Introducing Pre-CDP and its importance to successful CDP implementations Webinar Re-Cap

What is Pre-CDP Environment?

A Pre-CDP can help efficiently stitch and organize all your first party data and help setup the right marketing data foundation for data activation requirements.

Successful CDP rollout depends on ingesting a full and accurate customer profile across all channels. One of the things we’ve noticed is that a considerable amount of time in the CDP implementation phase is actually spent on organizing and formulating the data.

A Pre-CDP environment speeds up the implementation as it helps activating all the marketing use cases much more easily because it organizes all your marketing data effectively and allows you to generate your identity graph for your customers.

The goal here is to setup an environment that will prep all the data used to manage your marketing use cases effectively while allowing your CDP implementation team to focus on understanding the customer behavior, their journey, and activation.

Watch the full webinar video below or read the key takeaways from the webinar.

Benefits of Pre-CDP Data Platform

Quick Time to Market: Accelerate you CDP rollout by preparing your 1st party data that is ready for data wrangling.

Data Ownership: Data ownership allows you the freedom to migrate between different CDP solutions based on business objectives.

Go Beyond CDP: Develop 360-degree view of your customer that provides understanding of their cross-channel behavior that extends beyond just marketing needs.

Lower CDP Implementation Cost: Setting up a strong foundation layer allows you to reduce CDP implementation and operational cost by delivering quality and use-case specific data to the customer data platform.

CDP Implementation Challenges

Unorganized Data: Data is ingested from many different sources in a CDP making it difficult to manage. The redundant and overabundant data results in inaccurate segmentation. This makes it difficult to perform data cleaning or transformation directly in the CDP environment.

Mediocre Segmentation: It is difficult to build quality segments with unprepped data, which often does not have the required KPIs readily available. There are limitations in the segment builder tool in CDPs and the complexity of the calculations that can be included.

Identity Management: Little control over how your identities are stitched causes issues with confused identity or unmerged attributes.

Data inflexibility: A CDP will find it difficult to perform complex reporting or other data-intensive tasks.

How can a Pre-CDP Help

Advanced Data Wrangling: A Pre-CDP allows for advanced data wrangling by creating a separate environment for where your data is prepped for complex analysis by removing redundant data points. This ensures the vendor is clean and usable once sent to the Customer Data Platform. Data wrangling also allows you to perform robust segmentation by pre-calculating some commonly used KPIs.

Identity Alignment: Identity Alignment enriches your data sources with missing identity fields while also ensuring the customer IDs and identity fields are accurately set for each data source.

CDP Feeds: Simplify CDP implementations by having most data feeds coming from a single Pre-CDP environment. By sending only the data points required for activation, you will be able to reduce the data volume and complexity in CDP.

Exploration & Delivery: Complete data ownership provides you the freedom to switch CDPs if the need arises. This also enables business users to be able to explore the raw data for detailed analysis.

Questions:

Apart from media targeting, how else can a CDP help?

CDP helps organize and stitch your customer data, develop identity graphs, understand customer journey, activate and target customers, orchestrate journeys to enable customer conversions.

Do you also support the implementation of CDP and if so, which ones?

Yes, our primary expertise lies in CDP implementation and rollout including setting up a Pre-CDP environment. We have expertise across various Customer Data Platforms such as Adobe, ActionIQ, and Salesforce.

If my applications are creating data in different formats (8-9 different applications), what can I do to unify data? Can I do that in CDP or do I need to do it upstream?

You cannot bring your data as it is into a CDP and then try to organize it within the CDP. For example, a user shopping cart experience data would be managed by header, line items, coupons etc. The data is distributed across multiple different tables in relation format and that same data cannot be ingested as it is into a CDP environment because it will make it more complex to manage the data and also develop the user identity.

In that case, the data needs to be organized appropriately. You also don’t need to bring in all the data, you just need to push the data that’s only required for your activation use cases within the CDP. Hence, you need to organize the data, ensure the data is of good quality, and has all the attributes that will enable the CDP to really stitch the data efficiently and develop the identity graph.

Therefore, this data organization needs to be done upstream i.e., in a Pre-CDP environment.

Should do this (Pre-CDP) first prior to selecting what CDP you’re going to use or maybe help in that decision? Or should you deploy this and a CDP at the same time?

First, you should finalize the use cases as well as the organization’s marketing and activation needs because are what drive your decision in selecting a CDP. Your use cases will definitely drive this marketing data foundation of the Pre-CDP environment.

So, this does not have any bearing on your CDP selection. It’s always better to finalize your use cases and ensure you have all the data you need to activate on those use cases and start your CDP. This will accelerate you CDP implementation timeline while also reducing the cost.

How does CDP handle both structured and unstructured data?

CDP has tools to handle both structured and unstructured data. It’s a matter of configuring those appropriate data connectors and ingesting that data into your environment before stitching it.

How can CDP help when lot of people visit without logging in?

CDP is use to understand the ordinance of who are coming in and then to understand their shopping behavior or how they use their digital assets and to target them when they activate campaigns. It’s also used to manage your first party data.

What are the pros and cons of Salesforce CDP since it’s relatively new?

All CDPs have pros and cons but it’s all about understanding what our use cases are, what are we trying to accomplish with it, and whether measuring CDPs benefits based of what we need to implement and rollout. We cannot just state the pros and cons of various CDPs. It’s totally driven by use cases and organization’s goals.

Need help implementing a CDP? Get in touch with us here.