That’s one of those questions weighing on the minds of many marketers today. Should I invest in a customer data platform (CDP) or not?

While almost every marketing department would benefit from having a CDP, this quick, four-question, decision-making guide can help you find the answer and, if it’s “yes,” choose wisely and well. Ask yourself:

Can I view all our Data on a Single Platform?

If you pull data from multiple sources, rely heavily on your tech team to extract usable information, or struggle to get a 360° view of your customer, a CDP could make your work life infinitely easier and improve performance significantly.

When email engagements, social media interactions, text responses, and push notification feedback are stored in different sources, it’s easy to miss the crucial pieces of customer behavioral data required to build the full story. It’s a common pitfall that many marketers encounter. This difficulty is exacerbated when unstructured and third-party data are pulled into the mix.

If you find yourself spending hours pulling data from each channel after each campaign deployment and piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle to see the complete picture, it’s time to consider investing in a customer data platform.

The ability to view all your data on a single platform also empowers robust reporting and enables you to map, evaluate, and analyze data gathered across different touch points. This not only deepens your understanding of customer behavior and preferences, it also allows you to quickly identify and replicate best performing campaigns, channels, and messaging.

Can I Segment our Audiences with Precision?

Almost every marketer can segment audiences based on generic filters like age or gender. In an age where personalization can separate the winners from the also-rans, effective marketing requires greater precision driven by demographic, behavioral, psychographic, transactional, campaign interaction, and other types of valuable customer data.

Achieving such a sophisticated level of segmentation goes beyond simply acquiring a garden variety CDP. You’re going to need a strong, flexible customer data platform that can empower data manipulation in a seamless, straightforward, hassle-free process.

By revealing the potential reach, engagement, and conversion rates of a target segment based on past interactions and real-time insights, it will be easier than ever to calculate ROI, set accurate goals, and create personally relevant messaging to achieve true outcome-driven marketing.

Another advantage of advanced audience segmentation is the ability to create lookalike profiles based on the traits of your customers with the highest lifetime value (LTV). This enables the development of cohesive, targeted, and strategic customer acquisition campaigns instead of a shotgun approach.

Does our CRM do enough to Meet all our Needs?

If you simply need to manage your sales pipeline and determine prospect engagement with your sellers, and if your organization is a B2B account focusing on large accounts rather than individual customers, a CRM might suffice. However, relying only on a CRM will still limit you in creating a single source of truth about your prospects and customers.

While a CRM might prove enough, the constantly increasing volume of data may prove too challenging for your current system to manage. For example, as email and text communications with customers increase, their levels of engagement may prove useful in identifying propensities. CRMs are not designed to ingest or analyze such data. In contrast, a CDP built to house this information can prove invaluable in optimizing marketing campaigns and creating the kind of targeted, personalized communications that drive conversion.

Many brands find it more useful to view CRMs as an adjunct to a CDP in the marketing process, with both working in tandem, rather than as two mutually exclusive tools.

Do I need more Advanced Analytics Capabilities?

The answer invariably is yes. Having lots of data is great but meaningless if you can’t transform its potential into actionable insights focused on meaningful customer engagement and conversion.

A strong CDP with AI and machine learning capabilities can provide customer analytics that enable you to take a deep dive into your customer’s preferences and propensities as well as where they are in the purchasing cycle. It can even provide predictive and prescriptive analytics on campaign performance.

This not only unleashes a wealth of new possibilities for efficiently empowering engagement and conversion, it also can deliver budget efficiencies by reducing or eliminating the cost of communicating with disinterested customers and those least likely to convert.

No longer will you get stuck in a cycle of reacting to the last actions taken by customers. Rather, you can proactively anticipate future actions and take the next best step toward conversion based on behavioral patterns detected by your CDP’s AI.

If your answers to these questions have motivated you to learn more about how a customer data platform can elevate your marketing performance and measurably improve outcomes, we invite you to talk to a Resulticks expert at [email protected]