Top 5 Best Customer Data Platforms to Keep Your Data Woes Away

If you’re looking for the best customer data platforms, chances are you’re selling something online. You’ve got customers coming in from your website, mobile app, and even your physical stores. Each of these channels has a separate island of data. You’ve got bits and pieces of information about your customers scattered everywhere. 

That’s where a customer data platform comes in. It provides a unified view of this data so you combine all customer information and provide better, personalized experiences. 

But, the market is filled with customer data platforms. To find the best one for your company, you must find these tools and compare various features, which can take hours, if not days. 

To help you make a quicker decision, we’ve compiled the best customer data platforms in this blog. 

Let’s dive in. 

What is a customer data platform?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software system that aggregates and organizes customer data from various sources, such as websites, mobile apps, CRM systems, and third-party sources. 

Think of it as a data hub. The primary function of a CDP is to create a unified customer database for marketing and analytics tools. It typically offers features like data integration, data cleansing, identity resolution, and segmentation. 

With a CDP, you gain a comprehensive view of your customers across different channels and touchpoints. So, you deliver more personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, improve customer experiences, and drive better business outcomes.

What Should You Look for in the Best Customer Data Platform? 

The best customer data platform comprises all these features: 

1. Data integration

A good customer data platform integrates with various data sources like your CRM, social media, email marketing tools, and other systems to consolidate everything into a single, unified customer profile. 

2. Data cleansing and unification

Let's be real—data can get messy. That's why a customer data platform needs features to clean up and unify your customer data. It ensures your information is accurate, complete, and consistent across the board. 

3. Segmentation and personalization

A customer data platform should be able to segment your customers based on their behavior, preferences, and demographics. So, you can craft campaigns that speak directly to your customers, re-engage those who've fallen off the radar, and keep your top-paying customers happy and loyal.

4. Real-time data processing

The best customer data platform should be able to process data as it comes in so you can provide a personalized experience tailored to your customer's current needs. With AI-infused CDPs, you can even predict their future behavior and stay one step ahead.

5. Analytics and reporting

The best customer data platform gives you the insights you need to make informed decisions. Look for one that offers robust analytics and reporting capabilities to track customer behavior, measure the success of your marketing campaigns, and optimize your strategies accordingly.

6. Multichannel support

Your customers engage with you across multiple channels—email, social media, mobile apps, websites, and more. The best customer data platform should support all of these channels to create a seamless, consistent experience no matter where your customers choose to interact with you.

7. Security and compliance

Make sure your customer data platform complies with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. It's crucial to protect your customers' data and ensure you're operating within legal boundaries. 

Best customer data platforms 

1. Blueconic

Blueconic is a customer data platform that lets you easily create diverse segments using any combination of customer attributes to visualize exactly what you're looking for. Blueconic prides itself on real-time, “high-quality” data updates, so you never miss out on the most relevant details.

How to use Blueconic as a customer data platform?

• High-quality data from multiple sources: With Blueconic you get all customer data—from a website, mobile app, POS, or any other sources within your tech stack within one place. Each customer profile neatly comes loaded with behavioral, transactional, demographic, interest or consent-based data to tell you what your customers actually want. 

• Streamlining your customer data: Built-in machine-learning capabilities provide access to detailed customer insights and analytics, which you can use for A/B testing and rich visualization.

• Powerful segmentation: It lets you build customer segments without IT expertise or coding knowledge. The platform also offers many out-of-the-box segments for a quick start. Each segment automatically updates in real-time, and customers move across segments with changes in their behavior or preferences. 

• AI-backed customer insights: AI and ML capabilities create customized models that directly reflect how you interact with customers. Models like CLV, RFM, and propensity come built-in, allowing non-tech teams to get started immediately.  

2. ActionIQ

ActionIQ is a composable customer data platform that allows you to leverage data anywhere in your customer journey. Its flexibility ensures you can activate data for marketing campaigns, personalized communications, customer service interactions, or other touch points along the journey. 

How to use ActionIQ as a customer data platform?

• Robust customer data management: Utilize ActionIQ’s powerful algorithms to maintain customizable attributes for each customer profile. It gives you a 360-degree view of your customers by combining historical and real-time data in one place.

• Customer journey orchestration: Customize user journeys for multiple audience segments while implementing them across any channel for a truly omnichannel experience. 

• Better customer segmentation: Build hyper-segmented, lookalike audiences to create hyper-personalized experiences in the audience center. 

• CXAI: Leverage generative AI to models to design personalized audiences and experiences without data expertise or SQL. CXAI content and Typeface Multimodal Content Hub Integration helps create customized content tailored to your audience that you can activate across any channel. 

3. Twilio Segment

Twilio Segment’s powerful free and premium features make it an exemplary Customer Data Platform (CDP). Whether B2B or B2C, it helps integrate customer data from systems like CRM, Facebook, emails, and over 450 other tools for marketing, outreach, and data analytics. 

