6 Customer Data Platforms for Brands
This post is the latest in our “Automating Local” series. It’s our editorial focus for the month of April, including topics like artificial intelligence and marketing automation. See the rest of the series here.
Take a dash of marketing automation, coupled with the unified customer databases that many brands have already implemented, and what you’ve got is a customer data platform, or CDP for short.
Customer data platforms dominated the conversation at the MarTech Conference in California earlier this month, as marketers shared how they’ve been able to pull data from multiple sources, combine that data into single customer profiles, and then make that data available to other marketing systems.
With so much hype surrounding customer data platforms right now, we decided to dig into the market and learn about some of the hottest players in the space. Here’s what we found.
1. Lytics
One of the most buzzed about customer data platforms on the market right now, Lytics is used by major brands like Nestlé Purina. Lytics bills itself as a “smart” CDP. The company aims to remove the complexity that exists in many CDPs to help marketers serve more relevant experiences to individual customers. Lytics collects data though feeds and partners with the EDW, CRM, and other customer record strategies that brands already have in place, making it easier to get that data into the Lytics system. At that point, the platform begins unifying profiles and leveraging unified customer profiles to create centralized segments. Natural language processing and machine learning drive custom predictions and help brands orchestrate cross-channel campaigns.
2. Amperity
Amperity is all about unlocking the power of customer data and solving the challenge of identity resolution. The CDP boasts a high profile list of clients, including the GAP, Wynn Las Vegas, Brooks, and TGI Friday’s. Amperity takes its clients’ data in its native format, then uses artificial intelligence to unify the data and create accurate and current views of customers. Those complete customer profiles are then supplied to brands, so they can take better advantage of the marketing tools they already have at their disposal to understand, engage with, and serve their customers.
3. Simon Data
Simon Data was built to help marketers take full advantage of all their data sources. The platform integrates with first- and third-party data providers and generates unified customer views. A personalization engine then provides an interactive platform for defining customer segments across behavior, revenue, and customer support contexts. The CDP boasts that its unprecedented performance and coordination across the full range of data-driven marketing activities is unparalleled within the industry. The Simon platform also stands apart for its ongoing internal updates of relevant marketing channels, supporting multi-channel marketing across multiple categories, and full experimentation capabilities.
4. BlueConic
BlueConic’s customer data platform relies on more than 3,500 installed connections to automate customer data collection across different channels. Once companies have imported their customer profiles, using BlueConic’s “certified connections,” they can define and manage segments. BlueConic’s segments update in real-time to reduce data latency. Brand marketers also have the ability to choose which activation platforms to use on which types of customer data, so they are better positioned to deliver precisely targeted recommendations based individual customers’ behaviors, interests, and preferences. BlueConic works with more than 300 brands, including Moen, T-Mobile, and Hearst.
5. QuickPivot
QuickPivot’s customer data platform is all about empowering marketers to own and activate their data so they can compete with the largest retail groups. Like its competitors, QuickPivot collects data from a virtually limitless number of sources, including legacy systems, catalog purchase data, social shares, ratings, and reviews. Once it’s been collected in the company’s SaaS platform, a proprietary MapReduce processes the data and Core-to-Collect cleanses, normalizes, matches, and merges the data. With full confidence in their customer profiles, and with the ability to target customer segments without IT hassles, brands should be able to plan, design, and produce their own automated customer lifecycle workflows. They can also engage with customers through a module that includes email, print, web, social, and SMS. QuickPivot is used by brands like Annie Selke, HP, and the NHL.
6. CDP Tapad
Powered by the Tapad Graph, CDP Tapad is a telco-specific offering designed to improve the customer experience and acquisition process for telecom companies. Because CDP Tapad was built specifically for telecom carriers, the entire platform is designed to capitalize on the industry-specific internal data that those companies collect, including calling party IDs. Diverse data sources are brought together in CDP Tapad and then extended with cross-device identity resolution.
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
