The CDP Resource 2018 Q4 Customer Data Platform Buyers' Guide is available

95 providers that have been called, or that call themselves, a customer data platform are covered within this guide.

The first edition of the guide is only available on this website. Though it is possible for a second edition to make a wide release before the end of the year, broad/public distribution might not occur until Q1 2019.

Now is the time, it's a quick login process to access the content.

A category labeling method was applied to each platform in an attempt to cut through the complexity a bit and let platforms get credit for their strengths. To keep things simple, even when a platform might cover several areas of CDP technology well, it could only be assigned two category labels within the guide.

With dozens of actual customer data platforms in the space already, each with varying capabilities, it can help to speak with someone even if just for a few minutes to validate assumptions.

If you'd like to speak with someone who has an eye on a pile of it, please connect with me on LinkedIn or feel free to schedule a conversation directly.

Last but not least, if you enjoy or dislike the guide, it would be great to hear from you!

CDP Spotlight: Nominow

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As pointed out in a recent interactive post titled "Where o' where are the CDPs grown?", and as you might suspect based on the CDP Institute's expansion into the region, Europe is chock full of customer data platform providers. In the Netherlands alone we've got at least four!

Of those four, Nominow wins by far for the most fun name to say, and it should be noted that Nominow also made it to the list of platforms to watch this year in the guide. Why? Marketing utility is not often emphasized in the area of identity resolution -- Nominow takes a neat visual and testable approach to merging identities.

If you missed the buyers' guide, you can find it in the main menu of this site or you can click the button below -- you'll need to register with the site:

Click here for free access

And, in case you've missed this spotlight series, these are an opportunity for the providers to say some things about themselves. Providers are not paying to be included, they are invited by virtue of being listed as CDP technology in the buyers' guide. There's a consistent approach to putting them together, which looks a little something like this:

The CDP Spotlight Series

Here's how it goes: providers will explain WHAT they are/do. They will explain WHY an organization should choose them as a partner. We'll get to know the company a bit as we hear about WHO works there and WHERE. Finally, we'll close out getting a better understanding of WHEN key events in the providers' timeline occurred.

(This mainly concludes my portion of this post.)

What is Nominow?

Nominow collects and integrates touchpoint data from any source your organization may operate. It continuously builds and enriches customer profiles into a single data source of truth, serving as a most valuable source for any marketing campaign, event or other customer interaction you may want to initiate.

Get a complete and correct view of your customer’s profile. Nominow enriches your customer data and serves as trusted source for your marketing, analytics and predictions. Feed it with any data source you want: CRM, cash register data, email marketing, ecommerce etc. Nominow instantly improves the quality of your marketing effort.

  1. Gather customer data from all your available data-sources.
  2. Deduplicate and enrich client data and compose real valuable customer profiles.
  3. Use your validated customer profiles anywhere by synching data throughout the entire organization.

Smart segmentation allows you to analyze your customer data in order to identify and target specific individuals or market segments sharing specific characteristics. Use the Nominow Smart Segmentation feature to explore customers, cross and up sell prospects, create segments and audiences. Act on real and relevant characteristics and prepare your campaigns and events in the best possible way.

  1. Define dynamic customer segments, based on actual behavior registered in all connected applications.
  2. Export and sync campaign audiences automatically to your marketing applications ready for execution.
  3. Set up actions and triggers to continuously adapt to your customers' journeys.

Armed with actual and real data giving you a bright insight in your target groups, you are now able to execute campaigns that are far more relevant to your customers and therefore more successful.

Use the Nominow customer data platform to orchestrate any customer interaction like campaigns or events. Create, operate, manage and monitor any marketing effort to target the right individual and register, analyze and react on their response.

  1. Easily manage automated event-driven campaigns providing relevant content to your customer.
  2. Execute data driven campaigns auto piloting your other marketing applications.
  3. Learn from customer behavior to immediately have an optimized individual follow-up.

Nominow offers you state-of-the-art features to manage effective loyalty programs for your customers in order to grow retention. Extend and deepen your knowledge about your recurring customers by rewarding their loyalty. Know exactly what they like, where they go, how they respond. Growing both customer intimacy and your marketing intelligence.