How to use Twilio Segment as a customer data platform?

• Data consolidation: Connect all of your customer data apps, sales, and support and unify it on a single platform. 

• Unending customization: Create custom integrations, enrich and transform data, and ensure compliance by masking sensitive information using webhooks. The dev-friendly tools and features make testing, version control, collaboration, and experimentation buttery smooth. 

• Data security: Ensure data quality and customer privacy using Segment’s rigorous data protocols and automated customer data privacy feature. The dynamic tracking plan creates a single data dictionary for all teams. 

• Twilio engage support: Put your collected data to use by creating data-driven, personalized customer experiences that boost your CLV and ROI, improve retention, and promote brand loyalty through unified multichannel marketing. 

4. Emarsys

‍Emarsys is one of the most comprehensive customer data and engagement platforms. It leverages AI and ML to analyze customer data, allowing marketers to identify patterns, predict behaviors, and create highly targeted customer segments. 

How to use Emarsys as a customer data platform?

• Centralized customer data platform (CDP): Emarsys unifies data from websites, mobile apps, email interactions, and social media. It cleans and enriches it to resolve identities across channels to create accurate customer profiles. 

• Lifecycle marketing automation: Automate key customer journeys with pre-built and customizable programs for onboarding, abandoned cart recovery, win-back campaigns, loyalty programs, and more. Automated workflows and triggers ensure that customers receive relevant and timely communications, which improves the overall customer experience.

• Omnichannel campaign management: Coordinate campaigns easily across channels like email, mobile (SMS, push, in-app), web, social media, and even direct mail via integrations. 

• Powerful intelligence and analytics: Gain actionable insights through campaign reporting with metrics on opens, clicks, conversions, and revenues. It also comes with behavioral analysis, cross-channel attribution, and A/B testing capabilities to constantly improve your campaigns.

5. Treasure Data

Treasure Data provides you with a customer data cloud feature that enables you to provide better experiences throughout the customer journey by leveraging AI-powered data-driven predictions, real-time insights, tight data security, and smooth governance. 

The customer data platform not only helps you acquire and manage data but also assists you in utilizing the data for further business growth.

How to use Treasure Data as a customer data platform?

• Unified customer view: Get a unified customer view with parameters like customer propensity scoring, personalized recommendations, customer journey identification, and more

• Create impactful customer journeys: Use data from the customer data cloud as a single source of truth to personalize the customer experience across marketing, sales, and service while maintaining data safety and adhering to different data safety laws

• Built-in AI and ML: With access to over 20 pre-built machine learning models, such as Next Best Action and RFM, pinpoint the perfect customer for each channel, optimize targeting, and drive higher engagement rates.

Unify your customer data with Gigasheet

Regardless who you choose as your customer data platform, Gigasheet can be used to analyze and clean your customer data. Gigasheet can handle up to a billion rows of data, allowing you to use a spreadsheet on database sized data, well beyond the limits of Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel’s Row Limit.

With Gigasheet, you can clean, analyze, group and enrich customer data. On top of this, you can also create personalized marketing content that can be loaded into your customer data platform.  

Loading Data for Analysis

Firstly, you integrate with a tool of your choice to access customer data. These tools include Salesforce, Hubspot, Databricks, Google Analytics, and many more.

You can also import data from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, AWS S3, and Box. 

Enriching Customer Data Using Third Party Data

Once you have your data in Gigasheet, you can use enrichments to add more content to it. Use RevenueBase to find anybody’s email, LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn company profile, or company domain. 

You can also use Apollo.io to find more information on a person. 

Gigasheet also helps you validate emails to reach the right person with personalized messages and increase the ROI of your marketing campaigns. 

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Creating Personalized Content Using Gigasheet

Once you enrich and verify your customer data, you can start creating personalized content right within Gigasheet. Here’s how:

Go to the enrichment section in Gigasheet and find GPT. 

You will find a GPT pop-up where you can enter your prompt to generate a personalized message for your leads or customers. 

Click on “insert column reference” to pull out the first name, last name, company, title, or email address from the sheet to customize your message for each customer. 

After this, you’ll find three message options to choose from. If you like those outputs, you can click on ‘apply.’ If not, you can simply go back and edit the prompt for better outputs. 

Now, Gigasheet will ask you to confirm your enrichment request. 

And voila! Gigasheet adds a brand new column with personalized messages for each of your customers. 

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With Gigasheet and it’s enrichments, you can manage customer data end-to-end. Start with cleaning and filtering data. Then, enrich your lists with enrichments like Apollo and RevenueBase. Once everything is in place, use GPT enrichment to craft personalized messages for your customers. 

Gigasheet automates various tasks for your data analysts and marketers all in one platform. Sign up to Gigasheet today!