Amplifying Customer Engagement Strategy with CDPs

Managing customer data has never been more important – or more complex. Organizations are grappling with the need to not only consolidate vast amounts of customer data but to use it as a foundation for driving personalized, omnichannel customer experiences.

At the heart of this transformation is the Customer Data Platform (CDP) – a technology that enables organizations to unify fragmented data and profiles, build segments, and use AI, orchestration and activation capabilities to deliver exceptional customer engagement and drive alignment between marketing, sales, customer success and other functional teams.

CDPs: Backbone of Data-Driven Engagement

Whether you are operating in B2C or B2B markets, customer experience (CX) matters more than ever. It is a strong driver of financial growth and organizational outcomes and sets leaders apart from followers.

B2C brands engage with customers, who often switch between channels, through multiple touchpoints and modalities. A successful CDP should allow businesses to deliver cohesive, personalized experiences across all these channels, ensuring that a customer’s journey is consistent regardless of where it begins or ends—whether in-store, in contact center, in-field, online, or on social media.

Effective omnichannel orchestration drives higher engagement and reduces friction in customer journey, which is particularly important in B2C sectors like retail, travel, financial services, and hospitality.

B2B brands are always looking for opportunities to drive growth and differentiation for their products and services as they lean into the shift towards consumer-like purchasing behavior. B2B buyers are demanding omnichannel journey experience, clear understanding – not of just their needs, but also the role they play in the buying group – and experimentation with new channels, especially digital.

Firms are adopting CDP technologies that can unify and activate individual data across accounts and opportunities and navigate multi-stakeholder, non-linear acquisition and retention cycles to serve their B2B customers.

Evaluating B2B and B2C CDPs: Tailoring Your Approach

While the foundational goals of CDPs—data unification, analytics and AI, and engagement—are consistent across industries, their applications in B2B and B2C context differ.

In B2C environments, CDPs must handle vast amounts of customer data generated by millions of interactions daily. The emphasis is on scale, speed, and dynamic personalization. B2C CDPs need to enable real-time marketing interactions that adapt instantly to customer behaviors, ensuring relevance and impact. Key success metrics often include customer lifetime value, conversion rates, and engagement levels.

Conversely, B2B CDPs are optimized for precision and alignment with longer, more complex sales cycles. These platforms focus on account-based marketing (ABM), lead scoring, and multi-touch attribution, providing insights that enable sales and marketing teams to work seamlessly together. Integration with enterprise systems and the ability to support high-value, multi-stakeholder accounts are critical.

These customer and buyer trends have pushed vendors to provide integrated CDPs with functionality ranging from data unification and management, analytics and AI to activation. There has been ongoing market deliberations between packaged CDP vendors who provide integrated all-in-one solution, but also emphasize interoperability, extensibility, and modularity, and composable CDP vendors who offer buyers the flexibility to select and assemble individual CDP functional components.

Even between these two informal classification of CDP vendors, there is overlap of functionality, workflows, systems and architecture approaches.

Overall, the CDP market continues to be diverse and there is some level of confusion for buyers. Buyers must carefully consider not only CDPs, but how their selected solution will integrate with other MarTech (marketing technology) and enterprise investments.

Growing Interest in CDPs From IT and Data Personas

As CDPs evolve, their appeal is extending beyond traditional marketing users. Today, data management and IT leaders and users are emerging as additional stakeholders in CDP evaluation decisions.

For these personas, the focus is on ensuring that the CDP integrates with broader data ecosystems, particularly cloud data warehouses and enterprise analytics platforms. CDPs that offer robust APIs, native integrations, zero-copy and zero-ETL approach, and support for modern data architectures are gaining traction as businesses prioritize interoperability and scalability.

Additionally, data and IT teams are increasingly involved in evaluating the security, privacy, compliance, and governance features of CDPs. As regulations become more stringent and as customers demand transparency and trust in how their data is being used, handled and protected, CDPs that address these challenges while offering hyper personalization are becoming essential in an organization’s marketing and CX technology stack and for brands to differentiate themselves from competitors.

Announcing the IDC MarketScape: Customer Data Platforms

To bring clarity to this rapidly evolving market and for buyers, IDC has released two MarketScape reports that help you understand and evaluate how these vendors stack up against capabilities and strategy criteria. The CDP market is constantly evolving, with vendors that vary in size, expertise, and geographic focus.

Key Findings:

AI and Analytics Lead the Way: Platforms incorporating AI for predictive analytics, audience segmentation, lead scoring, journey optimization, churn prevention and related use cases are delivering value for organizations.
Interest and use of Generative AI is rising: Evaluate how GenAI capabilities within CDP tooling and workflows will make it easier for non-technical users in terms of productivity and data literacy for users and drive better personalization of content and engagements.
Go beyond structured data sources: Consider how unstructured and semi-structured data can be transformed into consistent attributes, enrich it with identity services and further augment customer profiles for broader marketing, sales, customer service, etc. use cases.
Privacy and Governance as a Feature, not a Hurdle: Vendors that embed privacy, consent management and compliance tools directly into their platforms are helping businesses build trust while delivering personalization.
Real-Time Engagement is Non-Negotiable: CDPs excel in enabling real-time data activation to meet customers where they are, instantly and effectively, especially in B2C settings, to drive higher engagement rates and meet continuously evolving customer expectations.
Omnichannel activation is key: Weigh how CDPs will help to simplify tooling, spend and complexity associated with campaign execution across channels within your existing or planned MarTech stack.
Playbooks and Use Case templates: Prioritize CDPs that offer templates, schemas, or playbooks specific to B2C or B2B functions and use cases to streamline implementation and adoption.
Value Measurement: There is growing interest in understanding which data elements, attributes and profiles contribute effectively to drive desired outcomes across use cases in marketing, sales, customer service, and other functions.
B2B specific capabilities: B2B buyers should prioritize CDPs that reveals complex B2B relationships, segmentation, lead scoring, individual-, account- and opportunity-level insights, among other criteria specific to B2B interactions.

To learn more about our research findings, CDP vendors, and IDC’s marketing and CX technology best practices, feel free to schedule an inquiry or briefing request. Please reach out directly (Tapan.Patel@IDC.com) or fill out a briefing request form.

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