Customer Data Platforms (CDP) is an application designed to gather customer information from across the web and offline channels. The application is designed to better predict the customer journey to sales and personalizes responses to further nurture and retain customers.
Moreover, it integrates with tools such as client relationship management software, Email Marketing programs, Visualization Tools, and marketing automation tools. However, choosing the correct customer data platforms depends on your industry vertical and business requirements.
So in this guide, I have ranked and reviewed the best customer data platforms based on pricing, support, features, integrations, ease of use, and more.
So let’s get started.
What Are the Best Customer Data Platforms?
Here is my list of the best customer data platforms to use this year.
1. Segment
Twilio Segment is the world’s foremost Customer Data Platform (CDP). This platform helps companies put their customers at the core of every decision by providing the data foundation that they need. This helps them to take customer-oriented decisions.
Using these data platforms, companies can gather, unify and route their customer data into any system where it’s needed and it is better to understand their customers and create absolute, compelling experiences in real-time. It helps seize data from customer intercommunication and that data is used to create particular user profiles and audiences which helps in the growth of the company.
Companies like Instacart, Levi’s, Intuit, and FOX use Segment to make instantaneous decisions, accelerate growth and provide the best customer experiences. By providing various perceptions to better understand your customer, a single platform will help you make personalized experiences.
Key Features
- Marketing – It provides a single view of the customer and real-time audiences that would help you in better marketing.
- Customer understanding – Get data right and help understand your customer.
- Engineering – One API, Cleaner code, and Best-in-class SDKs. All of which are easy and simple to use.
Pros
- It is easy to use.
- Their documentation on setting things up is very good and makes the process easy.
- Data supplies in real-time.
- It is able to track every action of users done on the platform.
- Good support and service with good salespeople.
- It incorporates almost all the tools.
- Provides diversity of integration
- It has easy integrations which work in different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks and uses the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as node.js backend.
- Free versions are available which helps Startups and they can get by with the free version of Segment for a long time.
Pricing Plan
Create a free account that includes 1000 visitors/mon, 2 sources, and more than 300 integrations. For Team it starts at $120/mon, includes 10,000 visitors/mon with unlimited sources, and includes 1 Data Warehouse destination. Moving on to Business Usage, the price varies, and accordingly, it provides custom volume, a single view of the customer, advanced roles, and permissions.
2. Emarsys
Emarsys is a customer engagement platform of choice for rapidly growing businesses to deliver omnichannel personalization and increase business outcomes at scale. It provides you with industry-specific analytics that can accelerate your business. It qualifies digital marketing leaders and business owners to rise business outcomes with the omnichannel customer engagement platform.
Emarsys helps companies manage, analyze, and optimize the customer journey and it is done automatically by sending one-to-one messages to customers across a number of devices and platforms. Moreover, this makes it easy to reach out to your customers and generate more leads. Plus, email marketing is another plus point here.
You can achieve the profitable and expected results for your business as planned with Emarsys. Plus, it provides webinars, videos, podcasts, blogs, and articles to learn and get going in case of any discrepancies.
Key Features
- Email Marketing: You can build emails, personalize them, manage Email delivery, and self-acting Responses using Emarsys.
- Online Marketing: Dynamic Content strategies, A/B Testing, and Mobile Optimized methods are also provided for online marketing.
- Reporting & Analytics: Marketing lead database, Data quality management, and segmentation are some of the key analytics provided for better understanding.
- Campaign Management: You can quickly manage your campaigns and plan according to the current campaign situations. This results in achieving expected campaign goals.
- Lead Management: Basic reporting, Web analytics, and Revenue analytics would help you to generate effective leads and turn them into customers.
Pros
- Targeted paid advertising campaigns to complement email campaigns using CRM functionality is a great tool.
- It is fast and easy to use once it is implemented.
- Easily integrated with many of the systems.
- Provides strategic insights and best practices.
- It is a cross-channel and a device.
- For more efficient and effective results it segments contacts and creates custom lists that allow us to send hyper-targeted email campaigns.
- Benefits with geo, store, item proclivity, client venture computerization, repeating and set off crusades, continuous informing, and truck recuperation.
Pricing Plan
Emarsys provides a few flexible plans to its customers with the basic cost of a license starting from $335 per month. The total cost of ownership (TCO) is inclusive of maintenance, training, customization, hardware, data migration, upgrades, and more.
3. Oracle CX Marketing
Oracle Marketing is the most far-reaching, integrated marketing solution available to launch cross-channel marketing programs and merge all prospect and customer marketing signals in one view. Using real-time intelligence and customer signals it delivers personalized experiences and adapts in real-time to the complexity and unpredictability of customer behaviors. The results are optimal, much faster, and even increase productivity. Plus, is very easy to deploy and scale.
Oracle Customer Experience Cloud is a cloud-based tool for customer relationship management, sales, marketing, customer service, e-commerce, and many more, such as configure, price, and CPQ tools. It highlights customer behaviors and enables marketers to better understand customer intent and target relevant messaging to the right groups. This is more impactful than multiple emails constantly.
CX design is the process that the teams follow to improve customer experiences at every point before, during, and after conversion. Using such customer data platforms can increase customer loyalty, and retention and even shoot up your sales.
Key Features
- Sales performance management: It upskills and impels salespeople to set goals and assure customers.
- Channel Management: The process includes improving different marketing strategies and techniques to reach out the potential customers as much as possible.
- Lead Management: Manage all the leads and their conversation systematically.
- Landing Pages: Subscribers are directed towards clicking the link email by creating an attractive platform.
