What is a CDP?

Though we wish it were otherwise, the customer journey is rarely a straight line. Today, the average customer journey involves three or more distinct channels, with consumers moving seamlessly between your website, mobile app, email and more, creating a trail of valuable data points as they go. As consumers continue to devote an increasing amount of time and energy to engaging in digital spaces, they’ve come to expect their activity on a team’s website or mobile app will translate across the various channels they use, making for more meaningful, personalized interactions.

Customers who see tailored content are five times as likely to engage with a brand, and the only way to create those tailored experiences is by effectively utilizing and acting on accurate customer data, preferably first-party data – data you collect in-house. The data points generated throughout the customer journey are vital to building and tracking customer profiles, personas and audiences that can be used to personalize – and maximize – your sales and marketing efforts.

The process necessary to identify, collect, track and analyze those disparate data points across multiple platforms – CRM, email marketing, e-commerce, social media, ticketing, and more – as well as verify and consolidate that data under a single customer identity, is labor-intensive, time-consuming, cost-inefficient, and prone to inaccuracy. As a result, traditional marketing efforts have typically relied on data drawn from a few select sources while discounting others that may be just as valuable (or more so) but cumbersome when it comes to extracting and analyzing data.

A CDP (or Customer Data Platform) is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) product that collects and funnels all your customer data from multiple sources into a single application. Most, if not all, customer data is locked inside some combination of online and offline data sources: a data warehouse, CRM, social media, e-commerce, email marketing platform, and more. A CDP provides a user-friendly layer that enables business users to intuitively access, search and use analytic data without having to dig through multiple systems or slog through information-dense databases – it’s a no-code solution that layers seamlessly into your existing tech stack. At StellarAlgo, our Customer Success team works with users to set up and implement your CDP, provides ongoing training and support, as well as a wide variety of other services to help tailor the tool to your specific needs, ensuring you experience long-term value.

Once your fan data is channeled into the CDP, either from the source or your data warehouse,  it’s filtered and unified into unique customer profiles. In just a few clicks, you can easily identify fan traits, build customer lists, create distinct personas, and segment and monitor fan behavior across a wide range of variables. In the case of our CDP, you’ll have access to customer data from as early as the day before, ensuring your outreach efforts remain accurate and relevant.

Some CDPs, including ours, use machine learning to calculate and predict customer behaviors. This added functionality monitors, models and assesses available data to provide predictive market insights that help users prepare for fluctuation and respond to changes in fan behavior. Rather than spending time and budget reviewing and analyzing these ever-evolving metrics in-house, the CDP’s machine learning algorithms identify and prioritize opportunities and risks in real-time, helping you determine the most likely path to conversion. At present, ours is the only sports-specific CDP on the market using machine learning to measure retention likelihoods, make lead recommendations, tag at-risk customers, and more on a daily basis.

Incorporating a CDP into your day-to-day activities offers a number of tangible results. For instance, in the first year of implementation, teams using our CDP retain, on average, an additional 2% to 6% of package buyers and see an average 2% to 5% win-back of single-game ticket buyers, a metric that’s especially significant given the industry average for single-game buyer churn is more than 80%. A CDP streamlines and automates the process of collecting and organizing your fan data, and makes it available to your external systems –  such as email marketing platforms, digital advertising tools, and more – saving time and money; leverages machine learning to help you predict, plan for and respond to fan behavior, increasing efficiency and lowering costs; and provides you with robust insights and segmentation options that help you better understand your audiences and audience segments, as well as when, how, and how often those segments engage with your content, enabling you to craft more personalized and effective sales and marketing campaigns.

You can drive a wide variety of internal and external sources to your CDP, and remove or add sources over time, to continually collect and organize historical and real-time customer data, giving you ongoing insight into your customer’s entire lifecycle. It’s your straight line through the meandering customer journey – the shortest distance between your fans and the myriad ways they can connect with and support their favorite team.

No more estimating which platforms or metrics will provide the best bang for your buck or devoting valuable time and dollars to compiling and measuring analytics from multiple sources – a CDP addresses these challenges by assembling a reliable stream of unified, easily-accessed consumer data that you can action with just a few simple clicks. With all your customer data in a single, convenient location, you can begin the work of really getting to know your fans and building truly personalized campaigns that offer them more meaningful interactions with their favorite team.

For information on incorporating a CDP into your organization, check out our earlier post on Customer Data Platforms and where they fit into your tech stack.