Customer data management

CDM is essential because each customer interaction with a brand provides marketing teams and sales teams with an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and positively enrich the customer journey. Having a customer data management strategy in place to gather customer information, metrics, and demographics, and a strong framework in place to process and analyze all types of data can help with customer retention as well as attracting new customers.

Yes. Organizations that handle any kind of data or use data collection tools in their martech stack have an obligation to protect that user and their customer data from being stolen or lost. Customer data management is a foundational part of data security policies because it protects the organization and its customers with encryption and authentication tools as well as management software.

A data management platform (DMP) is a software system that stores and manages data, typically for digital advertising campaigns. DMPs traditionally use third-party data such as cookies and IP addresses.

A customer data platform (CDP) is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. By bringing together multiple data sets and creating a single customer view, the CDP shapes highly personalized digital interactions using first-party data. Typically, CDP software contains dashboards and presents datapoints in an intuitive way to allow teams to understand the data they’ve gathered for validation of segmentation, customer support, customer relationship management, and the development of use cases and marketing campaigns.

Customer data management is a strategic approach to data, and it nearly always requires a technological component to break down data silos, manage the data at scale, and make the data actionable. A customer data platform (CDP) creates a unified customer view and makes it accessible to other systems within the martech stack.