CDP Institute

Closer to home for customer data specialists: personal data discovery vendor BigID has raised a $14 million Series A, bringing total funding to $16.1 million. BigID finds personal information in corporate systems and maps items related to the same individual without copying the data into a central database. This helps to comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR but it doesn’t create a unified profile for marketing or other uses.

Yesterday was Data Privacy Day. I hope you have a great party but will understand if you don’t post pictures. Meanwhile, Cisco last week reported that 65% of companies have seen a delayed sale due to privacy concerns, with an average delay of nearly two months. Companies with more mature privacy processes reported shorter delays. They were also less likely to have suffered a privacy breach. In other words, strong privacy is good business.

If you think it’s hard to measure the value of data privacy, try measuring the value of good customer experience. According to survey vendor Confirmit, just 20% of companies do well at measuring the Return on Investment of their customer experience programs. Poor data integration and low management support were the biggest roadblocks to CX success.

In fact, companies struggle to measure a lot of things. This survey from Qlik suggests one reason is a lack of basic data literacy skills. Just one-quarter of junior- and mid-level employees classified themselves as data literate while 74% felt their company would value them more if they improved their data literacy level. Encouragingly, 82% said they’d be willing to invest more time and energy in improvement. Click here to rate your own data literacy skills.

Retail personalization specialist Barilliance has added the ability to build a multi-source customer database, including CRM, purchase history, and Web behavior data. The extension is part of a new module, Retention, which also lets users define segments and select offers to deliver via Web personalization, email, Facebook ads, or product recommendations. Whether this qualifies Barilliance as a CDP depends on whether the data is also available to other systems. Apparently not.

You probably don’t need convincing that personalization is helpful but it’s still nice to proof. The Relevancy Group offers some in a report sponsored by email personalization vendor Liveclicker. Analyzing Liveclicker client results, they found that dynamic email content based on behavioral targeting delivered nearly 8% more revenue, real-time personalization based on open time and context delivered a 13% lift, and machine learning personalization increased revenue by 21%. They also report that 55% of consumers said they like emails with relevant products and offers. The rest are masochists.

Whatever kind of system you’re thinking about buying, Nucleus Research has a gift for you: a free copy of their 268-page 2018 Enterprise Technology Buyers Guide. This provides sector overviews and individual vendor assessments for CRM, Marketing Automation, Analytics, Enterprise Content Management, and seven other categories. CDP isn’t included, alas. Separately, and also free, they’ve published ‘State of the Market’ reports on several categories including CRM and Analytics Great stuff. Did I mention free?

Speaking of privacy, or lack thereof: Facebook scored what looks like a public relations coup by announcing a new “privacy center” that makes it easier to find and change privacy settings. No mention of changing the policies or options themselves. The new center is apparently required to comply with GDPR.

Here’s an item that’s more related to the previous one than you might think: a study from Salesforce finds that email marketing and display advertising teams collaborate on technology purchases at 74% of U.S. companies today and plan to collaborate at another 20%. The driver behind this lions-with-lambs comity is use of email addresses to feed advertising audiences to, you guessed it, Facebook. Lots of other interesting information here, including usage of data types, technology, metrics, and new ad channels such as voice devices and wearables.

Screen6 helps companies link mobile devices to personal profiles. It’s just announced it can update that data in real time, which lets it take advantage of the growing number of cookies (now 40%) that decay within 24 hours, something done to preserve privacy. So much for that.

We haven’t seen too many big martech acquisitions recently, but here’s one: GoDaddy is buying Main Street Hub, a company that manages social marketing for small businesses. Price is $125 million, which isn’t much of a return on the $93 million in debt and equity invested in the firm. No one has cracked the code on making money at small business marketing services. But the deal certainly gives GoDaddy something new to offer its customers.

For a broader look at martech investing, check out MarTech Advisor’s just-released Investscape report on 2017. Total funding dropped from $14 billion in 2016 to $8.8 billion in 2017 but the 2016 figures were skewed by a few very large deals. There’s no separate category for Customer Data Platforms in particular or data management in general, but it’s clear that investors’ priorities are on delivery: top funding categories were mobile marketing, e-commerce, sales enablement, loyalty, social media, and events.