  1. Create your own loyalty program, fueled by actual customer data available from all on- and offline touchpoints.
  2. Approach and treat your customers based on real purchase and response data.
  3. Target customers with individual fine-tuned promotions and deals knowing their (potential) value and behavior.

With Nominow as your single source of truth you now have the ability to predict your customers behavior. Anticipate market developments and outperform the competition. Use your customer data collected from previous campaigns or other interactions to discover patterns in the customers particular behavior and anticipate their next move. Nominow not only knows exactly who your customers are, but also what they want.

  1. Predict customer behavior or preferences using machine learning algorithms.
  2. Forecast on your business and campaign impact, anticipate sales.
  3. Identify and target those customers matching your expected and required behavior increasing your marketing ROI.

Get all the relevant information from your Nominow’s customer database in one overview. See how your data comes to life and experience our promise: “where data gets real”. With the astonishing dashboard feature in our customer data platform we give you clear and real-time insight on your performance. At a glance see the receipt, response and conversion rates of your campaigns, segmentation of your markets and get ROI information to optimize your marketing effort.

But that is not all. You can make any sort of segment-based analyses by adding specific filters. We designed and made it your dashboard giving you the insight you are looking for.

  1. Compose your own custom-made and interactive reports, displaying progress based on your own KPI’s.
  2. Improve results by sharing next steps and improvements.
  3. Still you can also connect Nominow data-streams to your existing BI/BA solution like Tableau.

Why choose Nominow?

We believe a well-known customer will be a happy customer. By knowing your customer, you can have a relevant dialog everywhere and at all times.  

Nominow is your “pure player” customer data platform. You will get in full control of your customer data with an actionable single customer view including all your customer data from various data sources like data management platforms (DMPs), marketing automation, email marketing, CRM, ERP and cash register systems, data warehouses, websites, e-commerce shops, mobile apps and social media.

We understand each company has its own optimized marketing technology stack, therefore every Nominow implementation is unique. Adapted to your specific needs as you wish.

Together we assess your situation, the context and strategic orientation in which Nominow will operate. We analyze your sources and use cases for data activation. We listen to specific requirements. Your Nominow solution is set up to your specific situation and needs. We ensure you get in control of your customer data with real actionable data and insights available on your demand. A typical Nominow implementation takes 6 to 8 weeks.

Summarized, your customers will experience:

  • A unique and relevant treatment by using a true actionable single customer view, connecting data from any online and offline data source.
  • Errorless dialogs feed by real-time up-to-date customer profiles. Continuously deduplicated, cleansed and harmonized ensuring their data is always correct.
  • Their data handled secured while showing you having full and secured control over their data meeting up with legislation like GDPR.
  • Well timed and personal promotions because you have shorter time-to-market for your marketing campaigns.
  • That they are never missed out in the action as their customer data fuels automated and data-driven communication programs.

In return you will get:

  • Better use of your existing stack strengthened with true customer data utilization everywhere.
  • Realtime insights in your campaign performance.
  • Increases in sales and reduced churn through predictive analysis-fueled actions.
  • Overall you will achieve a higher individual customer lifetime value.

Nominow, where data gets real.

Who is Nominow and where are you all?

Marketing Savvy Data nerds. That’s who we are. Based in the exciting city Amsterdam with a team of 14 we are developing the Nominow CDP to greater highs every day. Off-premise development teams in Europe and Asia are the additional power. Nominow CDP is continuously developed on a modern and innovative technology stack to deliver our clients and their customers a top-notch experience.    

When was Nominow founded? Any other key dates?

Nominow is being developed since the beginning of 2015 starting as a label of the creative agency The Valley. From January 2018 on Nominow is a separate own brand and autonomous company. In January 2019 a major new release of Nominow CDP went live, delivering the Nominow CDP SaaS solution on a modern and innovative micro-service architecture.    

