CRM Vs CDP: Differences, Similarities, Applications & Use Cases

You probably know about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools quite well. After all, it originated as a concept in the 80s, and as a product in the 90s. You may know some things about CDPs – even though you’d be surprised to know that they’ve been around for more than a decade.

And while you might think that CDP is just one of the (multiple) acronyms in your life, there are a few firms who’ve no doubts about CDPs whatsoever. Among them is the world’s No.1 CRM, Salesforce, which is developing its own CDP – earlier Customer 360 Audiences, now simply Salesforce CDP – by leaps and bounds.

Then, there are the good folks at Adobe and Oracle, who are on the bandwagon too.

Why?

In this article, we’ll answer that. As well as give you a detailed analysis of their differences, similarities, and areas of overlap. After reading through, you’ll know which tasks they’re best suited to, and which one (or two!) will help you increase conversions and drive ROI. Plus, we’ve got some illustrative use cases to explain it all perfectly.

So read on! And yes, it’s a long read. So get comfortable. Or,  skip to the TLDR part at the end of each section. And get your hands on the pdf version for future reference.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

  1. How Customer Experience is Driving the Unstoppable Growth of CDPs & CRMs
  • What is Customer Experience (CX)
  • Why is CX the Gamechanger Today?
  • CX from a ‘Personal’ Perspective 

How Customer Experience is Driving the Unstoppable Growth of CDPs & CRMs

What is Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience is defined as how a customer feels about your brand across the sum total of interactions with you. It’s about how welcome, cared for and catered to they feel with your product, your people, as well as all your digital interfaces & touchpoints.

Why CX is a Gamechanger Today?

According to a Gartner survey, 75% of companies can prove that higher customer satisfaction increase revenues. This growth is driven by higher retention rates or a greater lifetime value. As Raj Gautam, CEO, QL Tech, says, ‘Simply creating a better product is not enough. You need to constantly deliver more value to your customers.’

Delivering value means providing the right content to your audience for their stage in the buyer’s cycle. Give them timely assistance right where and when they need it. Keep your ear to the ground, and get the right feedback to continuously improve your product. Keep up with their changing behaviour and buying habits. And make them feel that they’re well cared for in general.

Giving CX that ‘Personal’ Touch 

In short, game-changing CX is all about providing that personal touch. Every interaction, message, ad, and solution that you deliver must seem like it was made just for them. And the rewards of doing so are immense.  

86% of shoppers will pay extra for an extra nice CX. And a more personalised experience has triggered 49% to make impulse purchases. Understanding your customer better and delivering just the right trigger will pay rich dividends.

 

CDP –  What it Does, and How

  1.  collect, understand and act on data to influence customer decisions whenever the customer is ready to act. Some customers may be looking for real-time interactions, and some may want to take things slow. Based on data
  2. Breaks down silos – presents a unified view of the customer and deliver a uniform CX across channels
  3. a wide variety of integrations that can unify data from disparate channels as seamlessly as possible. Every data channel should be connected
  4. The CDP should be data source-neutral unifies all customer touchpoints and makes data useful to every team and every technology within the enterprise. Rich customer data within the supply chain, call centres and other places outside the shopping cart should be utilised.

 

CRM Vs CDP Vs DMP

CRM is an operational system for sales and customer service agents; it has detailed data but isn’t designed to let other systems work with that data.

DMP holds summarized data used primarily to support ad campaigns. 

In short: big data and data warehouse overlap with CDP while CRM and DMP are pretty distinct and you’ll probably need both.

 

CRM Vs CDP in Detail

Rating CRMs and CDPs on the Most Critical Components of CX:

  1. Enabling elegant, painless interactions (66%)
  2. Providing speedy service (66%)
  3. Ensuring that customers feel understood (65%)
  4. Making relevant information easy to find (63%)
  5. Being consistent and connected across channels (63%)

 

Applications/Advantages of CRMs

Applications/Advantages of CDPs

True CDP can align with data compliance goals In the wake of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act

The best CDPs bring all customer data and preferences into a central repository, meaning opt-in/opt-outs are easy to manage, customer data is easy to eliminate completely and locating all of a customer’s data is a fast process — all critical elements to complying with modern privacy regulations.

