What to look for in a Customer Data Platform

Customer Data Platforms and other data solutions are the number one technology being implemented by companies today, according to Forbes. Which is probably why experts say the CDP market will be worth $1 billion by 2019.

So, chances are, your organization is already thinking about a CDP.

But once you know you need one, once you start researching, how do you find the right CDP for you? What should you look for? What questions should you ask?

In our recently re-launched CDP Buyers’ Guide, this is one of the core questions we tackle. For a full list of questions and considerations, download the guide now. Or read on for some starting points.

Start with your business goals

In order to ask smart questions about your CDP options, first you’ll need to know how a CDP fits into your overall business plan. What are you trying to accomplish—both long- and short-term? How can a CDP help you get there? What features will it need to have to support your specific use cases?

Start with your business strategy and use cases and determine which questions apply to you based on that information.

Hone in on business and marketing considerations for your CDP

If your marketing team is going to really use and fully benefit from a CDP, it needs to be marketer-friendly. Which means you need to ask how it’ll work for your marketers.

• Does it have a non-technical user interface that marketers can use or will you constantly need to be enlisting the help of the IT team?
• Can it accept data from multiple sources? How exactly will you get data into the system? How much will the tech team need to be involved?
• Does it provide unified profiles of your users and are there multiple ways to view them?
• Is it easy to segment users based on the data?
• Is data streaming and batch processing done in real time to keep your marketing channels updated?
• Does the CDP integrate seamlessly with the MarTech tools and channels you already use and value?

Asking questions like these will help you determine how nimble and usable the platform will be for your marketing team. It’ll also help you get clear up front with what your marketing team and IT teams will have to collaborate on and what’s already built into the system you choose.

Get the tech specs for your CDP

First and foremost, any system you choose should match up with your business goals and be accessible and usable by non-technical professionals. But it’s also important to understand how your tech teams will interact with your CDP. Has the CDP provider made that side of things easy? Can you integrate the CDP seamlessly with your existing data streams and tools?

Before you ask these questions, it’s important to understand what technical requirements you have. If you haven’t already folded the tech team into your research process, now’s the moment to do so. Find out what they need and make sure you integrate their key questions into your research.

Here are some technical questions you might want to ask:

• Does the CDP fit your specific technical requirements (as communicated to you by your tech team)?
• How easy or complicated is the technical implementation?
• Does the CDP have APIs and developer SDKs that your developers can leverage to integrate with other tools in your brand’s marketing stack?
• Does the system function deterministically or probabilistically? How compliant is it with privacy regulations?
• Is it hosted on a secure, cloud-based service?

Choosing a CDP

For more questions and considerations, download our updated CDP Buyers’ Guide today.

And if you’re ready for a demo? We’d love to schedule one and answer questions you might have about Lytics and how we can help you reach your business goals.