CDP Series – Part 2: CDP, how do we know that we need one? Webinar Re-cap

In part 2 of this CDP series, Jerry Helou, our VP of MarTech Strategies is joined by Vinoo Palayoor, the Senior Director of Enterprise Cloud Architecture of BJ’s Wholesale Club as they both answer the question – “How do you know you need a CDP?”

During the webinar, Jerry and Vinoo will walk you through their experiences in selecting and implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) at BJ’s Wholesale Club. You can watch the entire webinar below or read the key takeaways from the webinar.

Key Takeaways:

• A CDP allows you to collect data from multiple sources into a unified customer profile and activate on that data to deliver a more personalized and engaging customer experience.
• A CDP can help remove data silos by bringing in omnichannel data into one single place that will allow you to perform segmentation and audience management.
• Instead of trying to solve for third party cookies, the focus should be on collecting first party data, breaking the silos, bringing that data closer to the marketer and enriching it since the first party data to going to be the main driver behind your marketing initiatives.
• A CDP makes it easy to collect data fragments across your app and website and collapse them into a single profile.
• The main difference between a CDP and a CRM is that a CDP allows you to create audiences quickly as a marketer, while CRM is more focused around sales and service. A CRM is also more transactional in nature whereas a CDP is more marketing focused.
• Defining a good use case will help you to determine the problem you’re trying to solve.
• There’s a lot of engineering effort required during the CDP implementation because of the various APIs available.
• During the onboarding phase, think about the depth and width of the data as well as use cases and segmentation.
• Start with onboarding the offline data sources first before you begin onboarding the online data sources.
• Start training the people on CDP at the right time. If you start training too early, you don’t know what you’re doing yet. And if you start training too late, then people won’t know how to use the tools.
• Cross functional teams need to work together to ensure a successful CDP implementation.

Click here to read the next part.