A new article on
Marketing Land asks whether you think your marketing operations team is up to implementing a new CDP, discusses best practices for implementing a CDP, and tells us how a 75-year-old sporting goods company approached the task.
Customer data platforms are getting adopted by more and more marketing organizations. The CDP field is coming of age in 2021, with both SAP and Salesforce launching products as recently as October last year. That's contributed to a global CDP market projected to hit $10.3 billion by 2025.
A source of unified customer data is invaluable for marketing ops teams. Justin Sharaf is VP of Marketing with digital experience platform Jahia, and he refers to a CDP as:
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"...the brains of the operation. If CRM is where data sources live, they can be used from a sales perspective. Marketing automation can be used for nurture programs. Those systems aren't meant to bring it all together in that way, while a CDP is meant to be a hub."
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Chris Penn is the co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at Trust Insights, and he agrees that a CDP can:
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"...fill a role where you have to unify data and [enable] a single view of the customer. A lot of the vendors are now offering machine learning capabilities, which are all contingent on the underlying data. In reality, the CDP is an attempt for technology to solve a 'people and processes' problem. Most of the time, there are gaps in processes and people. At the end of the day, you have to solve the underlying issues. You still need expertise, training, and hand holding."
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Franklin Sports is a long-established and family-owned sporting goods vendor in Massachusetts, and the company has been ramping up its eCommerce play during the pandemic - like many other retailers. They recruited their current Digital Marketing Manager, Aaron Seitz, back in 2017. At that time, Franklin Sports was just starting out with a CDP developed by BlueConic.
The author says when choosing the right CDP, marketing ops need to focus on specific goals or channels integral to the business and ask themselves, does the CDP have connectors to those channels or systems? For Seitz, the priority was email:
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"Email, for us, tied back to the website and the brand, and how we're focusing there. [The CDP's] role has evolved where we see opportunities. One way we view email marketing for us is as an extension of our marketing nucleus. It's helpful to use the CDP as a core. The things we talked about three years ago are very different than what we're talking about now. Our ideas have evolved, as well as the actions and levers [we pull
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