What You Should Know About Mobile Data Platforms

In the time of rapid social media expansion, marketing organizations are facing more challenges than ever. There are more and more channels to target, stronger competition, and a much more fractionalized audience. The only way to have a big advantage over the competition is to deliver highly targeted content and messages. Marketers are starting to understand the importance of managing a complete data strategy to better control the end-to-end customer experience. Customer data platforms (CDPs) are becoming more popular as highly valuable marketing tools that help create a unified data platform that will improve the customer journey. In this article, we will explain what CDPs are.

What is a customer data platform?

Customer data platforms are designed to effectively join the data collected from different sources to create a complete customer profile. This enables organizations to implement data-driven initiatives. Since the majority of marketing technologies are in silos, the CDPs allow marketers to tie the data together in real-time, enabling them to segment and target their customers more effectively. When talking about data, what we mean by that is the huge amounts of information that users are generating while engaging on their mobile devices. This data comes from a website browsed on a mobile phone, a native mobile app, or the mobile device itself, including GPS, among several mobile data sources.

How does CDP work?

Despite the various capabilities and many functions of a customer data platform, the basis on which they work is quite simple. They function by extracting data from multiple sources, cleaning it, and rearranging it in a way that makes it available to other systems for personalized marketing projects.  These platforms may also have many other functions such as advanced data analytics, content marketing, predictive abilities, and more. Also, some mobile data collection tools work better on tablets, while others may only work on certain operating systems, such as Android. To leverage all the data collected, marketing organizations need to integrate it with all other customer data. Otherwise, they may risk creating inconsistent and irrelevant customer experiences due to incomplete insights.

Collecting data

This data comes in various formats. It can be structured, unstructured, or semi-structured, and a CDP has to integrate these sources to build a unified customer profile. CDP can collect raw, event-level data without needing to create detailed tables, and this is done by using schemaless ingestion. Customer data can be collected in several different ways. It can be collected in batches for a certain period, then loaded into the system as a singular batch. Another way of collecting data is getting it streamed into the CDP as it’s recorded in weblogs and mobile apps, giving marketers real-time access to changes in customer profiles. After collecting data, it has to pass the unification process, before it can be analyzed. This includes validating cleaning and deduping it to create a single customer profile.

How do CDPs analyze data?

A CDP is much more than just a database to store customer information. As experts from https://saicom.io/solutions/mobile-apn/ explain, it can analyze and segment customer profiles using specific rules or machine learning, perform predictive scoring, and provide journey orchestration. Many customer data platforms enable machine learning and artificial intelligence for advanced predictive analytics. Additionally, CDPs make it possible to visualize data through other tools with seamless integration. Marketers have access to valuable data sets that enable them to create segments based on attributes and behaviors, which can be then used for predictive analytics. And finally, journey orchestration enables analysis of customer interactions throughout the complete customer journey, to deliver the right message at the right time.

What are these platforms used for?

There are many advantages of customer data platforms, while the two most common uses are personalized customer experiences and targeted advertising. A CDP’s biggest strength is creating a completely unified customer view and accomplishing targeted personalization on a mass scale. This helps with providing a great customer experience to each customer, efficiently using AI, machine learning, and marketing automation. You will never be able to deliver exceptional customer experiences if you don’t have a complete view of your customers and your relationship with them, which is the main benefit of using customer data platforms.

A customer data platform is an excellent asset to any organization that wants to improve customer experiences, keep operations effective and efficient, and ultimately take their marketing business to the next level. If you weren’t sure what exactly it is and how you can use CDP to become a better marketer, hopefully, this article will help you get a clear picture of the benefits of these modern tools and methods.