Many more to come

Dozens of providers scored high enough in the 2018 Q4 guide to be offered spotlight posts -- stay tuned for more and for the 2019 Q1 guide due in March. In the meantime, read some of the interactive posts about the guide or access the guide itself for free information on 95 customer data platform technology providers.

Where o’ where are our CDPs grown?

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Here's one last interactive post based on the 2018 Q4 Customer Data Platform Buyers' Guide released in November.

Of the various bits of information in the guide, one hidden in the listings is the country that each provider hails from. Below is a visual summary of where the set of 68 of 95 platforms listed in the guide consider headquarters.

Why only 68 of 95?

The CDP buyers' guide attempts to list any platform that calls itself, or has been called, a customer data platform. A set of minimum requirements is then applied to each provider, and a provider may receive a "Not a CDP" classification tag if it doesn't seem to fit the bill. A couple weeks back another interactive post, "How many 'CDPs' are not customer data platforms?" dove into the various categories that were applied. You can view or remove the 27 "Not a CDP" providers from that list.

Takeaways

Before taking anything away from the visual below, it's important to keep in mind that being headquartered in a place means different things for different providers. For some, that means its the only place they operate. Others have development or other teams in another country, or split across countries. Many operate primarily from one country, but have extended sales and customer support teams in others. There's a lot more complexity to the geographical landscape than is portrayed here, but I didn't want to keep that from making a couple of short points:

1. 25 listed platforms outside the US!
You might think there are only a couple dozen CDP providers in the first place, nevermind outside the US. And, given the inherent bias in my own geographic location, I'm sure to be missing more non-US platforms than US-based platforms. This is a number I know has already grown, and should be a bit higher in the 2019 Q1 guide as more providers come out of the woodwork.

2. 18 of those 25 are in Europe
Not a huge surprise given the CDP Institute's expansion into the region. Again, this is an area you might expect some Euro-centric bias in my US-based research... but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that there are 18 providers in Europe, making that market a competitive one for US providers for years to come.

That's it! Here's the visual -- enjoy!

CDP Spotlight: Lexer

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Lexer was one of 95 platforms that made it into the 2018 Q4 Customer Data Platform Buyers' Guide by CDP Resource.

Click here for free access

Are there really 95 customer data platforms? Not quite... Those providers closest to being a CDP (e.g. two filled green circles in the guide) are the ones ending up here in spotlight posts.

Lexer landed in the guide with two filled green circles, being categorized as both a "B2C superstar" and "segmentation station" meaning that B2C marketers should find it easy to discover, analyze, create, and utilize segments based on their customer data. This visual from Lexer marketing (click it!) does a good job of wrapping that up -- you'll see segmentation examples based on pre-built algorithms for churn and high value, and clear depiction of capability to connect to multiple types of outbound channels and multiple vendors within a single channel.

The energetic and knowledgeable team at Lexer seems ready to build upon what appears to be a very solid foundation. Mentioned in the guide is a recent push towards the United States, as Lexer hails from Australia, and perhaps this is what keeps them a little under the radar within the CDP market. Place Lexer somewhere towards the right of the CDP spectrum, and keep an eye on them all year long as Lexer also made the little list of platforms to watch in 2019 at the end of the guide.

The CDP Spotlight Series

In case you are new to these spotlight posts, here's how it goes: providers will explain WHAT they are/do. They will explain WHY an organization should choose them as a partner. We'll get to know the company a bit as we hear about WHO works there and WHERE. Finally, we'll close out getting a better understanding of WHEN key events in the providers' timeline occurred.

(This mainly concludes my portion of this post.)

What is Lexer?

Lexer is software for Data Rockstars. From acquisition to growth to advocacy – our all-in-one segmentation and targeting hub has you covered. Use one tool or combine them all to deliver results your business will love. The combination of our simple user interface and built in data enrichment makes analysis easier, faster and more enjoyable for all team members.

“It’s so powerful to be able to do the customer research, segmentation and activation within a single tool.” - Anna Samkova, GM Digital at PAS Group

Lexer is the CDP for marketers at retailers and helps you to orchestrate personalized marketing across paid & owned channels to reduce wastage, improve customer experience and drive conversions.

