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Enter the CDP, the heart and soul of your martech stack, a central repository where data is collected, segmented, and organized so that it is ready to drive personalized experiences across your digital channels. Extracting value from your data The following are some of the ways in which a CDP extracts value from the data gathered within your organization: With its data-crunching might, the CDP forms a solid bedrock of data for the digital experience platform (DXP) to work with – effectively it’s the driving force behind the delivery of personalized experiences that consumers have come to expect and demand from brands. This is why a customer data platform (CDP) can act as a foundational component of a DXP.”
With today’s consumers expecting personalization as part and parcel of their brand experience, marketers are under unprecedented pressure to collect, aggregate, and activate data. In fact, according to Salesforce’s recent State of Marketing report, “the number of significant data sources used by marketers alone grew 50% from 8 in 2019 to 12 in 2021.”
So how can brands transform the data they gather into meaningful customer experiences? Enter the CDP, the heart and soul of your martech stack, a central repository where data is collected, segmented, and organized so that it is ready to drive personalized experiences across your digital channels. Best of all, it is designed to be managed by marketers, not IT departments.
A CDP centralizes your organization’s data, eliminating silos and ensuring that all relevant data is utilized. The following are some of the ways in which a CDP extracts value from the data gathered within your organization:
With its data-crunching might, the CDP forms a solid bedrock of data for the digital experience platform (DXP) to work with – effectively it’s the driving force behind the delivery of personalized experiences that consumers have come to expect and demand from brands.
According to Gartner’s definition, a digital experience platform or DXP is “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.”
As the description suggests, a DXP comprises a suite of digital marketing tools that drive personalized customer experiences from inception to delivery. Using AI and machine learning, a DXP ensures personalized campaigns are served up in the right way at the right time on the right channel. The following are just a few of the ways a DXP supports your personalization strategy:
With a DXP in place, it’s easy to connect to other components within the marketing stack, including analytics, customer data, marketing automation and ecommerce. Integrations are seamless, meaning you can tailor your martech stack to suit your organization’s needs.
While DXPs offer organizations the ability to develop meaningful customer relationships on any channel through mobile apps, marketing automation and chatbots, the CDP’s segmentation and decisioning capabilities refine the experience, allowing marketers to “read the room” and ensure campaigns are perfectly pitched for their target audience.
Breaking down the basic capabilities of both platforms, we can appreciate the role they play in creating memorable customer experiences.
Combined, these capabilities ensure that brands have the technology to deliver personalization at scale.
As a key component within the DXP, the CDP is fundamental to unifying, segmenting, and refining customer data to produce clever, personalized experiences that the DXP delivers to the customer in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time. Impressive, right?
As CMSWire points out, “successful marketing and ad campaigns are only as good as the customer data being used for segmentation, personalization, ad attribution and more. This is why a customer data platform (CDP) can act as a foundational component of a DXP.”
The beauty of the DXP’s API-first architecture is that it flexibly integrates with systems such as CDPs, allowing your organization to easily adapt and scale its customer experience campaigns.
Both the CDP and DXP have adapted their offerings and architecture in recent times, creating flexible solutions that easily sync with other platforms and applications. The Sitecore CDP and composable DXP are two of the most exciting innovations to hit the martech stack, offering seamless integration and next level personalization capabilities.
The Sitecore CDP combines the secure data management capabilities that you expect from a regular CDP with intelligent decisioning, predictive analytics, experimentation, and orchestration. By eliminating data silos and connecting customer data, the Sitecore CDP offers a 360-degree view of the customer, allowing your organization to scale up its personalization.
The composable DXP is the latest development within the DXP landscape and consists of a collection of applications that are decomposed into a set (or sets) of packaged business capabilities (PBCs). In a recent report, Gartner discusses how the new breed of packaged business capabilities within DXPs are designed to be ‘future-proof’ and can be “purpose-built and task-oriented but can also be rebuilt when elements of the purpose or context change.”
Truly customizable, next generation DXPs are cloud native, API-first, and composable, allowing organizations to pick and choose relevant components to suit their digital marketing strategy. Speed of delivery is another major plus. According to Gartner, organizations using composable DXPs can deliver new features up to 80% faster than organizations using traditional suites.
Want to learn more?
With these exciting possibilities on the horizon, there’s no better time to upgrade your martech stack. Reach out for a demo and find out how Sitecore’s CDP and DXP solutions can transform your customers’ online experiences.