by Zoe Fisher 
If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely interested in a CDP or want to learn more about them. We’ll explain more about CDPs and specifically Salesforce Data Cloud.
What is a CDP?
A Customer Data Platform, or CDP for short, is a type of software that can ingest customer data from multiple sources, such as websites, CRM, apps, etc. It can identify where data relates to a single customer, to provide valuable insights and inform marketing decisions for improved campaigns and engagement with customers.
How do they work?
CDPs work by connecting to multiple systems and ingesting data from there. The data is then mapped to a data model that allows for the unification process. Unifying data involves establishing unique identifiers for your data and prescribing the logic for the CDP to create a single record with all of the related data from disparate sources in one place. The below image shows how Salesforce Data Cloud works:
What is available?
There are many CDP providers available. At Nebula, we’ve been focusing on Salesforce’s Data Cloud, formerly known as Customer 360 or Genie. With out-of-the-box connectors to Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud is right in our sweet spot as experts in Sales and Marketing on the Salesforce platform.
What is the value of having a CDP?
Picture this; you log onto your CDP or CRM and you’re able to quickly review your customers with the highest lifetime value, add them to a segment, push this segment to any marketing channel and send these customers a highly-personalised campaign. Your customers respond and engage because each piece of communication and content is so relevant and timely. They build trust with your brand. Furthermore, they feel that their requirements are well-understood and anticipated, so they’re open to doing more business with you. You get the picture – more data; connected, transformed, understood and available.
CDP is about using a single view of your customer to create calculations and powerful insights, then pushing the unified data back into your channels to deliver campaigns that actually yield ROI. All in a repeatable and scalable way. It’s pretty good, right?
Where does AI fit in?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been aggressively adopted across industries over the past few years. Followed by the recent explosion of generative AI. Customer Data Platforms provide the means to utilise generative AI for marketing, sales, operations and most other areas of businesses that use tech in their daily activities.
Salesforce announced a huge new suite of AI capabilities on their Einstein 1 platform at Dreamforce. And it’s all built on the foundation of a great CDP, Data Cloud.
Where do I start?
Salesforce customers, with Enterprise Edition or above, will now have access to a Free Data Cloud account. This is a free, but limited, version of the powerful platform that has developed immensely over the past 2 years.
Take advantage of the free edition and explore the use cases relevant to your business, or create a proof-of-concept to support a business case to join the top 10% of businesses utilising this technology.
To get support from a trusted and Data Cloud-certified partner, drop us a note below and one of our experts can guide you through a get-started plan to success.