The Market Today
Customer Data Platforms or CDPs help businesses build their customer profiles by aggregating customer data from multiple sources, ensuring customer data is no longer siloed. This data is often categorised into descriptive, behaviour, identity and qualitative data and will include information relating to:
- Name, location, and contact details
- Social data
- Professional information
- Lifestyle and family information
- Engagement details around email, online and transactional activity
- Opinion and attitudes that have been expressed
With poor data quality costing the United States economy $3.1 trillion dollars each year (insidebigdata.com) and with 27% of data in the world’s top companies flawed (Gartner) a CDP is a must have for businesses that are looking to market more effectively to their customer base and get their arms around the rich data sources available to them.
“The Global Customer Data Platform Market Size is expected to grow from USD 2.4 billion in 2020 to USD 10.3 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 43%, making CDP one of the fastest growing sectors in the MarTech family.” (prnewswire)
The Search for Insight
As digital advertising and D2C spend accelerates at a phenomenal pace and the number of consumer touch points increase accordingly, CMOs, CIOs and CTOs are carving up their budgets and investing heavily in CDP software and skills to develop 360-degree customer profiles (or a single customer view (SCV)) and deliver personalised experiences. CDPs can deliver a powerful ROI and companies using CDPs are 5 times more likely to achieve a competitive advantage in customer retention and six time more likely to increase profits (forbesinsights).
The push for effective CDPs is compounded by the growth of the in-house agency, which encourages the close alignment of creativity and consumer data – as marketers and brand owners search for the balance between creative flair, data-driven intelligence, marketing operational efficiency and marketing agility.
CDP Top Performers and Rising Stars
There are now over 100 customer data platforms with many attracting high levels of venture capital. As the category matures, we have also seen several high-profile mergers and acquisitions, resulting in Twilio’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Segment in October 2020 (cmswire).
If you are considering investing in a CDP platform in 2021, here are 3 high performing players in the market, worthy of consideration.
1. Tealium; revolutionizes today’s digital businesses with a universal approach to customer data orchestration; spanning web, mobile, offline and Internet of Things devices. Based in San Diego, California, Tealium unifies customer data into a single source of truth and offers a turnkey integration ecosystem supporting more than 1,000 client-side and server-side vendors and technologies. Customers include Domino’s, Gap, IBM, and TUI.
2. Easyence; A CDP dedicated to omni-channel data-driven retailers, based in Paris and Lille, they support 140 brands in 66 countries and specialise in big data, eCommerce, Web analytics, merchandising, social content, programmatic advertising, attribution, and acquisition and includes Decathlon, the largest sporing goods retailer in the world, as a customer.
3. ActionIQ: integrates directly with your existing IT and business systems to remove fragmented customer data and siloed systems, with increased security and governance. ActionIQ gives you a single solution to empower your entire organisation to create more authentic experiences. With offices in New York and San Francisco, customers include Pandora, The New York Times and Michael Kors.
If you are looking for insight relating to your MarTech projects, from market landscaping to strategy and selection, we would love to discuss your requirements. Please contact us at hello@tkm-consultants.com
Author: Anil Noorani