GigaOm Radar for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)v1.0

Table of Contents

  1. Executive Summary
  2. Market Categories and Deployment Types
  3. Decision Criteria Comparison
  4. GigaOm Radar
  5. Solution Insights
  6. Analyst’s Outlook
  7. About Sue Clarke

1. Executive Summary

Customer data platforms (CDPs) provide a central repository that pulls in customer data from multiple online and offline sources and unifies it to create customer profiles. The data is normalized and reformatted to support marketing processes and systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, marketing automation, A/B testing, digital experience platforms (DXP), social media sites, and others to create personalized content to drive sales.

CDPs offer a number of capabilities to support marketing initiatives:

  • Segmentation enables marketers to categorize customers according to a range of criteria such as age, gender, location, behavior, or buying history. Segments can then be used in marketing campaigns.
  • Customer journeys consist of customer interactions with a company, allowing marketers to manage the entire lifecycle of a customer and ensure they receive content that will interest them and keep them returning through their preferred channel.
  • Customer journey mapping enables marketers to track every interaction with a customer and determine what the next best step is.
  • Analytics and insights enable users to analyze their customer data, which can be used to predict trends and likely buying patterns. If organizations are collecting data from backend systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), the CDP can be used to analyze sales and manufacturing data to ensure supply always matches demand. Analytics is also important for evaluating the success of marketing campaigns, and to assess the lifetime value of a customer, which is useful for determining which customers should be offered loyalty rewards.

A CDP mainly collects first-party data, although it can be enriched with third-party data. This is important because third-party cookies are largely disappearing, eliminating a data source many organizations collected as customer data to provide personalized content. Companies that are using a CDP to manage customer data to provide a single source of truth will run more successful marketing campaigns than those that are still using disparate systems to store customer data.

A CDP is most valuable to marketing and sales teams that need to deliver highly personalized, targeted marketing and advertising content, both to individuals and to more general segments to drive sales and increase profitability. This Radar report will therefore be of particular interest to the CMO.

This is our first year evaluating the CDP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This GigaOm Radar report examines 20 of the top CDP solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading CDP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.