“We wanted to establish a comprehensive view of customer,” Mohit Bhargava GM of Marketing and Sales for Village Entertainment says. “So, we sought out a repository of data (Lexer) that was user friendly, where we could ingest all member and customer information and create a unique identifier for every individual.” - CMO.

Lexer unifies your fragmented data into enriched customer profiles using advanced analytics and the best external data to improve decision making, customer service and marketing.

Key features:

  • Connect your customer data: real-time single customer view
  • Enhanced customer profiles: understand every customer
  • Make great decisions: acquire & grow customers
  • Create actionable segments: drive relevance and results
  • Effortless targeting: optimize every channel
  • Bottom line reporting: demonstrate real impact

Lexer makes it easy for marketers to access, query and action this powerful data.

All your customer data together at last
With all your data in one place you can save time and effort to understand your true relationship with every customer.

360° customer profiles accessible anytime, anywhere
Easy to understand profiles with advanced analytics you can actually use - improve marketing relevance and results faster.

Simple dashboards for self-serve insight
Only relying on your gut is a thing of the past, with powerful tools to surface the insight you need to make great decisions.

Create and modify valuable segments in seconds
Say goodbye to anonymous audiences - create real, addressable segments that matter.

Always-on audiences on any channel updated in real-time
With 3 clicks your audience is available and always up-to-date on any digital channel.

Know the true ROI with holistic reporting
With 360° data you’ll know how much every segment spends, redeems and converts.

“Matching the offer to the persona yielded very low CPAs, enabling us to grow our database by 85%.” Nick Adcock, CEO, Spyder

Why choose Lexer?

We are an omnichannel segmentation and targeting tool that is marketer friendly - Lexer’s customers love how easy it is to use.  Create, analyze and modify segments in seconds. Create cross-channel activations in 3-clicks. Lexer makes it simple for anyone in marketing to create truly targeted, cross-channel marketing.

“Our CDP (Lexer) will be used by everyone in the building, it’s just a matter of time” Moe Kiss, Analytics Manager, The Iconic

The Lexer CDP does all the heavy lifting - customer attribution, spend calculation, behaviour prediction and cross-channel unification - without you needing to do anything.

Support you can rely on

Lexer’s client service team have a constant commitment to ensure clients extract the greatest possible value from the data and tools we are engaged to deliver. Support and training programs are designed to ensure that users, managers, and executives to excel.

Who is Lexer and where are you all?

We're a team of passionate customer data experts in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Melbourne. Our product is proudly made in Melbourne, Australia.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that our culture center’s around creating genuine connections, echoing the no-nonsense spirit of Australia. We live this mantra throughout our 10 internal values and the way we work with clients.

A few of our values:

  • Commit to commit - we work through opposing views to always move forward.
  • Champagne taste, beer budget - we love the finer things in life but strive to be budget conscious, so that our profits are recycled into product.
  • Trust and be trusted - Lexi’s are empowered to fail, and trusted to succeed.
  • Clients, Clients, Clients - client’s first, always.

The Lexer team hail from a broad range of backgrounds: technology, data science, strategy, client-side and vendor. Lexi’s are hired for their problem solving skills, self-starting natures and passion. Lexer is an inclusive workplace for LGBTQ community members, and Lexer support and run initiatives that celebrate minority groups in technology businesses, like a recent talk given for International Women’s Day.

When was Lexer founded? Any other key dates?

Founded in 2009, Lexer was built in close-collaboration with its founding customers - optimising the feature set, design and data approach with every new client.

A testament to Lexer’s focus on customer needs is how we grew organically, without investment, until 2016 when rapid market expansion became a priority.  Over the last 18 months Lexer has doubled its global team, tripled its US operations and has had 3X growth in monthly active CDP users.

In 2019 Lexer is used by brands like Rip Curl, Kraft Heinz, Spyder, 5:11 Tactical, Paige Denim, IAG, Hush Puppies and more.

Thank you for reading!

