BlueConic Unveils Free Tool to Help Marketers Determine Readiness for Customer Data Platforms

BlueConic today announces a free customer data platform (CDP) assessment tool for marketers. The tool, available here, will help marketers understand organizational maturity for implementing a CDP and craft a roadmap for adoption.The $300 million CDP market is growing at an estimated 50% annually, according to the CDP Institute.

The Institute defines a CDP as a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database accessible to other systems. These systems ingest data from first-party sources such as a company’s website, CRM, point-of-sale systems and mobile apps and differ from data management platforms (DMPs) in their support of real-time data and persistent (longer than 90 days) storage to support omnichannel, personalized marketing campaigns.

CDP distinctions are important because they meet consumers’ expectations of brands and how they want to interact with them. Research shows that nearly 70% of customers expect their data to be shared across channels.

How it works

BlueConic’s CDP assessment tool consists of four questions and should take just a minute or two to complete by a marketer or anyone with a solid grasp on the company’s marketing resources, budget, and technology. The assessment score places organizations in one of three levels of maturity: Experimenters, Accelerators, and Visionaries. Among BlueConic’s customer base, 30% are visionaries, the most mature category. One such visionary is Randall-Reilly, which has so far been able to integrate first, second, and third party data sources at the customer and account levels, enabling new audience discovery for micro-campaigns. “We had this picture of trucking entities across multiple databases and wanted to marry it together in a 360º view, not only for our own marketing but for our advertisers’ business intelligence and CRM purposes as well,” says Geoff Deakin, product director, enterprise solutions, Randall Reilly.

“As marketers derive greater value from customer data modeling efforts and resulting personalization initiatives, the challenge to unify and manage customer data is more pressing than ever,” according to Gartner authors in the July 2017 Hype Cycle for Customer Experience Analytics, 2017. “The customer data platform promises to provide the necessary connective tissue between and among tools in the marketer's stack and help marketers harness and activate their first-party data.”

“We’ve seen marketers’ awareness and knowledge of CDPs skyrocket in 2017,” says Bart Heilbron, Founder and CEO of BlueConic. “But many still struggle with knowing where and how to get started. This assessment is the first step in knowing a company’s actual readiness for a CDP, which then allows us to work together to tailor a roadmap that produces early wins and sets them up for long-term success.”