How do CDPs work? Are they really conquering the market? And why? Let’s see it in this article

The Customer Data Platform systems (or CDP) are now booming. In another article in the Business School in White Rabbit, we addressed the issue of what is a CDP and its usefulness . But before we take care of the advantages offered by platforms like this, we believe it is useful to resume at least one definition. From Wikipedia , for example, we assume that :

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a marketer- based management system . it creates a persistent , unified customer database that is accessible to other systems . Data is pulled from multiple sources , cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile . this structured data is then made available to other marketing systems . A CDP provides real-time segmentation for personalized marketing.

The CDP market is currently at $ 300 million industry and projected to reach $ 1 billion by 2019.

These are systems / software that create a unified customer database , combining data from multiple sources, creating a single user profile. The latter combines classic information from CRM with information from other sources, and then makes these profiles available to other applications.

The CDPs, as we will see later, offer advanced data analysis features, and are of great interest for companies that want to significantly develop the effectiveness of marketing actions .   According to the sources – such as the one cited above – we expect a strong growth of the CDP market for 2019, reaching a turnover of one billion dollars .

A standard model

Before dealing with the Customer Data Platform: advantages (and comparisons) , as the title of this article states, it is good to underline that – in this context of great interest for CDP software platforms – it is easy to understand the creation of a standard by OASIS (which stands for Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards ). It is a non-profit consortium working on development, convergence and adoption of open standards in various areas including security, internet of things, energy, content management and has members of the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

As part of the CDP, OASIS is working on a standard , not yet definitive, with the aim of establishing a common and standardized set of characteristics of a CDP. In particular, the standard aims to define functions and methods to support the management of customized user experiences on channels, markets and heterogeneous systems, simplifying management, integration and interoperability between the various solutions that provide services such as CRM , Big Data , Machine Learning and Digital Marketing .

Typical use cases are:

• learn more about customers , prospects and visitors in general of their digital channels (site, social, …);
• provide personalized user experiences on sites and apps ;
• comply with the rules imposed by the GDPR ;
• have total control of their analytics and manage advanced and integrated reporting;
• avoid having to manage many different tools , with an increase in costs, time and the impossibility to perform cross-analysis on the data;
• segment your leads in an advanced way ;
• perform actions based on events and advanced rules .

The standard provides that CDPs can export data to other systems to manage actions: for example, through the CDP individual a segment of users on which to conduct a mail marketing campaign and the CDP is interfaced with an external mail marketing tool for carrying out the sending action.

Existing CDPs: an overview

An official implementation of the standard, called Unomi under the control of the Apache foundation, is currently underway . Unomi implements a series of APIs to be integrated into other software platforms that can provide the complete overview of functionalities useful for an advanced management of their business. The company that mainly deals with the development of Unomi also offers its own commercial platform that integrates a series of functionalities, such as the management of forms , the production of contents for newsletters and landing pages and connectors to other systems (eg Mailchimp ). The pricing for a basic installation (only possible on-premise and not in the cloud ), which includes 1 server and 3 software users , CDP, form and content editor is forty two thousand dollars / year, excluding connectors to other systems ( which cost about fifteen thousand dollars each). Adding other options, server redundancy, etc … it’s easy to get much higher figures.

White Rabbit versus CDP: a comparison

What does White Rabbit offer compared to Unomi and, in general, compared to the CDP market offer ? Definitely much more at a significantly lower cost. At least three aspects must be considered:

• CDP and marketing functionality
• Cloud / SaaS offer
• Integration with other systems

Concerning the strictly CDP functionalities, White Rabbit covers them extensively as it includes the collection of information from multiple sources , their integration into a single database, the advanced analysis tools and an effective segmentation thanks to real-time data filters. The marketing automation can also react in real time to events and can take advantage of advanced filters. All the functionalities are already integrated with each other so it is not necessary to develop interfaces to other systems (as provided by the CDP standard) to offer GDPR management functions, content editing, sending newsletters and so on. In general, the functions offered are much wider than the competition, as the platform integrates tools for project management , ticketing , CRM , marketing and so on.

White Rabbit is also a cloud platform that leverages Amazon AWS infrastructures : it does not require on-premises installation of a server, its configuration and maintenance, management costs, backup and update, as well as network costs for connection, data collection and management of other marketing functions.

Concerning the integration with other systems, White Rabbit integrates a series of connectors that allow interfacing with other software systems. Furthermore, it is possible to export data from White Rabbit to Excel format and further export functionality is being developed.

PS A Zapier connector is about to be released, which will greatly expand the amount of software that can be connected.