CDP buyers should look for organizations that already prioritize data privacy best practices

AI-driven personalization is the wave of the future. Right now, the building blocks of this are being laid by CDPs that can collect and normalize data in real time. In the future, this means chatbots that can have tailored conversations with customers, but also soak up their behaviour through the buyer journey and make decisions based on that data in the future.

machine learning-enabled CDPs powering real-time, tailored decisions, marketers will also approach testing in a whole new way. Through automation, marketers will be able to more quickly and strategically test the next steps and communication methods and gather smarter data around the results. 

 

Top CDPs

It has been interpreted in different ways by different vendors and even users. So, choosing a CDP software is never about the ‘best CDP’ in the literal sense of the word but it’s about the ‘the best CDP solution for you.’

AM I READY FOR A CDP?

Your Martech stack was built organically over time, without a clear PoA, maybe even before CDPs existed.

Victim of cloud vendors who’ve overpromised and underdelivered.

In house, the IT department has delayed or built inefficient, poorly integrated software systems.

Your data is in silos, and different tools are unable to access all of your customer data.

You have constant sources of data that will not dry up

You have all the data definitions/business rules required to make sense of the data

You need to make decisions in real-time.. You handle large volumes of data, your customer’s value personlaised one-on-one communication,  

 

You’re having trouble building a consistent, relevant, cohesive and personalized ‘multi-touchpoint customer experience’

You are unable to track and measure conversion effectively across the complex marketing mix

You are finding it hard to manage dynamic customer databases- from data privacy and unsubscribes to moving conversions from the prospect to the customer workflow in real time

Omer Artun, CEO and Founder of AgilOne adds: you are probably ready for a CDP if:

You have a significant number of customers who frequently interact with your brand across channels (the greater the number of customers, interactions, and transactions, the more value a CDP will provide)

Your company gets a lot of value from 1:1 interactions (e.g., increased LTV, response rate, ROAS, etc.)

There are multiple customer profiles across multiple systems, but you could benefit from a master customer record

You need a single customer view in real-time, so all operating systems can have access to real-time customer data across different interaction points, devices, and applications

Beyond the pure customer insights, the right CDP can offer, marketers must also realize that a CDP solution can help future-proof their operations and keep pace with the evolution of technology like AI for years to come.

% of companies that are going to be competing solely on customer experience.. Gartner!

CX -> marketing + sales + service

Not good to outsource CX initiatives

 

The success of digital transformation will not be measured by how much companies invest in innovative technologies, but by how well they use those technologies to elevate and maintain the customer experience. 

In the experience economy, transactions that used to occur face-to-face are being rapidly replaced by digitally-enabled interactions, person-to-machine engagements or, even, machine-to-machine experiences across a diverse and dynamic spectrum of digital gateways or digitally-aided, in-person situations.  

Customers knowingly or inadvertently give you their data – the behavioural, financial, relationship, location, and personal identity information that gets exchanged – knowingly or not – in return for an ever-improving, loyalty-building customer experience. 

 

capture and analyze interaction data in real-time

brands face the problem of stitching together fragmented data from interactions that stretch across email, web, mobile apps, call centres, chatbots, in-store transactions and more. To meet customer expectations for contextually appropriate responses, companies need unified, actionable data for which legacy technologies like data warehouses, data lakes, and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are just not up to the task. 

In the ever-expanding digital ecosystem, customers engage across multiple channels at any time of day or night from virtually any location or device and expect a brand to respond with an immediate personalized response.      

delivers the most current intel about a unique customer from – structured and unstructured; real-time and historical; anonymous and identifiable – data that is collected from multiple sources. 

