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.

It is no longer necessary to log in 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!

An update

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Whew. Quite some time has passed, quite some things have occurred.

But CDPs live on! As I've moved on from independent analyst / consulting life, there's not much sense in holding back the old CDP Buyers' Guide, which has been viewed by thousands of individuals at hundreds of companies around the world, and continues to drive new registrations on this site. So folks still need help... and this site will remain, so that I can continue to post and invite others to share as well.

You can download the guide, which is clearly dated (came out November 2018), but might still offer some insight, here: CDP Resource's 2018 Q4 Customer Data Platform Buyers' Guide

I would still welcome any feedback on this self-published (thanks Canva!) guide, positive or negative, though if you are a provider I would welcome you to write a publishable explanation of where you are today, and how you would categorize your technology, so that it can be shared here.

Where I've headed since the guide, which would have definitely been included if ever there were a revision, is that a customer data platform must be a thing that the entire organization understands. The software components that make up the organizational customer data platform not so much -- but what the customer data platform does for the business, how it protects customer data, how it makes customer data useful... these things should be understood across the organization, which will make building out an actual customer data stack a lot easier as getting buy-in is baked into the organization. Define your customer data platform, then buy one (or two or three).

 

Presentation — what is a customer data platform (CDP)?

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Hiatus over!

I got a chance to present to a group of digital analytics enthusiasts last week -- you can view the slides here. You can also view the slides here, as I'll take you through the deck, minus intro/outro slides.

This problem of "defining the customer data platform" is a serious and also ridiculous problem all at once. Consultants, providers, and analysts must attempt to explain what CDPs are. Clients are asking. It is a painful and important job, but in the end business doesn't need to explain software. Business needs to use software. The definition of a CDP from your business should be very different from what these other folks are saying.

Customer data platforms are software that can help your organization manage customer data.We'll get into it in a bit more depth, but part of managing customer data is making it available (while meeting security and privacy standards) for analytics and marketing/communication use cases. Needs in this area of customer data management vary so wildly that there is room for a couple dozen CDPs long-term in the market.

Where things get even more confusing in the definition of a customer data platform is that a CDP goes beyond making data available for analytics and marketing/communication use cases. For example, most CDP definitions would call for minimum requirements of basic segmentation capabilities and delivery of data to systems that need them. This is what enables owners of customer data platforms to choose best of breed technologies in any category -- if that system lacks these basic capabilities, the CDP has your back.

You kind of have to include David Raab's definition of a CDP, so I did. It is so very solid! These three points make a lot of sense.

I went on to include the text from our very own "What is a CDP?" page. I am trying to distinguish between marketing service providers, marketing clouds, and customer data platforms a bit. It's not to say that the marketing clouds and MSPs can't buy or build their own CDP software and sell it... but it's difficult to be vendor neutral and truly enable best of breed technologies in these situations.

Technical partnerships can take an infrastructural-based CDP deep into execution use cases (smart orchestration), and likewise they can take an execution-based CDP deep into data management use cases (contextual unification).


Oh, just a few more points about that definition! "Developed software" means someone has to have purchased and used it successfully, pretty much. From there forward, each of these is included in the list to point out that these things mean very different things for different organizations.

We'll get into the details on the next slide, because there are four core areas that customer data platforms are here to help in: data collection, unification (which is kind of what building profiles is), analytics, and delivery!

Much time could be spent talking about this. Other analysts have similar areas, sometimes three, sometimes five... but all seem to agree that there are some core functional areas, and CDPs are often taking very different approaches or handling very different tasks within these functional areas. Quick examples:

In data collection, some systems can ingest data other systems generate. Others can generate data by way of APIs, or inclusion of SDKs, etc.

Unification might only involve simple stitching (A=B in one system, B=C in another system, so A=B=C and all data is "unified") to build a customer profile, or as mentioned above there could be capabilities for unification to depend on the context that profile will be used in. As the complexity of unification increases, so too does the importance of being able to trace exactly how and why profiles were unified.

Segmentation and reporting are the basic analytics capabilities that all CDPs would have, while certainly not all of them allow external machine learning algorithms to be brought in.

How delivery works is one of the more critical components of your customer data platform. This is where expectations seem to often be most disconnected, as it is one thing to be able to send customer data to other systems, and something else entirely to have orchestration logic or even more complex triggering rules.

In closing, while it is good to have external definitions of what software is, the most important thing is to accelerate without disruption. There's nothing much more disruptive than making the wrong major software decision during any part of digital transformation.

Bye bye for now, CDP Resource

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I will try to keep from a long and drawn out post here, but it is with great excitement that I say goodbye for now, CDP Resource. After a few years of CDP implementations and another year of independent analyst/consulting work in the CDP space, it is time for an adventure. An adventure that requires that CDP Resource is postponed.

CDP Resource came about as an independent resource for folks trying to figure out what kind of customer data platform was right for them. While I may still continue this effort to some degree, I'm pleased to announce that Quaero has created a conflict of interest for me. Independent I am no longer.

I encourage conversation with any and all parties who might be interested in having a discussion around the market, needs from a CDP, etc. At the same time, these discussions will now come from a point of view that is provider driven, to some extent, and so I'd ask each of you to take my own opinions as critically as any other provider.

It is my guess that I will take to LinkedIn to discuss in more detail, but this is all that will appear on CDP Resource on the subject for now. I will leave what is here. Thank you to everyone who supported and participated in this effort.

