDP tools, it’s important to understand how the CDP can integrate into the existing tech stack, and how it may help future-proof as your tech stack shifts over time.
Those audiences created and insights gleaned can then be deployed in any of the downstream tools already in use — ESPs like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, SMS platforms like Attentive, and paid media channels and partners like Meta, Google, and Liveramp.
The goal is to give customers the seamless experiences they expect across every touchpoint, from browsing a website to making a purchase in-store. CDPs play a crucial role in orchestrating these complex customer journeys, allowing marketers to map out and optimize the entire lifecycle—from awareness to advocacy.
Take the first step toward customer marketing success
It’s become abundantly clear to many enterprises that the ability to harness the power of data is critical to marketing success. Customer Data Platforms have emerged as essential tools for enterprise marketing teams, enabling them to unlock the full potential of their customer data and deliver personalized experiences at scale.
However, the CDP space (and marketing tech space as a whole) is very crowded and it can be tough to determine which CDP “flavor” is going to drive the most value for the organization.
Simon Data is not going to be the right fit for every brand. But for those that have invested in a cloud data warehouse like Snowflake, Big Query, or Redshift and are looking for better ways for the marketing team to access and leverage that data — and to drive value from that data quickly — the story quickly becomes compelling.
Looking toward the future of marketing, CDPs will remain a cornerstone of modern marketing strategies by helping businesses thrive in a competitive and challenging marketplace.
I, for one, love to see when enterprise marketing teams can break free from their data dilemmas and dive headfirst into new possibilities. Once they have better access to customer data and leverage an intuitive tool to create relevant and personalized campaigns, then the fun begin!
From there, it becomes a conversation of which use cases and campaigns will drive the most revenue and value for the business and we can finally move from obstacles to execution.
To see Simon Data in action, book a demo with us. If you’re just getting started with the CDP search, read our 2024 Buyer’s Guide.
