Must-have features and capabilities in an enterprise CDP

A customer data platform (CDP) is one of the most impactful investments you can make to support your sales, marketing, and customer support teams. But it’s important to remember that not all CDPs are made equally. As with any other major software decision, it’s important to take the time to weigh your options and make the selection that is right for your business. 

Not sure how to evaluate the CDPs you are considering? We recommend taking a capability- and feature-focused approach, looking for the CDP that offers the most impactful functions.

Below, we take a quick look at what a CDP is and how it compares against other martech options you might be considering. Then, we offer a list of must-have features and capabilities that we think you should prioritize as you evaluate CDPs. 

What is a CDP?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a type of marketing software designed to centralize and unify customer data from multiple sources to make the data easier for businesses to use and understand. 

By bringing all relevant customer data to one central location, CDPs make it possible to create a single, comprehensive view of each customer — which you can then use to facilitate more effective marketing, sales, and customer support strategies. 

While not always required, CDPs usually sit on top of a cloud data warehouse (CDW) like Snowflake, which is typically responsible for centralizing, organizing, and cleaning the data to make it more usable.

CDP vs. other software options

Businesses often discuss customer data platforms alongside other software options, which often share similarities with CDPs, but it’s important to understand the differences that exist between them:

Customer relationship manager (CRM): CRMs are designed to act as a record of all the different ways a customer has interacted with your business. This includes keeping track of emails sent (and opened), calls, support tickets, and more, alongside contact information and specific other relevant details. They are used primarily for sales and sales enablement, and do not contain the full breadth of customer data typically found in a CDP.

Email service provider (ESP): An ESP is a solution businesses use to facilitate email activities. While functionality can vary significantly from ESP to ESP, these solutions typically make it possible to design and send emails, track performance, and manage email lists — functions that can often be achieved with a high-quality CDP.

Data management platform (DMP): DMPs offer short-term data storage for tasks like marketing segmentation. This includes storing, organizing, and managing customer data from multiple sources. They are not as effective as CDPs at facilitating long-term customer relationships. 

CDP features and capabilities to look for

As you begin evaluating CDP options and narrowing down your short list, we recommend you look for a solution with the following capabilities:

1. Enterprise-level integration 

Your CDP should connect smoothly with your existing tech stack, maintaining bi-directional data flows and supporting real-time API calls. It should adapt to your custom data models rather than forcing you to change your architecture. While there is no way to know your future data needs, you should be able to add and remove data sources easily and safely without a fixed data schema in the CDP. 

2. Customer 360s

The real power of a CDP lies in its ability to compile information about your customers on an individual level. This deep understanding of each of your customers makes true 1:1 personalized marketing possible — but only if the CDP presents the data in a usable form. 

That’s why we recommend looking for a CDP that can generate Customer 360s for you using customer data. These profiles offer a unified view of each customer, empowering more effective marketing and sales efforts at every customer journey stage. 

3. Privacy and security

By its very nature, a CDP will contain a lot of information about your customers — potentially sensitive information like their contact information, date of birth, payment information, transaction history, and more. 

It’s important to keep this data safe to facilitate customer trust and ensure compliance with various privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. With this in mind, look for a CDP that has layers of security — like encryption, access management, and monitoring — throughout its platform. Bonus points if it carries certifications like SOC 2. 

4. Email marketing

While not every CDP offers email marketing functionality, many do. This makes it possible for you to replace your business’s email service provider while you deploy your CDP — eliminating redundancies in your martech stack, streamlining your operations, and saving funds to be used elsewhere in your budget. After all, why pay for a separate tool or service when you can handle email — and all customer communications — from a single centralized system? 

5. No-code segmentation

How easy is it to create audiences and segments within your CDP? If it seems like it requires a master’s degree in data science just to spin up a segment, we’d argue that that isn’t the right choice for most businesses. Instead, look for a no- or low-code option that empowers your marketing and sales teams to create the audiences and segments they need, when they need them — without waiting on support from your tech team to make them happen.

6. Multichannel orchestration

If you’re like most businesses, you communicate with your customers in multiple channels — like social, email, SMS messaging, and the web. And while that’s great — it is, after all, the key to meeting your customers where they actually are — it can get complicated pretty quickly if you’re managing each journey in a separate tool. Look for a CDP capable of orchestrating campaigns and outreach across channels.

7. Predictive insights

Actually putting your customer data to use means you’ll need a way to parse and understand it — without combing through each individual profile. The good news? With AI and machine learning, it’s possible to quickly scale your efforts to make database-wide predictions about which customers are most likely to make an initial purchase, a follow-up purchase, or who might be about to drop off. It’s also possible to leverage these predictive insights to generate relevant product recommendations based on what you actually know about your customers. Look for a CDP that empowers you to make these robust AI-based predictions. 

8. Service & support beyond technology

Look for a CDP partner who understands your marketing goals and provides implementation expertise and ongoing strategic guidance. They should demonstrate a clear ROI methodology and maintain robust data security practices. Moreover, they should be able to support you beyond the initial implementation. Services should support you throughout the contract lifecycle based on your needs and goals. If a vendor’s services are done after a speedy implementation, consider how you plan to manage the platform and new and ongoing initiatives.

Simon Data has it all

Having a hard time finding a CDP that has all of the features and functionalities we discussed above? The Simon CDP’s got it all. With the Simon CDP, you can:

• Generate comprehensive, accurate Customer 360s to power next-level marketing
• Trust that your customer's data is safe and secure thanks to Simon Data’s SOC 2 certification and adherence to GDPR and CCPA
• Design, implement, and track the performance of your email campaigns, including building email lists from your database
• Segment users via a no-code, easy-to-use interface that was designed with marketers in mind — not data scientists
• Orchestrate true multi-channel campaigns that empower you to meet your customers where they are
• Make predictive insights about your customers capable of powering your marketing messaging and sales efforts

We know that many brands have valuable customer data but lack the team capacity, specialized knowledge, or even the time to transform it into revenue-driving campaigns. Even with powerful tools like CDPs, technology alone isn't enough to deliver results.

If you’re looking for help strategizing your marketing campaigns, we offer lifecycle services that combine our AI platform with expert guidance from Simon. As a marketer, you probably know what campaigns you want to run, but we break down the barriers to getting them out the door.  

We provide the extra resources, specialized knowledge, and hands-on support you need to drive measurable results faster.

Ready to learn more? Take a free virtual tour of Simon’s platform today.