CDP Spotlight: Optimove

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In case you missed the first CDP buyers' guide from CDP Resource, 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

The guide was released in November, and included quick takes and categorization of 95 providers. Within weeks, an update and shift to an online edition will take over the site. In the meantime, I have a handful of "CDP spotlight" posts lined up for our reading enjoyment.

Today we add Optimove, which is one of the few customer data platforms out there that has focused on being an instructive tool for marketers, synthesizing customer and campaign performance data to make recommendations on optimization. That sounds so boring, I can assure you it is not! Optibot has your back. You can have a quick look at Optimove by way of a 4 or 5 minute video here (you'll have to fill out a minimal form but will get immediate access).

Unlike the CDP guide, these spotlight posts 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 Optimove?

Optimove is the Science-First Relationship Marketing Hub, used by over 350 customer-centric businesses to drive measurable growth by scaling customer engagement. Optimove combines the art of marketing with the science of data to autonomously generate actionable insight, empowering marketers to deliver highly effective personalized customer marketing campaigns across multiple channels. The company's unique technology suite helps marketers maximize customer spend, engagement, retention and lifetime value.

At Optimove’s core is a CDP that collects and processes all available data; enriches it with predictive analytics, such as Future Value and Risk of Churn; consolidates it into a single customer view; and creates a bespoke customer data model for advanced segmentation.  

Optimove clients leverage the software’s robust segmentation capabilities to orchestrate highly personalized customer journeys across multiple channels, with AI-driven optimizations and recommendations. On average, Optimove clients communicate automatically with 92 unique customer segments, across multiple channels, every day.

Optimove is used by leading brands of all sizes, including Staples, Family Dollar, Deezer, Adore Me, Go Compare and many others. With over 220 employees in New York, London and Tel Aviv, the company's revenue has grown 60% during the past year. 

Why choose Optimove?

Optimove implements a science-driven approach to planning, automating and optimizing a complete relationship marketing plan. Using predictive customer modeling, multi-channel campaign automation and AI-driven optimization, Optimove empowers marketers to deliver the right message at the right time via each customer’s preferred channels. This winning combination of data science and marketing art leads to significant increases in customer engagement, brand loyalty and lifetime value.

Optimove captures, cleanses and unifies all customer data, freeing marketers from IT- and BI-owned domains, such as accessing customer data and transforming it into actionable insights. Optimove leverages this data to create a brand-specific predictive customer model that adapts and responds to ever-changing customer affinities and behaviors. Marketers can easily create granular segments and activate them across both native and integrated execution channels, including email, mobile, ad networks and many others. Furthermore, Optimove empowers marketers by providing integrated campaign prioritization and segment exclusion mechanisms that ensure that customers are always targeted with the most relevant and effective message at any given moment, while eliminating marketing over-exposure. Optimove also helps marketers understand the exact impact that their marketing campaigns are having on the KPIs most relevant to their particular business.

By providing a holistic solution that addresses all of a marketer’s needs in one integrated interface, Optimove significantly shortens ideation-to-execution cycles from weeks to hours, facilitating marketing agility and operational excellence.

Optimove’s AI and machine learning technologies provide deep insight into any brand’s customers. The power of predictive analytics enables marketers to craft hyper-personalized customer communications, based on each individual customer’s likely future actions, making communication with customers far more welcome and effective. Catering to each customer’s specific needs creates strong, long-term relationships between a brand and its customers. With this in mind, Optimove provides new approaches to customer relationship automation, including Dynamic Customer Journeys and Realtime Behavior-Triggered Interaction.

With predictive analytics, marketing execution, and accurate measurement covered, automated optimization is the next obvious need for any brand aiming to scale their relationship marketing efforts. Optimove’s Optibot is the world’s first relationship marketing bot, helping marketers avoid the high cost of generalization typical of batch and blast campaigns. By autonomously identifying untapped revenue opportunities within the customer base and current marketing plan, Optibot makes it practical to leverage data for ongoing marketing performance improvement on a large scale.

Who is Optimove and where are you all?

The Optimove family is 220 strong, spread over three locations: New York, London and Tel Aviv.

We are professionals who do whatever it takes for our clients to succeed, because our clients’ success is our success.  We’re obsessed with what drives customer behavior and strive to provide our clients with the best solutions for fostering long-lasting customer relationships.

Our philosophy at Optimove is, “we won’t put you in a box.” Every employee is given the opportunity to grow, and to let their best sides shine. Most of the company’s senior management started in junior positions within the company and grew into their current executive roles. For example, our VP of Global Marketing started as an analyst and our CFO was originally the office manager. There’s a lot of internal mobility, empowering employees to maximize their strengths. We strive for excellence and support each other in the process. We like to think big, so our team is made of highly driven professionals with a wide range of interests and a fantastic sense of humor.

When was Optimove founded? Any other key dates?

Optimove was founded in 2009 as a customer data analytics and CRM strategy consultancy. The customer modeling and segmentation algorithms developed throughout the years, along with industry best practices learned from experience, were all baked into a SaaS offering launched in 2011. Optimove was bootstrapped from the beginning, investing its profits into growth and product development. In 2016, after building a 100-strong team, a viable product with proven product-market fit in several industries and a solid brand identity, Optimove entered a high-growth phase and accepted its first-ever investment, $20M in growth equity from Israel Growth Partners. Following this investment round, Optimove opened offices in New York and London. In 2018, the company acquired DynamicMail from PowerInbox, further solidifying Optimove as the relationship marketing vendor of choice for customer-obsessed brands.

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 end-of-the-month. 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.

Editor’s note: the above paragraph is now untrue, only the existing CDP Spotlight posts will remain for now due to postponement of CDPR activities.

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.

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