The Rise of the CDP…
The relatively new CDP industry is experiencing a rapid boom in popularity. Big waves of hype have encouraged many, many solution providers to tout their technology as being CDP technology: that includes both totally new businesses that are building their tech from the ground up, and established marketing clouds that are crossing over into the CDP realm.
According to a report by the CDP Institute earlier this year, the CDP industry as a whole raised $173 million in 2018 (a 23% rise from 2017) and their current list of identified CDP vendors worldwide stands at 78.
…and the Rising Confusion
Who’s talking the talk but not walking the walk? A report by the Winterberry Group states that of over one-hundred platforms presented as CDPs, fewer than twenty meet the necessary requirements to be defined as such.
In other words, over 80% of CDPs are mis-labeled. The reason behind this whopping figure is the lack of established and clear definition. In the atmosphere of uncertainty caused by the technology’s novelty and rapid popularity, many vendors have taken the opportunity to play fast and loose with the definition of a CDP to ride the current trend.
Separating Wheat from Chaff
The CDP Institute is a vendor-neutral institute founded by David Raab that’s dedicated to educating marketers and martech-ers about Customer Data Platforms. CrossEngage are proud founding partners for the CDP Institute Europe – we’re passionate about CDP technology and share values with the CDP Institute.
Recently, part of the CDP Institute’s mission has been to identify and certify the CDP providers that earn their classification. The RealCDP initiative holds CDP systems to a strict set of requirements that must be met for CDP status verification, all of which regard their data-handling capabilities and all of which have to be fulfilled. They must be able to:
- Ingest data from any source.
- Capture the full detail of ingested data.
- Store ingested data indefinitely.
- Create unified profiles of identified individuals.
- Share data with any system that needs it.
The RealCDP Initiative’s importance as a stabilizing, de-mystifying presence in the current CDP atmosphere is difficult to understate.
We’re very happy at CrossEngage to receive our RealCDP verification!
Dedicated to a Vision
The RealCDP verification, however, only concerns itself with the minimal data-handling requirements for CDP classification. Whilst that’s enormously important for discerning between those that are true CDP platforms and those that aren’t, the list of requirements doesn’t fully capture CrossEngage’s capabilities as we go above and beyond the usual data-handling functionalities of traditional CDPs.
We focus on customer engagement, as engagement is the logical conclusion of data gathering – after all, data is useless if it isn’t activated. We make collected data useful by seamlessly integrating our cutting-edge segmentation technology with engagement tools, so that you can connect with your customers through direct mail, email, Facebook, Whatsapp and more in extremely personalized and effective ways.
We are verified CDP providers, but we differentiate ourselves from other verified providers: we don’t stop at data accessibility and analysis, and place special focus on our engagement capabilities. We integrate with and orchestrate engagement channels so that customers can be communicated with in seamless, consistent, cross-channel campaigns. We’re dedicated not only to creating unified, permanent customer profiles; but also to ensuring that those customers can be communicated with as effectively as possible.