- Website Visitor Tracking: Using this feature, you can identify and understand the visitors visiting the website.
- Multivariate Testing: This feature helps to compare various webpage elements and come out with the best one.
- Campaign Segmentation: It helps to obtain anonymous website visitor details like buying necessities, their inclination towards particular things, and loyalty.
- Email Drip Campaigns: It sends a sequence of emails within a gradual time span.
Pros
- The platform is user-friendly.
- It indulges features like lead nurturing, dynamic content, and an email builder.
- It has foremost possibilities in how and where to implement marketing decisions in marketing campaigns, which will help to get benefit from customers response than sending them emails frequently.
- The system itself provides a one-way approach for every user role and it can be customized to grant rights where ever needed.
- This data platform allows campaign designers to execute the campaign flows in the way they require to achieve their complex business processes with robust functions and features.
- It has a lot to provide like integration points with other B2B products, such as CVENT, Salesforce, LinkedIn, ON24, and much more. One time the integrations are built so the data flows straight and systematically between different systems. which reduce a lot of hand-to-hand process and human errors.
- Synchronization with CRM so new contacts are added automatically.
- Can process huge volumes of data.
- It has a good feature of keeping the track of marketers to see their campaign output.
- Using actions and drag-and-drop workflows to build programs.
Pricing Plan
There are no free trials and no free versions available for this customer data platform. Plans start from $2000/month and pricing resources vary which includes – being an informed buyer and marketing automation software pricing guide.
4. Exponea
Exponea, now acquired by Bloomreach, is a customer data & experience platform that provides email marketing, lifecycle intelligence, product suggestions, automation, personalization, anticipating intelligence, and full channel automation. It is the best-personalized customer data platform for any type of business.
Exponea helps to maximize profits and take customer loyalty by targeting the right customers with the right message at the exact time. It allows customer data and marketing robotic insights for CRMs, CMOs, and B2C Marketers. This helps you to keep track of all the marketing campaigns resulting in better outcomes.
Exponea provides a lot of built-in tools that can be used to make good use of your customer data. Overall Exponea is very much intuitive, easy to use, and provides faster results than other customer data platforms.
Key Features
- Data Enrichment: You can improve data by adding new attributes very easily.
- Multi-step Marketing: Develop layout by adding various campaign elements
- Email Marketing: Provides customized emails which will help to reach more customers. Furthermore, email marketing campaigns are also helpful.
- Data Cleansing: It can help you process inaccurate data with the required modifications.
- Behavior Tracking: It tracks the positive behavior of the customer.
- Data Orchestration: To Synchronize the data from multiple channels.
- Audience Builder: Using various facades try to catch the attention of the customers or subscribers.
- 360-degree Customer view – Try to maintain whole customer data elements from various platforms in a single panel.
Pros
- Provides detailed customer analyses.
- Scenario Designer.
- A good maintenance team.
- User-friendly dashboard where user profiles can be added and modified which can be used by marketers to enhance the delivery time of results.
- Provides data cleaning and data enrichment.
Pricing Plan
In these customer data platforms, a free trial is available and subscriptions for different models. Pricing is made on the basis of the number of events tracked with the client’s traffic.
So now let’s cover the basics.
What is a Customer Data Platform?
A customer data platform or CDP is a structured application used by marketers that have unified data from different databases. This data includes both online and offline channels and is filtered, cleaned, and analyzed for customer behavior.
The customer data platform collects data from multiple sources such as emails, websites, social media, mobile applications, and more. Moreover, it offers analytical insights on capabilities such as operations, human resource management systems, digital marketing, and sales.
Additionally, removing manual errors it allows organizations to make precise decisions to improve business margins further.
What Features Should You Look for in a Customer Data Platform?
Here are some of the essential features you should look for in a customer data platform.
1. Behavioral Triggers
The customer data platforms should provide robust tracking and monitoring of lifecycle events, engagement activities, and browsing patterns. Additionally, they should send relevant content and messages to encourage customers to take certain actions.
Also, it should be able to translate into other actionable insights of communication.
2. Ease of Use
A CDP tool should be easy to use for you and your team. All other features do not matter if it is complex and difficult to understand all functionalities. Therefore, an intuitive user interface and easy-to-navigate platform will help accelerate productivity.
Some standard features that should be there are identity resolution, lead nurturing, reporting, mobile application, etc.
3. Third Party Integrations
A customer data platform should support a wide range of third-party integrations to streamline the omnichannel experience for marketing processes. Some of the popular third-party integrations are Shopify, Zapier, Tealium, Slack, and more.
4. Omnichannel Presence
All your communication channels and resources should streamline customer experience with the highest precision. This will help you build an omnichannel strategy by analyzing holistic customer engagement.
5. Personalized Marketing
Every customer has unique requirements and different consumption purposes. Therefore, focusing on the right customer on the right channel is crucial for gaining influence and customer opinions.
Hence, CDP needs to personalize campaigns for retargeting and targeting customers.
Best Customer Data Platform – Final Summary
This wraps up my list of the best customer data platforms to use this year. I will keep updating the list with other CDP tools available in the market.
Understand that customer data platforms are designed to personalize the experience of all customer data collected from various touchpoints. They not only help in customer retention but also help you understand what is the potential demand customers will expect in the future.
Finally, you should at least check their free demo before going forward with the purchase of the CDP tool.
Which one of these customer data platforms are you planning to use? Let me know by commenting below.
More from Smashitbuck: Do check out my other articles on becoming a digital nomad, inspirational, and the importance of time management to read this year.
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