The Data Cloud to Support Customer Data Platforms

With the non-stop growth of customer data as channels and touchpoints explode, businesses have struggled to collect, store, and analyze silo'd data set to provide guidance to the broader team and show value to executive leadership.

To fill this yawning chasm between data collection and marketing analytics, customer data platforms (CDPs) that consolidate customer info have become popular in recent years.

A customer data platform’s main purpose to activate known audiences in different marketing channels. This platform has prebuilt connections to marketing systems, including email, e-commerce, and digital ad platforms, which allow marketers to use first-party data to personalize the experience delivered to specific individuals.

Many customer data platforms deliver similar essential functions: First-party data ingestion for a range of disparate sources; profile building that ties attributes to identities; and the ability to share profile info with other marketing platforms for personalization.

As the category has evolved in the past five years, customer data platforms have emerged that also offer functionality in adjacent workflows such as reporting, orchestration, and other capabilities.

The data infrastructure needed to support a world-class customer data platform includes:

Data Management Platforms (DMPs): DMPs are used to target ads to anonymous customer segments more effectively.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM):In marketing, this common platform may be used to refer information to a database marketing team that uses email and other channels to market to known customers.

Cloud Data Platform: This is a single platform that provides secure and governed access to all data, enables teams to work on common data sets without resource contention or performance degradation, and supports multiple workloads, from data lake, to data engineering, to AI and ML. Snowflake's Data Cloud is the only solution that is available on three major clouds (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform),  empowering users to discover, instantly share, collaborate, and get value from their organization’s data quicker than ever before. Marketing organizations can either build their own customer data platforms on top of a cloud data platform, or they can buy an out-of-the-box customer data platform from providers such as Segment, Simon, and AgilOne.

To learn more about Snowflake and CDPs, download the eBook: "5 Tips for Implementing a Customer Data Platform."