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A Customer Data Platform provides a holistic view of customers based on their interactions with the products and services. Such a tool is important to form a unified customer database and create better marketing efforts. The CDP industry profit recorded a profit of around two billion U.S. dollars, with an impressive hike of 25% from its earlier value in 2021. Whether it is for customer retention or acquiring new customers - today, all kinds of marketers use CDPs to accumulate customer data under one umbrella and make decisions based on that.

But how to choose a reliable platform? This article provides a glance at all the things you need to check before you find the perfect CDP tool for your business.

A Complete Checklist for Choosing the Best CDP

Purchasing CDPs is a big investment. So, before you pick your choice of CDP, go through this list and ensure that the chosen tool performs all the below-mentioned functions smoothly and effectively.

• Data unification
  Businesses receive customer data from various sources - online, offline, adtech, and martech stacks. A reputed CDP integrates the available data and offers a unified data library. By using smart integrations, these platforms also help in tracking specific customer activities such as buying patterns, purchase history, etc. CDPs should also be able to segment the customer data based on certain customer attributes. The ultimate aim of your selected CDP should be ingesting as well as activating data in real-time.
  
  
  



• Data standardization
  Developing and presenting a wholesome view of customer data is one of the primary tasks of an efficient CDP. While working on primary data, CDPs should make the fullest use of the available third-party data to generate further information. As a part of marketing automation, CDPs should develop a centralized customer data repository. This will help your business to set up data standardization and be able to work on the data, analyze and process it.
• Customer profile creation
  Having rich and constantly updated customer profiles helps businesses to improve their marketing strategies and provide customized products and services when it comes to actual transactions. A good CDP should be able to create in-depth customer profiles combining primary and third-party data gathered from different channels.
  
  Through unification, a CDP should clean, validate and enrich customer profiles with recent and updated information. CDPs should make use of four kinds of data - behavioral, descriptive, qualitative, and identity - to gather raw information and convert them to accessible customer profiles.
• Equipped with analytics features
  Businesses invest in their marketing and sales efforts to enrich customer retention. However, to make this possible, firms should be able to extract deep and valuable insights from customer data. This is where CDPs with in-built features like advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning can help. With a powerful CDP, you can create separate dashboards containing appropriate metrics. This will help to streamline the entire process of data collection and maintenance.
  
  
  
• Provide real-time data
  While data recording and data maintenance are undoubtedly helpful for observing patterns, what businesses often incline towards is real-time data, data that reflects the current time - the ‘now’. So, the CDP that you would be choosing should provide you with fresh data to work upon. For this, the CDP should be able to receive real-time data from various channels such as social media, email communication, Data Management, and Customer Relationship Management platforms.
• Privacy and security handling
  In the business world of today, privacy and security concerns assume the topmost priority. As an efficient business promoting customer security, your company should buy a customer data platform that is 100% secure. So, the CDP you choose must align with the standard data and privacy compliance requirements.
  
  
  
  
  
  When you choose Springwood data engineering service, you can capitalize on your user data and create a strong and well-integrated customer journey. From data pipeline management to custom integrations, we specialize in applying the best practices to drive your business further.
• Easy and hassle-free implementation
  What remains to be done after you have chosen your CDP is the actual implementation and integration of the tool with other platforms. So, make sure that your CDP solution is backed with a reliable network of ecosystems. Connect with your internal stakeholders, especially the IT department and check how the CDP syncs with the existing tools. Find out about those tools that require integration with the CDP and discuss how the overall system can be made more effective.
• Audience segmentation
  CDPs can take marketing automation to a whole new level by creating custom audience segmentation based on the different kinds of data it acquires. Companies with custom audience profiles can channel their marketing efforts better and create more personalized advertisements targeted to specific sets of audiences.
  
  
  
  
  
  From personalizing emails to targeting prospective customers on social media, CDPs play a big role in managing a diverse audience and interacting with them in a better manner.
• Quick adaptability
  A CDP with a higher rating for adaptability and flexibility is definitely a good choice. Such a customer data platform connects perfectly with the existing ecosystem and gives zero threat to the tech stack already in use. It is recommended to always go for the CDP that involves easy integration with the rest of the tools. This ensures less pressure on the internal business teams to catch up with foreign software in minimum time.

Final Thoughts!

Data drives all kinds of companies. So, choosing the right CDP will help you make the most out of the data available. And the valuable insights gained from these data packets will help you build better, scalable systems. Therefore, to understand your customers and their interaction with your brand, choose a reliable CDP that perfectly aligns with your business goals and requirements.

With Springwood data engineering service, increase the potential of your business to build a strong customer experience based on the data acquired. Take the first step towards building a thriving community of happy and satisfied customers.

Keywords - Customer data platform, data engineering, customer retention, growth and marketing, customer data, customer experience

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