How Do Customer Data Platforms and Customer Relationship Management Systems Differ?

Analyzing a collection of data is one of the main fundamental elements that a professional digital marketing agency uses to build the foundation of their future marketing strategies. This is because modern marketing is all about leveraging consumer habits to enable smarter, more efficient and personable marketing campaigns that attract target audiences to interact with the brand. While Customer Data Platforms (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are two types of technologies that create these connections, there are some distinct similarities and differences that enable each to play a role in customer data collection.

What is CDP?

CDP is a type of software that creates a customer database that’s accessible and persistently unified to pull data from multiple customer-related sources. It also allows the data to be cleaned and combined together into a single view section which can be made available on various marketing systems. When it’s used effectively, CDP gives a scalable, 360 view of your customer’s experiences.

What is CRM?

CRM are technologies that manage business relationships and interactions with customers as well as work on improving professional relationships with potential customers. These tools support the company’s contact management, sales management and the overall productivity for the business.

How do they offer benefits?

Marketing organizations generally utilize CDP because of its simplified approach to exposing customer behaviours and engagement across varying channels. This enables a digital marketing agency to quickly learn about which connected systems should be used for each client. Whereas, CRM is more likely to be used for sales-based organizations because they collect and track information about prospecting customers.

So, what’s the best choice?

That’s the interesting part. There’s no need for you to pick just one. The best thing that you can do for your company is to understand the differences between them, know their strengths and weaknesses and apply them in the areas that can positively affect your marketing goals.

Here are some examples of how they work:

• CDPs manage multiple data sources into a single customer view.
• CDPs create customer profiles that are advantageous when you’re developing your social or email campaigns.
• CDPs are great for sending alerts to customers who have abandoned their shopping carts.
• CRMs capture and track customer details which makes them great to help with engagement of the customer lifecycle.
• CRMs help to understand the business relationship with the customer.
• CRMs provide information to marketing sales teams.

As a digital marketing agency, how do you use each data management system to determine your future marketing campaigns? Tell us in the comments section below.