 

A CDP is an evolution of something all modern marketers (should be) familiar with – a marketing database. In this case, a CDP is a marketing database, purpose-built for the API-driven world and ‘pick and mix’ marketing technology stacks in mind, while also allowing for the integration of offline sources and legacy database and infrastructure”. This gives you some idea of who could use a CDP

 

WHAT BASICS NEED TO BE IN PLACE BEFORE INVESTING IN A CDP?

We identified the symptoms, diagnosed the problem and prescribed a good strong CDP as the possible cure. But –  have you checked for allergic reactions?

It appears that true, data-driven personalization across all touchpoints and throughout the customer’s journey would be difficult- if not impossible – without a CDP.  So, if that is your goal, and you have clarity on exactly where you are stuck with using your customer data more effectively, you should be ready for a serious investment decision. But it’s not all about what you don’t have. You also need to think about what you do have in place today for a CDP to deliver tomorrow.

 

Consider these:

  1. A plan: document your journey and plan: what are the realistic expectations and outcomes along with milestones for the CDP investment? Who are the people accountable and who are the decision-makers?  What will your KPIs and metrics be? What will you prioritize in case there is too much data?
  2. Data: you need some amount of ongoing customer data from multiple sources with a reasonable level or capability for integration to be in place before CDP can work to move you forward. In essence, you should be at least at the bottom of the pyramid in the Graphic above. Even if it’s unconnected, siloed and inaccessible, you still need the inflow of high-quality data from multiple sources.
  3. Data skills: you don’t need the tech chops of a data warehousing expert but some analytic and application experience is required within the marketing team to manage and own the CDP project, right from the evaluation and requirement mapping stage to regular use post-deployment, and of course the turbulent deployment stage in the middle. Get the right people on the team before moving to the next stage.
  4. Management and user buy-in: it’s unlikely you will get a budget without management buy-in, but don’t forget adoption- will the users- the people that make up your marketing team – be able to accept this level of integration, transparency and measurability?
  5. Marketing Automation: you need a fairly mature marketing automation solution or stack in place for optimal CDP outcomes. Having connected and real-time data in place won’t be much good if you don’t have a robust outbound/ inbound marketing automation system in place to use the data and execute personalized campaigns.
  6. Integration capability: for CDP to deliver, data needs to flow. Ensure you have checked with internal experts on the integration capabilities of existing solutions and what it would take to get the data flowing both ways, as well as plug in the analytics solution.
  7. Compliance: with GDPR and other data protection data privacy laws in effect or due to come into effect soon, a unified customer view will go a long way in ensuring compliance. It is useful to understand the compliance requirements for your industry and geography and figure out whether and how a CDP Course Changes Build Customer Loyalty

 

According to Gartner, a course-changing digital experience leads customers to shift their perspective or approach and begin to take confident steps toward their goal. A positive course change can impact brand preference by 37% and behavioural advocacy by 54%.

“When customers do something different with confidence after a digital experience, that creates a lasting brand impression and inspires customers to share their memorable experience with others,” said Ms LaRocca-Cerrone.

 

Self-Reflective Learning Drives Course Changes

Customers’ self-reflective learning during a digital experience has 2x the impact on driving customers’ course changes, compared to user experience functionalities. This is because customers change course when they feel empowered and ready to do something different, not because of a slick or intuitive user interface. “To trigger these valuable customer course changes, CMOs must invest in building a new class of digital experiences that slows customers down at key junctures and rewards their self-reflection,” added Ms LaRocca-Cerrone.  

How to Use Customer Analytics to Grow Your Business?

No business in the world can undermine the value of customer analytics. It not only helps businesses to make informed decisions, but it can help them build their entire customer lifecycle for their brand.

Now some might be wondering what customer analytics is. Well, it’s the collection, processing and analysis of customer information to gain insights into customer behaviour. As for why you need customer analytics? Well, this goes without saying, there more you know about your customers, the better your business can prepare itself to attract, convert and develop a long-lasting relationship with them.

Businesses use various tools to gather customer business analytics effectively. In this article, we are going to discuss all the steps involved and why customer analytics is necessary for your bottom line.

