With consumers empowered to engage with a brand whenever and however they want, it is as vital as ever for the marketer to understand them in order to make a personalized connection. The result of that connection leads to increased engagement, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy, all great outcomes for both the brand and consumer.
“63% of marketers can’t assemble unified customer data” — Understanding CDP Users: CDP Institute Member Survey 2019
For that connection to happen, the marketer needs to understand the context of their interactions with the consumer, as well as the consumer’s preferences. The key ingredient to make that happen sounds simple: a single, accessible view of the customer. But getting to this point can be a challenge. According to Gartner Research, 58% of marketers indicate integrating customer data is a major obstacle in a multi-channel strategy, with 55% reporting augmenting customer profiles with relevant data as the next biggest challenge.
Combining the data into a single view
Customer data resides in systems like analytics, email, mobile, campaign management, point-of-sale, and social, which are not integrated, nor were designed to be integrated. A way to overcome the challenge of disparate systems is to consider a customer data platform (CDP), which the CDP Institute defines as “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” A CDP does more than just bring all of the data together; it provides marketers with a single, accessible, and actionable view that can be used to drive meaningful engagement with consumers.
At Cheetah Digital, we are excited that the CDP Institute recognizes the Cheetah Engagement Data Platform (EDP) as meeting the definition of a CDP. The Cheetah EDP has all of the features expected in a CDP, as well as most of the distinguishing features that meet the need for today’s marketer that desires to make meaningful connections. But you might be thinking, why do we call the Cheetah Engagement Data Platform an EDP instead of a CDP? For us, the answer to this question relates to how we can empower marketers to actually make marketing data actionable and it is fundamental to how we see the industry evolving.
Differentiating the Engagement Data Platform
What differentiates the Cheetah EDP from a traditional CDP is that it provides marketers with that holistic view of the customer, machine learning, native omnichannel touchpoints, and solutions that drive customer acquisition, loyalty, and retention. Together, these capabilities provide marketers with solutions to create value throughout the customer lifecycle, from acquiring customers to watching them become brand advocates.
In this recent blog post, my colleague Patrick Tripp touches on how the Cheetah EDP is different from a Customer Data Platform with capabilities such as:
- Enterprise data management
- Data transformations
- Audience segmentation
- Accessible and advanced analytics
- Integrated machine learning
- Streaming data ingestion
- Connectors framework
- Trigger engine
- Smart messaging
Together, these capabilities and many others will help you overcome challenges related to fragmented data, or disconnected touchpoint systems.
Lastly, the Cheetah EDP is a core component of the Cheetah Engagement Suite, which includes Cheetah Messaging, Cheetah Loyalty, and Cheetah Experiences. Together, these solutions uniquely combine delivering customer experiences at any point in the customer lifecycle, email, and other channels, with a robust data platform. The benefit is that marketers can take a data-driven approach to make connections with customers, through strategies that help them better engage with customers, encourage or reestablish loyalty, and deeper relationships.
For a little taste of how the EDP fits into the Customer Engagement Suite, take a look at this two-minute video. Data is at the heart of how we enable marketers to crush their marketing goals. It’s the lifeblood of everything we do.