I'll be back with more spotlights and some insight from research behind the buyers' guide. Again, if you haven't had a chance to review it, access it here for free information on 95 providers.

Fun with simple customer data platform ranking metrics

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In my previous brief interactive buyers' guide post, we get the answer to the question: "How many 'CDPs' are not customer data platforms?".  The report provides some insight into how categorization labels were distributed in the first CDP Resource Customer Data Platform Buyers' Guide. Today I wanted to have some more fun with interactivity, so let's take a look at a couple of simple metrics to help better understand where the CDP market is at right now. 

Free access to the guide

Looking just a wee bit below the surface

I was elated to be invited back to the Digital Analytics Power Hour to be interviewed on the topic of customer data platforms for episode #103. At some point during the podcast, I let it slip that I maintain some "538-style" data points on the customer data platform market. With 95 platforms out there, I started to wonder which were appearing most frequently across other analysts work. The simple approach I took was to add fields in the CDPRMPDB, or the CDP Resource Master Provider Database :D, indicating which reports or directories each provider appeared in. Aside from Google, LinkedIn, and inbound contacts, I used seven reports/directories to compile the list of 95 CDPs for the first buyers' guide:

  1. CDP Institute directory
  2. CDP Institute vendor comparison matrix
  3. Real Story Group analysis
  4. MarketsandMarkets analysis
  5. MarTechAdvisor CDP buyer guide
  6. Scott Brinker's MarTech landscape (2018)
  7. Gartner's CDP market guide

So the first simple metric is just a count of how many of these the provider showed up in. Is it super meaningful? Not really, but it is interesting to know which platforms have been within the category or are understood to be leaders within the category by someone. The metric is in bright green below, labeled "inclusion total". Sure enough, providers with a 5+ tend to be more tenured platforms.

Another ridiculously simple metric can be created from the buyers' guide itself. The green circles next to providers in the buyers' guide can be transposed to numeric scores. Green circles? Perhaps you need to read the guide -- go do that and come back. Ok, remember these?

Let's create a scoring system where full green circles are 2 points, empty green circles are 1 point, and no circles at all leaves you with a 0 ("Not a CDP", though some in that category also scored at least 1 point in another category). This example above would be a 3. The maximum "buyers' guide total" a provider can have is a 4 (two filled green circles). In dark green below, this "buyers' guide total" is depicted alongside the inclusion total. Summed together, you get a definitively strange metric to sort things on but also an interesting picture of how CDP market research is currently shaped. Flip through pages 2 and 3 (see bottom left of chart) to see each metric on its own.

Providers at the bottom half of this list with more dark green than light green could be considered "under the radar" I suppose. I hope this helps a bit -- please do feel free to reach out if a printable copy of the guide, or access to any specific portions of the research might be meaningful for your organization. Thanks for reading!

How many “CDPs” are not customer data platforms?

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Last quarter, I released the first CDP Resource Customer Data Platform Buyers' Guide.

Free access to the guide

It's a textual snapshot of the CDP market, which seemed to grow by about 50% during the process of putting the guide together. "Green dots" and a category labeling system are there to help folks make sense of the field, but realistically these indicators only scratch the surface of all the research going on behind the scenes.

For a little bit of fun today, I thought I'd do a couple things that just can't be done with a PDF. In the guide, two categorization labels are applied to each platform. The aggregation of these data points is interesting in itself. Earth-shattering insights like this one can be found just by playing a bit with the categorization:

Over 25% of "CDPs" are not customer data platforms.

You can see this in the interactive visual below. 27 providers are excluded if you click the button on the top. Click the button again to include all categorization labels, then click the bar next to 'Not a CDP' to see which providers I wasn't too sure about first time around.

There is sure to be quite a bit of motion within this categorization between the 2018 Q4 guide and the 2019 Q1 guide. Stay tuned! We'll have platform additions, and we'll have platforms previously flagged as "Not a CDP" or "Becoming a CDP" or "New CDP" that age out of these categories. 

For a little more interactive buyers' guide content, check out the next post, "Fun with simple customer data platform ranking metrics".

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