Survey of Large Organizations Shows CDP Uptake Now Exceeds 50%

More than half of large organizations are now using a customer data platform (CDP), according to a global survey of 200 companies carried out by London Research.

The research, carried out in partnership with customer data platform vendor BlueVenn, found that 51% of organizations with annual revenues of at least USD$50m are already using a CDP, while another third (35%) are planning to invest in one.

The new study, entitled Customer Data Excellence shows a clear link between CDP deployment and business success, with CDP owners two-and-a-half times more likely to have significantly outperformed against their organization’s main marketing goal in 2018.

This research, which explores how companies are harnessing CDPs to provide better customer experiences, finds that CDP-equipped companies are significantly more likely than their peers to have a range of data-driven marketing capabilities relating to people, processes and technology.

While the US is the leading market for CDPs, the rest of the world is catching up. Business-to-consumer organizations are outstripping business-to-business companies in their use of CDP and data-driven marketing solutions.

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Respondents at organizations with CDPs are at least three times more likely than those at other companies to agree firmly that they have the following attributes:

• A full view of their customers across digital and offline interactions with their brand (41% vs. 5%).
• Use of attribution beyond first/last-click to improve their paid media performance (31% vs. 6%).
• Use of machine learning for real-time decisioning / data analytics (26% vs. 6%).
• Ability to deliver real-time personalization of content based on visitor behavior (36% vs. 8%).
• Testing and optimization capabilities that are central to their website and email strategies (40% vs. 13%).
• Ability to set up and execute multichannel campaigns from a single technology platform (38% vs. 12%).

Following the results, the survey also provides a new seven-stage maturity model, which is aimed at helping marketers:

• Define and prioritize their customer experience requirements
• Rigorously translate these into customer data requirements
• Audit their current capabilities
• Define a data and technology road map aligned to their business goals
• Adopt an integrated approach to leveraging (and monetizing) customer data
• Identify and unlock synergies across their marketing programs

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Commenting on the research findings, David Raab, Founder of the CDP Institute, said: “This report sheds new light on the CDP industry, confirming some assumptions and challenging others. As expected, we find that CDPs are more widely deployed in North America than elsewhere, are more common among larger organizations than small ones, and are (slightly) more used by B2C than B2B businesses. Those findings suggest there is considerable room for expansion as the industry grows beyond its initial base.”

He added: “We also see that the most successful organizations – in terms of exceeding their marketing goals – are more likely to use CDPs. Such findings don’t directly answer the question of causation: did these organizations succeed because of their CDP or did they deploy a CDP because they were already well run? There’s some evidence for the latter view, in that CDP users are more likely to display other evidence of data management maturity: data champions, data strategy, and marketing-run customer data management.”

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“A CDP is a natural complement to those achievements and no doubt magnifies their benefits. Similarly, CDP users are more likely to be advanced users of attribution, paid and owned media, analytics, cross-channel orchestration, and outbound channel optimization. Again, we can conclude that the CDP is both evidence of maturity and an important tool for taking advantage of it.”