 

How can you collect and store customer analytics data?

The way your business collects and stores customer information makes an immense impact as it paces the way towards how can use the data as effectively as possible.

Data collection

The first step is figuring out ways to collect data for this your marketing teams can use Google Analytics to collect customer information such as the behaviour of visitors to your business website.

There are other tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Optimizely that work just as well as Google Analytics.

Data sorting

The data that you have collected is mostly unstructured, you need a way to sort it and direct it for further analysis. A customer data platform (CDP) can be very helpful in doing this, will help you do this. CDP directs your data to the place where it needs to be. 

CDPs connect multiple tools and ensure the data collected is standardised. Properly sorted data is much easier to sort and analyse.

Data storage

Now that you have your customer data all sorted your CDP needs to send the data for storage in a data warehouse where it’s unified. Redshift is one of the most popular data warehouses among users, but there are plenty of others like BigQuery and Postgres.

Once you have selected the data warehouse that you’re going to use to store your data, now’s the time to start that process of customer analytics. 

Data analysis

Lastly, you’ll need some way to analyze your data with business intelligence tools like Mode Analytics, Looker, or Tableau. But there one thing that you should note is that these tools are that they require specific knowledge of SQL. 

In case you are not proficient in SQL, you can also consider having a look at a tool like Chartio.

Need for customer analytics for your business

Customer analytics will help every department within your company, especially when it comes to building highly personalised, timely marketing campaigns.

Customer journey analytics can also help your sales team understand your customers’ behaviour to help them reduce your sales cycle. Your development team can use customer analytics to build a better product as per customers’ preferences.

Similarly, the marketing teams can use customer analytics to streamline your marketing funnel more so that your audiences convert more effectively.

Summary

Today’s well-known brands have an immense understanding of their customer analytics. If you want to take your business to the next level by creating a more personalised experience for your customers, you need to take the time to build a customer analytics infrastructure.

If you have any questions or need help setting up your customer analytics pipeline, please feel free to book a 30 minutes free session with us, and we will try our best to help you out.

Cheers!!

Why CRM is the perfect choice for Marketing Automation?

Marketing is more than attracting people, it’s about creating value within your brand so they can relate to your offerings and approach you themselves. This way you can create long-lasting relationships with your customer and get returning business from them.

Needless it used to require a lot of effort from cross-functional teams to implement optimum marketing strategies. However, with recent technological advancements, it’s possible to automate the majority of your marketing campaigns, and one of the bests tools for marketing automation is a customer relationship platform (CRM).

In this article, we are going to discuss how the CRM platform help in streamlining your business’s automated marketing endeavours, so without further ado let’s get started.

What is customer relationship management software?

CRM is a marketing automation software, designed to take care of all your major customer relations needs, and automate crucial elements within your business. It plays the role of an ideal secretary. It is constantly working for the betterment of your marketing strategies, marketing designs, customer feedback loops, and more.

Some of its major functions include historically tracking historical customer data, including dates and notes of phone conversations, past purchase records, and email interactions as they proceed through the buyer’s journey. Using tagging logic the CRM applies tags on the users when they take certain actions such as adding items to their wishlist or filling out a form and launches email campaigns to direct the leads back into your sales funnel.

Why CRM is the best choice for marketing automation?

The CRM has a wide range of benefits that elevate your automated marketing capabilities such as:

Reduces chances of Human Error

When businesses have an outdated system or process in place for lead tracking, the probability of human error that comes with managing the shortcomings increases which might lead to prospects slipping through the cracks. CRMs marketing automation enables your sales team to have the right tools to close a deal.

Unify Your Database Management

The CRM provides all the user’s information in one place, Marketing teams don’t have to go out of their way to forage customer profile information and instead are able to prepare to approach leads and prospects based on unified data management.

Provide Consistent Messaging

The marketing communication that affects the customer’s experience can be aligned when engaging with the client. It’s not as much of a challenge to provide consistent messaging when you have all the contextual information available in CRM.

