Customer data platforms (CDP) are software solutions that collect, unify, and create customer profiles utilized by different platforms and marketers to improve their advertising efforts. CDPs connect customer data from numerous sources, such as e-commerce websites, to create a 360-degree view of their profile. Third-party tools can then use these customer profiles for marketing automation tools to execute and analyze various marketing activities.
With each stage in a company’s growth, customers have always expected more from the company. The experienced personalized service and expect that from any business as of today. Along with relevant communication, brands must ensure they provide a consistent customer experience across various channels. This increases the need to have well-maintained and insightful customer data. The solution for most of these companies is to use a CDP that provides them with the right kind of data.
Choosing a CDP may not be as easy as it sounds and requires careful studying and observation of multiple customer data platforms and the functions they possess. What’s the company decides that it requires a CDP, it needs to determine which vendor to choose from. The sheer number of vendors in the market mix this process all the more difficult and necessitates a buying process plan. The requirements and use cases will differ for each brand. Marketers can start by defining their use cases, matching requirements to potential vendors, evaluating vendors, and finally coming up with a decision.
To come up with this list of top 10 CDPs that brands can choose from, we have leveraged a research report from Straits Research, a provider of industry and company market research reports. This report comprises 25 top CDP offerings, and we have shortlisted ten that we think are the best of the best.
According to Straits Research, the top 10 customer data platforms (in no particular order of preference) in the market are listed below.
- SAP
- Oracle CS Marketing
- NGDATA
- Salesforce
- Adobe
- Tealium
- Segment
- AgilOne
- Ascent360
- Zaius
SAP
Logo by SAP as seen on the Website.
The management of customer data holistically and responsibly is essential to brands these days. The SAP Customer Profile is a CDP that enables users to transform a range of first-party customer data, such as preferences, account status, consent, and identity, into a unified customer profile. These customer profiles can then be orchestrated, managed, and analyzed across a business from a centralized hub.
This CDP provides users with the ability to view individual customer profile reports, which then appropriate information about every customer quickly and efficiently. The user interface is clean and provides a list of users or customers on one side and their detailed information about the user profile on the other.
Oracle CX Marketing
Logo by Oracle CX Marketing as seen on the Website.
Formerly known as Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle CX Marketing is a CDP designed to enable marketers to plan and execute automated marketing campaigns through display search, mobile, video advertising, and email, while delivering a personalized customer experience.
It helps brands orchestrate exceptional campaigns for the B2B segment and allows users to create and implement sophisticated and straightforward marketing strategies across all channels. This will enable users to engage buyers by providing personal, meaningful experiences. It also allows brands to personalized Communications at scale, thereby ensuring significant customer interaction.
NGDATA
Logo by NGDATA as seen on the Website.
The NGDATA Lily CDP, a Hadoop-based platform, was initially developed by Outerthought and acquired and supported by NGDATA, a Belgian company. It combines AI, data connectivity, and inbuilt Analytics to provide one-to-one personalization. The ‘Customer DNA’ feature allows users to produce the most inside for customer experiences. Real-time interaction enables users to engage with customers on the channels they prefer with relevant communication.
It allows marketers to master customer experience at scale by providing the power to manage all campaigns on a single platform, without raising multiple IT service requests. Its ‘Intelligent Engagement Platform’ offers capabilities that far exceed the basic CDP.
Salesforce
Logo by Salesforce as seen on the Website.
The Salesforce CDP is a leading real-time personalization and interaction management solution that enables brands to transform one-to-one engagement dreams across channels into reality. Interaction Studio helps businesses gain a comprehensive view of each customer and prospect by combining advanced machine learning and in-depth behavioral analytics with data from existing sources.
This CDP leverage is data to deliver the most relevant and individualized experiences during ki interaction moments in the customer journey. It offers real-time personalization and interaction management, both of which are seen as the future of marketing. It is built to empower businesses by synthesizing disparate data, extracting insides, and facilitating decisions to engage audience members indeed.
Adobe
Logo by Adobe as seen on the Website.
Adobe’s ‘Real-Time Customer Data Platform’ CDP is a service that is built on the Adobe Experience Platform and helps users in combining known and unknown customer data in real-time. It provides holistic, up to date that users can access in any channel to create correct personalization.
It provides dynamic profiles complete with advanced privacy and identity controls, real-time data activation via pre-built APIs that deliver personalized experiences, and seamless integration with existing tech, among other stellar features.
Tealium
Logo by Tealium as seen on the Website.
The Tealium Universal Data Hub platform houses its customer data platform, the AudienceStream CDP. This platform collects fragmented data from multiple, widespread sources and unifies it as one, allowing brands to gather, interpret, analyze, and act on the available customer data. Additionally, it rigorously safeguards the security and privacy of sensitive customer information.
This CDP allows clients to create custom rules for customer profiles, establish identities across channels and devices, and act in real-time. It offers segmentation and data enrichment capabilities that drive real-time marketing by utilizing the tools that users already possess.
Segment
Logo by Segment as seen on the Website.
The Segment CDP provides a single API, allowing users to integrate all of their marketing stack tools at one time instead of having to do it manually. It also provides users with tools for validation and protection of customer data. This platform is used by enterprise-level companies such as IBM and Petco, retail companies such as Peloton, and SaaS companies such as Zendesk.
It is a San Fransisco-based data platform company whose primary goal is to make integration smooth and seamless. It provides users with real-time monitoring, raw data access for manual analytics and interpretation, and dynamic UI with modifiable dashboards.
AgilOne
Logo by AgilOne as seen on the Website.
This customer data platform is meant explicitly for B2C companies and offers ‘360 profile,’ wherein users can give customer interaction. The platform cleanses, standardizes, and enriches customer profiles automatically, thereby helping users deliver consistent experiences. This CDP provides AI and machine learning, identity resolution, and online and offline data unification capabilities.
Notable users of the AgilOne CDP are Lululemon Athletica, and Tumi, among others. As per their website, AgilOne is the only CDP that “is built to support advanced enterprise needs, with the most flexible and full-featured platform on the market.”
Ascent360
Logo by Ascent360 as seen on the Website.
The Ascent360 CDP unifies a brand’s disconnected data sources to help them make informed marketing decisions and execute revenue impacting campaigns. According to Ascent360’s website, this platform, along with the underlying software, also includes a true partnership and the services required to ensure success.
Ascent360 provides each brand with a client success manager, backed by data scientists and accomplished marketing strategists collaborating with brands to drive business growth. It centralizes disconnected data sources and provides a single data source with a 360-degree view of every customer and prospect.
Zaius
Logo by Zaius as seen on the Website.
Zaius stitches together all customer data that a brand already has, which provides complete visibility into each customer, their history with a brand, and a real understanding of the customer’s journey. This CDP creates a predictive model based on all existing data to uncover behaviors and predictions that you didn’t know existed.
It provides insights as to which customers will purchase next, which products need better marketing, and pinpoint the prospects prepared to increase their order. This, in a sense, is supercharged segmentation at its best. Zaius allows marketers to build and deploy marketing campaigns, integrate them into the marketing systems of their choice.
Conclusion
The availability of customer data in one centralized location saves marketers, and other employees valued time and money in an organized and systemic manner. Brands can create personalized marketing campaigns that increase conversions, maximize ROI, and create delighted customers with a united view of customers and their data. Other than just making data available in a centralized location, customer data platforms also offer marketing teams with relevant insides needed to run marketing campaigns. They also help organizations predict which future move will be e optimum on an individualistic customer level.
