Do You Really Need a CDP?

As a B2C ecommerce company, you may be considering using a customer data platform (CDP) to better manage and understand your customer data. While a CDP can certainly offer some benefits, it might not be the right tool for all of your marketing and customer data needs.

In this blog, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of CDPs and whether a CDP is sufficient to manage your data or whether you need to explore other tools.

Customer Data Platforms: Benefits

First, let’s define CDP. A CDP is a type of software that allows businesses to centralize and manage customer data from various sources, such as online forms, social media, and online tracking tools. This data is then used to create a single, unified view of each customer, which can be used for marketing, sales, and customer service activities.

One of the main advantages of using a CDP is that it allows you to collect and manage customer data from multiple sources in one central location. CDPs also excel at sending data from one place to another. This can make it easier to get visibility into customer purchasing history, preferences, and behavior. With this information, you can create more personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, which can help to increase customer engagement and conversions.

Customer Data Platforms: Downsides

Despite these benefits, there are also some drawbacks to using a CDP. For one, implementing and maintaining a CDP can be a complex and time-consuming process that requires specialized technical skills and resources. For example, businesses would likely need a data engineer to get data from a CDP into a data warehouse and then a data analyst to analyze the data and build models and dashboards to make sense of it. Even if a company already employs those roles, managing a CDP takes manual time and effort that can detract from other work data employees could be doing.

Additionally, the data centralized by a CDP is not always sufficient for analyzing marketing. CDPs can gather website information that can be used for optimizing website functionality, but to optimize your marketing you need more filtered, specific data than a CDP can provide. On top of all that, if your marketing strategy includes offline, you wouldn’t be able to track those sources (direct mail, OTT, linear TV, etc.) alongside your digital marketing.

Rockerbox, CDP, or Both?

In contrast to a CDP, using a platform like Rockerbox can provide many of the same benefits as a CDP, without the added complexity and cost. People sometimes invest in a CDP to get a clean dataset that gives a log-level understanding of customer behavior, but in most cases, Rockerbox is a better choice for accomplishing that goal.

If you’re looking for a tool that can send data to a different location, whether that’s an A/B testing platform or MMP (mobile measurement provider), a CDP is a logical choice. However, if your primary need is to build a central source of customer and marketing data, Rockerbox is the better choice. In some cases, you might need both tools, but a CDP alone isn’t enough to give you all the marketing insights you need.

Rockerbox is a marketing attribution platform that allows you to track and analyze customer behavior across multiple channels and devices. This can help you to identify which marketing efforts are most effective, and allocate your budget accordingly. Rockerbox also stands out over CDPs by offering offline marketing, making it easier to tag and categorize marketing data, and by offering granular filters, such as new vs. repeat customers and product type. Additionally, we offer data warehousing integrations if you still need to build your own model or run more custom analyses. 

In conclusion, while a CDP can offer some valuable insights into customer behavior, most B2C ecommerce companies will likely find that it’s not sufficient for getting a full picture of marketing and customer data. While CDPs excel at certain tasks, Rockerbox is the better choice for constructing clean, formatted dataset and pulling out user-level marketing insights.