Blog

CDP Use Cases: 7 Best Use Cases For Your CDP

Last updated: April 4, 2023

Customer data platforms (CDPs) centralize all of your customer data in one place, so it can be activated for marketing purposes quickly and effectively.

But the benefits of a CDP go way beyond improving insights: Customer data platforms can also foster brand loyalty, improve marketing effectiveness and drive long-term revenue.

Here are 7 of the best use cases for CDPs in marketing:

Streamline your tech stack: Boost efficiency, unify data & retain talent! Get expert tips now:

Work Email *

First Name *

Last Name *

Company *

Job Title *

Read Now

7 Best Use Cases For Your CDP

1. Establish a single customer view

Customer data platforms take in customer data from every touchpoint you use to connect with them – from email and social media to display ads, events, etc. – and store it in one place. Then they automatically clean and unify that data so you can establish a single view of each customer (i.e., you can track each interaction that each person has with your company, across all platforms, and you don’t have any duplicate profiles that distort your view of that person.)

Besides saving time, a single customer view also helps teams:

• allocate their marketing resources more effectively
• evaluate each marketing channel more accurately
• improve product-marketing fit
• enhance and improve their customer profiles 
• identify key success levers and friction points across the entire customer lifecycle

2. Connect online and offline engagement

Traditionally, marketers have struggled to translate real-life customer interactions into tangible data – and sales. And that’s largely because they can’t record those interactions, or get enough trackable information about the customer in time to convert them.

Here’s an example: Say that a long-standing lead attends your in-person conference. If you use a CDP, that person’s event data is automatically added to that person’s pre-existing customer profile. That includes every session or sponsor booth they scanned into, etc.

Your sales team can then combine that person’s event data with their past interactions with your company to get a fuller picture of their needs. Maybe this person has previously downloaded eBooks from your company and indicated on the lead forms that they’re in the tech space with a company size of 100-250.

So instead of reaching out with the standard boilerplate “post-event follow-up email” template, your sales team can combine all the customers’ information to make their follow-up email more targeted and effective.

3. Create actionable segments

Back in the day, buying journeys were pretty simple: Your grandparents saw an ad for a car on a network TV channel, they strolled into a dealership, and then they picked the one that rode the best.

There was a limited number of advertising channels, so marketers knew what steps the average person took to learn more about their product – and what factors mattered most to them. Marketers still needed to segment their audience by age, race and gender, but that was about it.

Since then, there’s been an explosion in the sheer number of ways people learn about your product. This creates an infinite number of buying journeys, even for people in the same demographic categories.

For instance, the person who’s browsed a few of your product pages, then downloaded a piece of content from your website requires a different approach than, say, the person that’s clicked your display ads, then signed up for your email list.

Marketers need to account for these different paths to purchase when creating segments.

Since they take customer data from every source, CDPs make it easier to create these multi-dimensional segments.

On Omeda, you could query everyone that’s visited your publication’s website in the last six months, then segment your audience based on their past purchase history, previous engagement with your emails, events they’ve attended, etc. This way, you can create ultra-specific messaging for each audience based on how they’ve already interacted with you – and increase your chances of winning their business.

4. Increase sales and customer lifetime value

CDPs pull transactional and demographic data that shed light on your customers’ preferences, interests and future needs. Using this information to upsell and cross-promote your products can increase customer lifetime value, while also introducing customers to the products they’re likely to enjoy. Everybody wins.

Here are some effective ways to up- and cross-sell based on CDP data:

• Offer perks for repeat purchases or subscription renewals.
• Note when customers have spent a long time on a relevant product page, then send them with a cart abandonment email or add them to a retargeting campaign.
• Provide content and/or product recommendations based on previous purchases or interests.
• Identify the products/publications that are most likely to be purchased together and bundle them.
• Segment ads and emails by time and day, based on past customer behavior.

5. Secure your customer data

The more disparate your customer data, the harder it is to manage – or even find. That poses a big problem in a privacy-first world.

Under the GDPR and new American state-level privacy laws, customers can ask for copies of the customer data, or request that some or all of it be destroyed. That means you need to know where certain data points live – and what information is shared throughout your customer journey – without having to go back and forth with your dev team.

If your customer data is spread across multiple software, it’s much harder to surface it quickly and accurately enough to comply with those regulations. But if you have a CDP, all of your customer data is stored in one place, and each person’s data is unified into one profile, so you can query – and delete – their data in seconds.

6. Supercharge your advertising efforts

Often, paid advertising exists separately from the rest of the marketing funnel. Ad teams use data from Facebook, Google, etc. to target and attract new customers but depending on the whims of the algorithms, this may or may not reflect your actual target audience.

With a CDP, you can use your customer data set to inform your ad targeting and create more accurate lookalike audiences. This gives you more conversions for a lower average cost (and as a bonus, it keeps your advertisers happy!)

Omeda integrates with leading ad platforms, including AdRoll, Facebook and Google Ad Manager, to facilitate this process. With this customization, you can easily target groups such as:

• Customers that are due for magazine renewal in the coming month.
• Specific demographics such as Job Title, Industry, Interests, etc..
• Customers that have paid for a subscription in the last month.
• Customers who have let their magazine subscription age out of Active status.
• Customers that work for Fortune 100, 500, or 1,000 companies.

7. Improve the customer experience with personalization

We’ve all heard that it’s at least 5 times cheaper to retain a current customer rather than to attract a new one. But companies can’t just settle for just keeping their customers on the books anymore. Companies need to cultivate long-term brand loyalty  – or risk losing them after one subpar experience.

Research bears this out: According to PwC’s 2022 Customer Loyalty Survey, 55 percent of surveyed consumers said multiple bad experiences would cause them to drop a brand they liked. Another 37 percent cited a bad experience with products/services as the reason for leaving a brand, and 32 percent left after ONE bad customer service incident.

CDP data can improve customer experiences by making them more individualized: The more information you have on your customers, and the more accessible it is, the more you can tailor your content, offerings, and customer service channels to their needs.

Not sure where to start? According to McKinsey’s Next in Personalization 2021 report, the top personalization actions for consumers include:

• Tailored messaging based on past purchase history, previous pageviews, etc.
• Behavioral triggers
• Timely communications based on key moments in the customer journey

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get our latest articles sent directly to your inbox.

Email *

Subscribe