Over the past several years the Customer Data Platform (CDP) marketplace has quickly evolved and CDPs are now carving out a critical space in the marketing technology stack as a repository for the complete, accurate, and up-to-date customer profile, managed by the marketer for quantum improvements in customer engagement. Marketers’ needs have driven market hype, and many companies have started or have migrated into the CDP space in the last 24 months. The rush of cloud vendors to this space has further muddled the marketplace, with Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce all announcing product plans to build a CDP or CDP-like capabilities.
The August 2019 survey from The Relevancy Group also shows that market maturity is increasing. Some 44 percent of marketers surveyed currently have a CDP and an additional 32 percent are looking to implement one before Q3 2020. This reflects both market maturity (with many marketers recognizing a need and working to meet it) and confusion (with some marketers identifying their CRM, data warehouse, marketing cloud, or other systems as “the CDP”).
Defining the CDP Marketplace
While marketers have started to embrace the need for a CDP, consumers are changing even faster. Today’s continuously connected, online-savvy consumer –trained online, with a mobile phone always in hand – treats as table stakes a level of personalization and consistency that many brands considered impossible only a few years ago.
As the sophistication of CDP offerings has increased, the marketer’s ability to deliver on consumer expectations is increasing. However, tangible capabilities and features are often drowned out by the noise of vendor claims that are far beyond their delivered products.
To help clarify this market, The Relevancy Group lays out a few key technologies that are vital to the success of a CDP. A sophisticated CDP should be able to join and combine data from every source, create and manage customer profiles, analyze and enrich the customer data, and syndicate and activate audiences. The single view of the customer must also be available in a holistic, integrated, and persistent manner.
Core Features to Evaluate
In this report, The Relevancy Group recognizes the top CDP vendors who can deliver real-time targeting, personalize both anonymous and known user experiences, and deliver content, actions, and offers at the cadence of the consumer and with the preferences of the individual customer journey.
To meet these demanding requirements, many different types of first-, second-, and third-party data need to be integrated and incorporated into a holistic customer record. These include traditional sources like CRM data, website behavior, channel response data, offline and online spending, mobile behaviors and a variety of new sources of unstructured data like social sites, sensor data, IoT technologies and more.
Redpoint Global Customer Data Platform
Redpoint Global initiated work in this marketplace in 2006, some six years before the CDP term was coined and a decade before the influx of new players. With the team of architects and business visionaries responsible for building Accenture’s CRM practice, Redpoint had the experience and foresight to build a solution that solved the challenges of siloed customer data, out-of-date decisions, and poorly coordinated customer engagement.
Redpoint ranked highly in all categories in last year’s 2018 CDP Guide from The Relevancy Group, and the group’s analysts were impressed by improvements in 2019. A big differentiator for Redpoint was its ability to deploy in any configuration (on-premise, cloud, hybrid) with any type of data (structured and unstructured data, in traditional databases, and files or Big Data and Hadoop sources), a fact also noted by customers. Redpoint’s identity resolution and real-time, inline analytics were highlighted as strong points as well.
Technically, Redpoint shines compared to peers when it comes to technical services and customer support as well as product innovation and usability. For 2019, Redpoint Global’s CDP was awarded Gold for Client Satisfaction, Technical Services, and Customer Support and Silver for Product Innovation and Usability. The CDP was also rated best in class for Integrated Customer View Completeness, Integrated Customer View Quality, Implementation Completeness, and Implementation Quality.
The Relevancy Group noted, “Many of the customers we spoke with presided over large, sophisticated marketing programs and placed significant reliance in the Redpoint product and services teams to help them drive their core business objectives, both for marketing and, more broadly, customer engagement. The people at Redpoint ‘separate them from the pack’ remarked one customer, and another lauded the technology by pointing out that ‘it is absolutely the only solution in the marketplace that could meet our needs.’ ”
Leaders from The Relevancy Group and Redpoint Global will present a webinar on September 25 that explores the current CDP landscape. Register today to discover key use cases being enabled by connected, actionable data, and to learn why the distinct value proposition for a CDP is gaining widespread momentum.
RELATED ARTICLES
Building vs. Buying a CDP? Why That’s Not the Only Question You Should be Asking
CDP Myths Debunked: More Than Just Another Data Platform
How to Maximize the Value of Your Customer Data Platform
Be in-the-know with all the latest customer engagement, data management, and Redpoint Global news by following us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
