58% of MarTech capabilities is not being used: David Raab

What should a CDP do?  How to get the right CDP? These were some questions that were addressed at the e4m MarTech India Conference by David Raab, Founder, The CDP Institute.

Speaking at the conference, Raab spoke on the topic - Using CDP to make your consumer data.  

Raab started his talk with a question and asked what do companies need to do? Explaining the answer, he said companies need to meet customer expectations with price, service and experience and privacy. They also need to manage complex data and complex MarTech, he shared. 

“58% of MarTech capabilities are not being used.” So, companies have a need and they need to ask, what should a CDP do? And which of the needs should CDP fill?

Describing CDP, Raab shared that it is a packaged software that builds persistent unified customer databases accessible to other systems. “Basically, it means to build customer profiles.” A real CDP in the CDP Institute's mind does very specific things, he mentioned. “A real CDP takes data from all sources. It doesn't throw away any detail. It keeps detailed data permanently or as long as you're allowed to keep it, build that unified profile so that it brings it all together and puts it into one place. It allows any other system to access it. So, the data is shared widely and has certain real-time capabilities, not all, but can do real-time event triggers like shopping carts.” 

He also shared that there are a lot of other systems that store customer data. He explained how CDP is distinguished from a data lake and the data warehouse because they are custom built systems, or from a data hub or a Tag Manager, which doesn't usually store data, it just moves it around from one place to the next or a CRM or marketing cloud, which don't really usually pull in external data into just work with the data, that's internal to them. 

“We're not saying these are bad systems. We're saying they're not CDP. They're good at what they do, which is different from what CDP does,” said Raab. 

He further said, “So every system is optimized for its purpose. But only the CDP is optimized to create complete shareable customer profiles. If you need unified shared customer profiles then you need CDP.”
 

He further added that CDP was one component of the MarTech stack. “It's just one piece of puzzle among other things. All gaps must be closed and CDP doesn’t have to close them all. Don’t expect your CDP to do everything.”

“The right question to ask is what should my marketing stack do? How to get the right tools, CDP or no CDP.”

Raab had one advice for the marketers. “Identify the gaps and keep adding value. When you do that, CDP is usually part of the most effective solution.”