Lastly…

The CRM is truly a wonderful platform fully capable of automating all your marketing endeavours. However, to unlock its full potential, you need support from professional digital marketers like QL Tech having over a decade of experience in CRM implementation and customisation.

In case you need help in CRM customisation or have any questions regarding CRMs, please feel free to book a free 30 minutes session with us and we’ll try our best to help you out

Cheers!!

Converting Traffic into Leads Might be Harder Than you Think

Having a beautiful website with great content isn’t enough your website’s design should be in such a way that your leads get registered efficiently. The first step would be to start off with high-demand generation campaigns that generate leads.

The aim of the marketing team for the business is to procure as many leads as that successfully convert to loyal customers who bring repeated business. Any professional digital marketer knows that they need to set up effective lead nurturing campaigns to gather more and more leads for your brand, However, its easier said than done,

This is why in this article we’re to be discussing some of the most powerful lead nurturing campaigns that will capture your audience’s attention, increase their lead scores, and boost the selling potential of your website and your sales team. 

So let’s get cracking, shall we!

1) Segment leads for targetted messages

Your brand might be offering multiple products or services but not all your leads may be interested in everything you’ve got. This is why engaging with your leads through personalised messaging is necessary. When you communicate with your audience with contextual messaging, the success rates of conversion increase exponentially.

Your business should implement a system for grouping your leads into targeted segments. This would allow you to focus on specific challenges and solutions, which will enable you to form a relationship with your prospects on a more personal level.

You can segment your leads either based on their behaviour or demographics and some organisations use multiple buyer’s personas. Now the good news is you don’t have to do all this manually, There are tools like Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to automate your contextual messaging and make sure the right messages reach the right people at the right time.

2) Educate more, promote less

Most marketers are so eager to get business from their leads that they get overly promotional. What the need to be focused on empowering the audience with educational content so that the audience truly understands the challenge your brand can help them with.

People don’t want a sales pitch they need to feel enabled so that they can make a purchase decision on their own, If we keep ignoring what the leads really want there is a very high chance that we might lose them.

The main objective should be to provide meaningful and actionable information throughout your email campaign that follows a clear path through the marketing funnel.

3) The first impression has a massive impact

The first email that you sent to your audience becomes a deciding factor that whether your brand would be judged spammy or whether the recipient would look forward to further communications from your side.

It is crucial we always remember the value of a lead, don’t spoil the relationship before you give it a chance to blossom by failing to follow up on an engagement or spamming with too many messages in a short timespan.

In this regard a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help your business out greatly, they track the open rate of emails and follow what was the email about. Based on this your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) can send relevant information to your leads and gently guide them through the funnel.

Final words…

Lead nurturing is one of the most crucial activities of digital marketing and if done correctly it can do wonders for your business’s growth. However, it is not as easy as it seems, it is advised you consider consulting with a professional digital marketer if you wish to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) for your business.

In case you have any questions or need more advice on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Customer Data Platform (CDP) implementation feel free to contact us and we would be happy to help you out.

Cheers!!

What’s Next for Customer Data Platform in 2020?

The year 2020 might have been awful in so many ways from start to finish. But one thing is for sure, we have made great strides in the development of the latest innovation in digital marketing platforms that is the Customer Database Platform (CDP).

Every entrepreneur is trying to utilise this technology to gain an edge in the world of online marketing and customer service. Which is to be expected as the Customer Database Platform can really help in transforming both the aspects of the business.

But before we jump the gun talking about the latest trends in CDP, for those who a fairly new to the platform, we’ll discuss a little bit about CDP and what it can do?

So, let’s get cracking shall we…

About Customer Database Platform

In short, a CDP is a Digital marketing framework that helps present a centralised, diligent and individual perspective on the customer, consolidating data from numerous channels, platforms, and tools. 

Not only this the Customer Database Platform lets the data migrate to and fro between different customer data frameworks to streamline communications and oversee customer engagement.  The information it consolidates can be easily customized that enables businesses to implement contextual marketing strategies.

