The real work in building a CDP is assembling the customer profiles, whether they reside in a data warehouse or a separate CDP database. This hasn’t prevented reverse ETL vendor HIghtouch from championing “composable CDP” to help sell its data extraction tool. They’ve just added some features to make their extracts more useful to marketers, including abilities to split an audience into test segments and to profile audience members.
Salesforce has also just announced an integration that lets its CDP read data from Snowflake, although they prefer the term “zero copy data sharing”. The connection operates in real time, which isn’t always the case with these relationships.
Salesforce is warming up for next week’s Dreamforce conference with a bundle of product announcements. Today it focused on Customer 360, which makes unified customer profiles available for applications across the Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce Clouds. That may sound like a CDP, but don’t be confused: the Salesforce CDP still exists as part of the Marketing Cloud. On second thought, it’s okay to be confused.
Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.