What Are 5 CDP Best Practices You Can’t Ignore?

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) emerged as one solution for understanding individual customers and delivering an enhanced customer experience. However, these benefits don’t simply happen on their own. Some key best practices are required to get the results desired.

Not all CDP best practices are tech-related. In order to get the most out of your CDP, you also have to do some things outside of the software.

1. Visualize and map a single view

A CDP thrives on data, so it needs to be fed from different sources. To keep it performing at optimum levels, start with planning how to get a single view of the customer. This involves standardizing the data you decide to collect on customers and assessing what type of information you need to create a personalized experience.

In order to make the most of a centralized data platform, tell it where to pull the data and what data sets matter. Encourage your marketing and sales teams to work together to determine the type of information they want the platform to collect to improve engagement, conversions, and overall satisfaction.

2. Determine compliance standards and set rules accordingly

Part of deciding what to collect should also include an understanding of compliance standards and data governance, such as GDPR regulations and The California Consumer Privacy Act. Ensure that the CDP is not inadvertently putting you at risk.

While you may think these regulations aren’t relevant to your company, regulations like GDPR affect any organization that maintains data that belongs to a European Union (EU) citizen. Even if your company is not based there, you may still do business with an EU citizen, such as if they sign up for a newsletter or fill out some other online form that you posted.

Here, your legal, compliance, and information security team members can provide direction to help your CDP work correctly to avoid doing something outside of your customers’ consent or putting the data at risk for a breach.

3. Get company commitment to using a CDP

Outside of support from those in digital marketing and sales, the rest of the company should also understand and embrace a CDP. This starts at the top with executive support in ensuring everyone is on board. Make sure that they buy into using the platform whether that includes sharing data sets or exchanging findings with other units, departments, and stakeholders.

Smart leaders address the use of a CDP and reinforce why it is important that everyone leverages its power to help achieve specific company goals. This may also be the appropriate time to assign roles and responsibilities, while also providing the training mechanisms so that everyone feels confident using it.

4. Plan how to measure CDP success

A CDP is not directly responsible for bringing in revenue. Yet, it plays an essential role in influencing how a customer or prospect will act on their purchase journey based on the insights it uncovers.

Determine the metrics needed to assess how accurate the CDP is in terms of understanding audience and customer behavior. Some CDPs use machine learning to organize the unstructured data they receive. When you determine how you want to measure success, it's ideal time to research CDPs and select one that uses artificial intelligence to help automate the personalization process.

5. Reinforce the value of a CDP

Your CDP is a critical part of your martech stack hub. So much critical information flows in and out of it. Your CDP brings order to data from multiple sources and offers direction for personalized campaigns.

That’s why it’s important to assess the benefit of using a CDP that incorporates machine learning and artificial intelligence. It’s also important that your CDP address tech features that make it easier to segment profile data and achieve your conversion and engagement objectives.

However, as you can see from this list of CDP best practices, you must first prepare that CDP to deliver what you want by aligning the data sets with your strategic goals, audience members, and messaging.

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