In our first post in this series, Powering Consumer Experiences with Data: A look at MDM and CDP, we took an introductory look at how companies are leveraging different technologies to deliver a 360-degree view of their customers. Today, let’s dive a little deep into some of the considerations you should evaluate when comparing an enterprise-MDM solution and a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
MDMs, like Reltio, and CDPs can work together to build a strong data platform for all a company’s customer data. When deciding exactly what is best for your company, consider the technology and structure involved.
Customer Data
Many companies, both large and small, respect and value that customers are people. Knowing who their target audience is, as well as understanding their needs and wants, is one of the most important parts of building a successful business.
However, the technology behind a business defines a person as many different things. Depending on the technology involved, a person may look like a digital identifier, a cookie, email address, device ID, and more, especially if you are focused on activation. Your consumers have essentially left behind a trail of breadcrumbs - each with tidbits of data. As a data and marketing team, its now your job to stitch these pieces together accurately while maintaining the key identifiers needed to remarket to those individuals in your activation systems.
Thus, data collected from this technology may show more or less customers than you may think you have. For instance, a single email address may indicate a couple that shares a single email address. Therefore, that customer is not one individual, but two potential connections you can market to. Using unique identifiers and good merging techniques can get you a more accurate data set. If your business sells to households or organizations, this can become even more complex.
So, determine your specific business goals. Really think about how your organization defines a person. How does your company back that up with data? Think about what information you will need to know about each customer in order to grow and manage an excellent user experience. Then, when you are confident of the answers, consider what may happen if you get this wrong, or if your data has errors. It may be only a minor inconvenience for one person to receive the same email offer at two different email addresses (perhaps my work and a personal email address), but if you begin making marketing decisions based on poorly merged data (shared IP addresses, or physical addresses), you could do more harm than good.
Lastly, privacy is also a key consideration that has been brought to our attention over recent years due to the ever increasing amount of personal data that is available digitally. Find out how you are allowed to use the data you collect, and how you can build a valuable relationship with your customers through verifiable treatment of their information, all while complying with local and federal privacy regulations.
Who Needs Access?
Another consideration when evaluating technologies, is to map through who might need access to all of this information. MDMs are typically IT owned, and work mainly through data teams. This centralized data must disperse throughout your entire organization. Users will improve data quality and make sure data goes to the appropriate teams by leveraging your MDM system. Typically, IT and data teams will be the owners as well as the hands-on-keyboard users of the system, but can facilitate movement of data into other tools, like a CDP.
CDP is typically a marketing-owned technology. Campaign managers, digital marketing teams, and the like will utilize this solution. By giving your teams hands-on access to customer data with which they can segment user groups, facilitate omni-channel campaigns and more, you create great efficiencies within your organization as well as deliver on improved marketing relevance.
Use Cases
It’s important to think about what use cases you will empower through the customer data you collect. MDM can simplify compliance and data governance, as well as provide agility in data models. Users will be able to add attributes to entity records, edit records, and add relationships as they see fit. Most of these actions wouldn’t fall into the hands of your marketing or personalizations teams.
A CDP will help you figure out if you need better first-party data, as many CDPs have their own first-party tracking systems. Not only will you be able to acquire more first-party data, but you may be able to improve certain aspects of your ROI. But if you have ingested messy, non-coordinated data across multiple systems into a CDP, you may discover that the datasets you’re trying to merge together for a full view of your customer leaves you with more questions than answers.
Throughout all of this digital transformation, personalization becomes extremely difficult for marketing teams. Most teams begin the transformation at a crawl, slowly becoming familiar as they grow in the process. Find technologies that help you to iterate on ideas quickly, make data available in real-time and fail fast.
Organizational and Data Maturity
Many companies begin the process of digital transformation by pondering the modern day existential chicken or egg scenario - which to go to first- an MDM or a CDP? There’s no universally correct answer. Whatever is best for one company may not be the best answer for another. So, when thinking about beginning this process, think about the following:
- Do you have enough first-party data for it to make sense to use a CDP?
- Where exactly is my data? Is it siloed across sources, or neatly organized in one platform? Thus, do I have a truly unified view of my customer?
- How easy is it to activate this data in other tools?
- Is my data correct? Or does it show elements of inconsistency and inaccuracy?
Once you know the answers to these questions, it becomes easier to decide which technology to implement first. For instance, if you do not have a lot of data stored, or data that needs to be merged, you may want to look at the more lightweight, agile option of a CDP.
On the other hand, if you are an enterprise company with thousands of customers, and multiple brands or views of the customer, beginning with cleansed and mastered customer records could pay off greatly. If this sounds close to your situation, you will want to put your MDM in place before adding in the final touches of a CDP. Large-scale projects tackling both MDM and CDP have certainly been implemented, but typically require additional considerations, resources and planning.
In our next and last installment, we’ll take a look at some of the component parts that make MDM and CDP integration work even better in duality.
Make sure to watch the webinar I hosted back in June 2021 Actionable Data behind Digital Transformation: A Discussion on MDM and CDP.