What is CDP? Which one should you use: CDP vs CRM vs DMP?

The cookie-less era is coming, and third-party data tracking is becoming more difficult, and digital advertising is becoming less accurate.

Companies are looking for opportunities in first-party data integration, which includes integrating data across channels such as their website, app, social channels, and physical stores, in order to better understand customer profiles and decision-making processes, and design an automated and personalised approach to provide better service to customers, resulting in higher business profits.

However, most of them have encountered ‘Customer Data Fragmentation’ during data collection, which is why we need CDP (Customer Data Platform). CDP helps companies integrate fragmented customer data, track, understand, and optimise every customer touchpoint in pursuit of business growth.

What is CDP？

CDP stands for Customer Data Platform, which is a system that collects, stores, and manages data from different sources to give businesses a complete and accurate understanding of each customer. It helps companies solve the problem of data fragmentation and apply insights and understanding to providing personalised experiences and improving customer interactions.

What is Social CDP？

Social CDP is similar to CDP, in that it collects data from various channels to create complete and accurate customer profiles and analyse customer decision journeys to provide customised customer experiences. The difference is that Social CDP focuses on the most timely and effective social channels, allowing marketers to easily set up automated marketing journeys, and salespeople to view complete customer profiles based on customer social data.

Omnichat has launched the Social CDP solution, empowering companies to build a complete and detailed customer profile by integrating customer data from various social channels:

• Omnicustomer – a customer profile database (integrates data from different channels for the same customer)
• Automated marketing journeys
• Personalised messaging marketing
• Integration with other CRM and CDP systems for data synchronisation

Why do retail brands need CDP？

Retail brands need the CDP (Customer Data Platform) because they face four major challenges in their marketing efforts:

1. Increasing advertising costs: With the rise of privacy protection measures like ‘Ask App not to Track’ on iOS system and the GDPR policy, third-party data tracking cookies are becoming less effective, making it harder for retail brands and e-commerce companies to precisely target their ads. This leads to rising advertising costs.
   

2. Scattered social channels: Retail brands have to deal with multiple messages coming from different social channels (such as WhatsApp, FB, IG, LINE, etc.) and also, it’s hard to gather customer data from all these channels into a single customer profile.
   

3. Difficulty in understanding customer behaviour: Merchants are difficult to integrate customer interactions on social media, website browsing behaviour, and in-store consumption into one single customer profile, and also it’s hard to determine when and how to encourage customers to make a purchase by messaging.
   
4. Declining conversion rates: Customers are easily distracted nowadays with diverse choices, and the average conversion rate has dropped from 3% in 2019 to only 1% now.

What is the difference between CDP and CRM？

CDP (Customer Data Platform) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) are both solutions that collect customer data, but they have different focuses.

CDP is used to collect, integrate, and manage customer data, and create a single and unified customer database. It focuses on making use of customer data to deliver better customer experiences, increase sales, and improve customer loyalty. CRM, on the other hand, focuses on managing relationships with customers and normally offers features such as sales management, customer service management, and marketing management. These features help businesses establish and maintain good relationships with customers and increase sales and customer loyalty.

For businesses, CDP and CRM are not mutually exclusive, many businesses use both tools to achieve different goals.

What is the difference between CDP and DMP？

CDP focuses on collecting and integrating customer data to create a single and unified customer database, and help businesses better understand customers. DMP(Data Management Platform) focuses on collecting, managing, and analysing large amounts of user and third-party data, typically for targeted advertising. DMP collects data from various channels such as website, social media and emails, and creates a single and unified user database that can be used to improve the effectiveness of advertising.

In summary, CDP is more focused on customer management, while DMP is more focused on massive data management and analysis.

Use Social CDP to compete in the first-party data race in the cookieless era

In 2024, third-party data tracking Cookies will be officially eliminated, and 2023 is the last crucial moment to master first-party data. In the post-epidemic era, brands that integrate online and offline sales and all-round community channel data with CDP will become future retail giants.