New research shows marketers seeing significant benefits with Customer Data Platforms
A new report from Advertiser Perceptions and Treasure Data clarifies the extent to which marketers are using and benefitting from Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). The report finds CDPs are making advertisers more successful, efficient and privacy-compliant, and there’s significant room for expansion – most advertisers are just beginning to integrate enough data to see their customers’ complete online journeys clearly.
Two in five marketers say CDPs have a significant impact on online sales and ROI, while reducing the time their teams spend managing customer data. Most put the value of a CDP on par with Customer Relationship Management and Data Management Platforms in getting more value out of customer data.
“CDP is a broad technology on the hook for advancing marketing in critical ways from data unification to privacy compliance, so marketers can be marketers again,” said Stuart Schneiderman, SVP/Business Intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions. “Our research makes it clear that marketers are making headway with CDPs, and there is still plenty of upside. There are gaps between what CDPs can do and what marketers are using them for, so we expect significant growth in usage, efficiency and ROI in the next year.”
More than 60% of advertisers are using CDPs to help map out customer journeys and personalize digital campaigns. Nearly as many are using them to create audience segments and report on campaign performance. The top benefit they cite is the ability to unify customer data from multiple sources and platforms. An overwhelming 94% have improved customer engagement while 92% have increased ROI/ROAS (Return on Investment/Return on Ad Spend), 89% have raised online sales, and 88% have enhanced cross-selling and upselling of products.
Other key findings:
Most marketers aren’t taking full advantage of CDPs yet. Advertisers are unifying CRM (76%) and transactional data (65%) with CDPs, followed by website traffic (57%). But fewer than half are bringing together product use (46%), social media (40%), app (32%) and offline data (25%) into CDPs.
CDPs save time by breaking down silos. Three in four surveyed saw a reduction in time spent managing customer data and reporting.
CDPs are a priority in privacy compliance. A majority feel CDPs protect them from GDPR/CCPA fines, and 92% say CDPs are important to their privacy compliance efforts.
“The dividing line in performance is urgency,” said Tom Treanor, CMO at Treasure Data. “Clients can’t wait two years to see ROI from CDPs, that’s why we show our clients they can get big returns in weeks by rolling out 2-3 narrowly defined use cases with clear objectives.”
Methodology
Advertiser Perceptions interviewed 101 marketers from its proprietary Ad Pros Community in August 2020. All interviewees are B2C martech decision makers involved in selection and use of customer data management platforms.