Some of its main features

1) Reporting via customized dashboards

CDPs display strong utility in terms of customisation. With real-time notification capabilities, This platform can auto-generate highly refined reports for end-to-end visualisation. Its unifies dashboards will permit you to choose what data that meets your specific business requirement.

2) Automation across channels 

The CDPs improve automated advertising capability by re-arranging rough data. The platform’s programming can execute cross-channel in a systematic and easy to visualise manner.

3) Multiple Integrations

Get a guaranteed stack of options to incorporate with other platforms, so you pick so you can have one focal database for the entirety of your customer data at your fingertips.

2020 trends for Customer Database Platform

Now the awaited news on what’s all been happening on the CDP front:

  • Vendors of applications are incentivised to add CDP capabilities to their systems because some clients want them. Individual CDPs are used for each system
  •  The client will be advised by not to keep a singular CDP as their primary database as it adds value to their product and makes clients less likely to switch to another system.
  • Comprehensive accuracy of the ‘identity graph’ in finding matches between identifiers, beyond matches made using the customer’s own data
  • Additional information circulated by the vendor, both to refine the existing customer and prospect records and to inculcate new customers and prospects to the customer’s list.

Last words…

In spite of the recent developments, there’s still much work to be done in the Customer Database Platform. However, things are looking up as more and more people are getting interested in this technology.

We promise to keep you updated on this platform’s developments and as always if you hve any questions or need assistance with setting up a CDP for your business, we are just a message away.

Till then Stay Tuned!!

What’s Next for Customer Data Platform in 2020?

The year 2020 might have been awful in so many ways from start to finish. But one thing is for sure, we have made great strides in the development of the latest innovation in digital marketing platforms that is the Customer Database Platform (CDP).

Every entrepreneur is trying to utilise this technology to gain an edge in the world of online marketing and customer service. Which is to be expected as the Customer Database Platform can really help in transforming both the aspects of the business.

But before we jump the gun talking about the latest trends in CDP, for those who a fairly new to the platform, we’ll discuss a little bit about CDP and what it can do?

So, let’s get cracking shall we…

About Customer Database Platform

In short, a CDP is a Digital marketing framework that helps present a centralised, diligent and individual perspective on the customer, consolidating data from numerous channels, platforms, and tools. 

Not only this the Customer Database Platform lets the data migrate to and fro between different customer data frameworks to streamline communications and oversee customer engagement.  The information it consolidates can be easily customized that enables businesses to implement contextual marketing strategies.

Some of its main features

1) Reporting via customized dashboards

CDPs display strong utility in terms of customisation. With real-time notification capabilities, This platform can auto-generate highly refined reports for end-to-end visualisation. Its unifies dashboards will permit you to choose what data that meets your specific business requirement.

2) Automation across channels 

The CDPs improve automated advertising capability by re-arranging rough data. The platform’s programming can execute cross-channel in a systematic and easy to visualise manner.

3) Multiple Integrations

Get a guaranteed stack of options to incorporate with other platforms, so you pick so you can have one focal database for the entirety of your customer data at your fingertips.

2020 trends for Customer Database Platform

Now the awaited news on what’s all been happening on the CDP front:

  • Vendors of applications are incentivised to add CDP capabilities to their systems because some clients want them. Individual CDPs are used for each system
  •  The client will be advised by not to keep a singular CDP as their primary database as it adds value to their product and makes clients less likely to switch to another system.
  • Comprehensive accuracy of the ‘identity graph’ in finding matches between identifiers, beyond matches made using the customer’s own data
  • Additional information circulated by the vendor, both to refine the existing customer and prospect records and to inculcate new customers and prospects to the customer’s list.

Last words…

In spite of the recent developments, there’s still much work to be done in the Customer Database Platform. However, things are looking up as more and more people are getting interested in this technology.

We promise to keep you updated on this platform’s developments and as always if you hve any questions or need assistance with setting up a CDP for your business, we are just a message away.

Till then Stay Tuned!!