Is a CDP right for me?

Blog

Apr 12, 2021

StellarAlgo

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve wondered whether using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) would add tangible value to your fan engagement efforts. In today’s digital world, you’re likely using a variety of technology tools to help you navigate, organize and engage with your audiences – such as e-commerce, social media, a CRM and email marketing, to name but a few. You might even be using a data warehouse or Data Management Platform (DMP), adding yet more audience touchpoints for you to learn from and action – provided you have the time and resources to make the most of it.
With so much available data, it can be challenging to get a clear picture of the audiences you’re looking to reach. This is where a CDP adds value. If you aren’t already familiar, you may want to take a read through our earlier post What is a CDP? which provides an overview on the purpose of a Customer Data Platform and the value it drives. To recap briefly, a CDP is an increasingly essential tool in your technology stack that helps you to better understand, monetize, activate, measure, and optimize your individual fans and marketable universe. A CDP consolidates your first- and second-party online and offline data sources into a single customer view, enabling your team to quickly and easily understand and act on audience insights; it’s a no-code solution that layers seamlessly into your existing tech stack regardless of the size of your organization or level of technical sophistication. Additionally, if you have a data warehouse, a DMP, or both, and want to continue using them, you can; and if you want to move your existing data warehouse to StellarAlgo’s, or build a new one, we can do that as well. 

What can a CDP do for me?

A CDP is a no-code tool that makes it quick and simple to access and act on your fan data. By breaking down silos between data systems to create a single customer view, and then layering in machine learning technology to gain further insight into fan behaviors, business users get invaluable information at their fingertips. The user-friendly platform enables you to streamline and enhance your fan engagement strategy to help your sales, marketing, analytics, sponsorship, and business intelligence teams achieve their goals. Using a CDP helps you solve a wide variety of use cases, with some of the most impactful ones being:

If one or more of the above sounds like you and your organization, a Customer Data Platform could be what you’re looking for. As you evaluate whether a CDP is right for you, there are a few considerations we recommend you pay particular attention to:

Breaking down silos to make your fan data accessible and actionable

As mentioned above, when all is said and done the purpose of a CDP is to break down silos by funneling your fan data from disparate online and offline sources into an intuitive, user-friendly, single customer view. If you want to streamline your data collection and integration processes – while saving your team time, money and resources – and gain actionable insights into your fans’ behavior, then a CDP would enable you to do this and more.
Whether you have 50,000 local fans or 20-million global fans, and whether you’re drawing from two data sources or a dozen, all your owned channels can and should be linked to your CDP. The more data sources you connect the more information the CDP has to build a 360-degree view of who your fans are. If you’re worried you have too few data sources, or that you need to cleanse or organize your data, don’t let that stop you from making a CDP part of your engagement strategy. At StellarAlgo, we work with teams of all sizes and levels of technical sophistication to implement CDP resources that are right for you at every stage of your business. Plus, as you change, add, or remove data sources over time, your CDP evolves with you to provide consistent, timely customer data. Your data doesn’t need to be cleansed, parsed or organized – our robust backend data infrastructure does this for you so you can get down to the business of activating on your audience insights.

Using data to better understand your fans

With your cleansed, deduplicated, de-anonymized (where possible), and unified customer data at your fingertips, the ultimate goal in using a CDP is to help your entire organization better understand – and therefore activate – your fans. As more and more customers continue to spend their time and dollars online, personalization has become the hallmark of the most effective sales and marketing efforts, and with good reason:

86% of consumers say personalization plays a role in their purchasing decisions

80% of consumers like when emails contain recommended products based on previous purchases

73% of consumers prefer to do business with brands that use personal information to make their experiences more relevant

As you consider implementing a CDP, ask yourself: “Do I want to better understand my fans and prioritize personalized engagement?”. If the answer is ‘Yes’, using a CDP will give you access to tools that will help you identify traits and build detailed customer segments. In addition, StellarAlgo’s CDP uses machine learning to monitor and assess fan behavior; measure retention likelihoods and tag at-risk customers; build predictive models, make lead recommendations; and more, enabling your team to nurture fan relationships and build truly personalized outreach campaigns you can monitor, report on, and leverage in future interactions. For a recent example, check out how the Arizona Coyotes are using their CDP to prioritize personalized communication with their fans.

Being a customer-centric, data-driven organization

Possibly the most important criteria when evaluating whether a CDP is right for you is to determine whether your organization is committed to creating a digital-first, data-driven customer-centric culture. Executives routinely tell us they want to transform the way their organization works; increasing the level of digital sophistication in both their teams and processes while standing up new revenue streams and growing existing ones. To do this, organizations need to be committed to that cultural transformation and adopt the tools that will help them quantifiably demonstrate the impact of their efforts. A CDP requires known fan data to function, so your organization not only needs to be tracking and collecting that data but to also see the value in incorporating digital data to help drive your efforts. While many organizations use some amount of data to guide their decision-making, a truly data-driven organization is made up of people who prioritize using data, who believe it adds insight and value, and who want to use data to activate fans through digital channels.
If your organization is ready to make the leap to a more data-driven, digital-first approach – or if you’re already there – the potential benefits are manifold: developing a better understanding of who your fans are, how they behave, and how different groups of fans are interacting with your organization across multiple systems and channels; saving time, resources and money by automating workflows and activations; leveraging predictive models to identify and increase net new revenue opportunities, increase retention and growth of your current fanbase, and measure the true ROI of campaigns; and more.  
If some of these use cases match your priorities and you’d like more information about the ways you can use StellarAlgo’s CDP to accelerate your team’s capabilities, contact us for an introductory call.

More fans.

Better Engagement.

Stellar Results.

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