There are quite a few CDPs in the market nowadays and there is one for all business sizes. Before your business and your team takes a call on which one is better suited to your business needs, try and factor in the following :
- Budget Constraints: Are you deciding on a CDP primarily cause it’s cheaper than the alternatives which are more enterprise level softwares than what you would like ? That’s a double edged sword. Why do I say so ? Read on…
- Data Sources : What all data sources do you have currently and do you intend to increase this number in the coming years ? Check for out of the box integrations for the data sources you intend to bring in data from.
- Data Engineering Costs : This is in line with the budget point above. Many a times, you might find that the cheaper option you have your eyes set on has a ‘custom’ integration to the sources you want to connect to or send data to. Always factor in the amount of customisation that would be needed to make it work for you. You might end up paying more for the data pipelines than what you would have paid for the license cost of the higher priced option.
- Data Science Capability : With even my neighbour’s kid talking about AI-ML, it does become a necessity in today’s world that the CDP option we are looking at, has data science capabilities within its ecosystem and we should be able to leverage those without adding up further to our costs.
- Support to ‘Undo’ mistakes : Let’s face it ! We aren’t all perfect and there would definitely come a time when you or your team would make a minor mistake which might do harm to the data within CDP. Ask the sales teams about what kind of support would be provided in such a scenario and get a SLA signed.
- Merge Policy : What happens when similar data points come into the CDP from disparate sources? Which one takes precedence over the other and why ?
- Data Governance : With so much buzz around data privacy and regulations being firmed up every few months, data governance should be an important factor to consider when you go shopping for a CDP.
- Intuitive UI : This one might feel like not a big piece of the puzzle but trust me, you don’t want to spend time looking for simple things within the UI.
- Data Transformation : Can you build new data points or tweak the existing ones within the CDP? If yes, then to what extent.
- Segmentation Capabilities : How powerful can your segments be once you’ve ingested your data ?
- Community Support : Are there others in the market who have already implemented the tech or are implementing as you do so too. It’s very important for any tool to have a support community to fall back on, in times of need.
- Learning Resources : The tool you choose should also have an easy to understand documentation available. You should not need to go to engineering team to get simple issues sorted.
- Destinations : You’ve done all the hard work and created audiences. Now, these audiences would need to be activated on destinations. How well does your choice integrate with the walled gardens of the world ?
- Existing Tech Stack : How well does your CDP aid on-site personalisation ? How well does it integrate with your email marketing tool ?
These are some (not exhaustive, mind you !) tips based on my experience till date working on different CDPs. Hope these make sense to you all and help you make better purchase decisions.
Let me know your thoughts in the comment section and may be show some appreciation with the claps.
Till next post, cya.
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