Maintaining a consistent brand across channels is a complex task. As customers move from one touchpoint to another, they expect a seamless experience centered around their needs. In this regard, the biggest challenge for marketers delivering on this promise is fragmented data and the lack of data unification.

Without the ability to tie together data from multiple sources, marketers are left with fragmented customer profiles and unable to deliver truly targeted campaigns, intensifying organizational challenges and making data-driven objectives harder to achieve. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can help marketing leaders meet these demands.

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In essence, CDPs are systems created to tackle the challenges associated with fragmented data. Let's explore more about how CDPs, particularly the Adobe Customer Data Platform, can help solve the organizational and market challenges your teams are facing today.

Customer Data Platforms, tools designed to unify fragmented data.

A CDP is a digital platform that helps companies collect, unify, segment, personalize, and activate customer data across multiple channels. It’s an essential tool that marketing, sales, and product teams use to understand their customers and deliver better experiences. Essentially, the big problem that CDPs solve is fragmented data.

Most information on the internet is siloed, but this can also be true within organizations. A data silo is a set of data available to a single department or a small group of departments, but not the rest of the organization.

This fragmentation leads to a lack of transparency and good communication between departments, but with with the Adobe CDP, companies are able to break down these silos and share information across any department (marketing, customer service, IT, data science, etc.) and lines of business (B2C, B2B), making unified user profiles a reality. In the words of Belinda Finch, CTO at Three:

"If IT can provide the right data then marketing can take that data and use it in the right way. Being able to do that in real-time together to understand the customer journey and end-customer experience is absolutely key".

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While breaking silos is one of the main benefits of the Adobe Customer Data Platform, there are a few specific features that separate them from other data platform models. According to the Customer Data Platform Institute (an organization dedicated to helping brands manage their customer data more efficiently), these are two of the essential elements all CDPs should have in common:

• Create a persistent, unified customer database: By capturing data from multiple systems, Customer Data Platforms can create a comprehensive profile with information that helps behavioral tracking over time, leaving behind any trace of fragmented data that complicates delivering exceptional customer experiences.
• Make data accessible through all systems: Most customer data is collected by systems that were not designed to share it with other platforms. CDPs not only allow these systems to share the data but, once collected, it can be processed to make better marketing decisions and more effective campaigns.

Making better business decisions with the Adobe CDP on your customer experience management.

The Adobe Customer Data Platform allows you to go above and beyond basic data management needs. With such a powerful tool, you can classify and process customer data in more sophisticated ways, helping you make complex decisions, such as:

• Which products should be recommended to which customers at what time.
• Improving your overall marketing strategy.
• When to offer discounts to your customers.
• Determine which segments of your audience are the most profitable ones.

As an Adobe Solutions Partner, at Conexio we use the Adobe Real-Time CDP, a platform capable of creating unified customer profiles for both B2C and B2B purposes, as well as a variety of additional functions that provide organizations with the coveted "single view" of their customers. Let's explore what exactly this entails:

• Creating a single, uniform data format: Forget about fragmented data. With the Adobe Customer Data Platform, data can be collected into a standard format for real-time activation for internal and external use.
• Automatic profile updates: No need to stitch data together. Profiles are updated automatically and in real-time.
• Actionable insights for B2C and B2B: Deliver relevant experiences based on real-time data.
• Apply data governance and privacy plan: Implement effective marketing strategies while respecting your customers' privacy needs.
• Manage both B2C and B2B lines of business: Create hybrid unified profiles that provide both personal and professional information for enhanced decision-making.

While there are a few Customer Data Platforms that can achieve components of delivering dynamic, personalized experiences on any channel, the Adobe CDP has specific functions that make personalized experiences at scale possible in a way that other CDPs and marketing clouds can't.

Adobe Customer Data Platform, the future of customer data.

While CDPs are a relatively new addition to the marketing and CX software stack, they have quickly become an invaluable resource.

If you're already familiar with them or have been considering implementing them into your company's marketing strategy, it's time to embrace their potential and take advantage of the opportunities they present. By mastering them, you'll be able to unlock value in an otherwise seemingly narrow corner of your marketing stack.

As we explored above, the capabilities they bring go beyond solving the fragmented data issue. For instance, they also help organizations adjust to data privacy concerns and modern data collection methods. Due to this combination of circumstances, CDPs have risen as a must-have moving forward. And with the shift towards first-party solutions intensifying, their relevance will only continue to grow.

Marketing, after all, is about delivering the best experience to your customers, and the Adobe Customer Data Platform is an essential part of achieving this. At Conexio, we transform data from every touchpoint into relationship-building insights, cost optimization opportunities, attribution models, and much more. So, if you’re ready to invest in a world-class Customer Data Platform (or optimize the one you have!), don’t hesitate to reach out to our experts.