What is Salesforce CDP?
Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.
It’s a single platform for gathering and merging data from various channels while empowering multiple teams to use customer profiles in their specific projects.
Also known as Data Cloud, this platform is recognized as a market leader in Gartner’s 2024 Magic Quadrant for CDPs. If you want to find out more about this robust solution, join us in the article below for an overview of Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Salesforce CDP Defined
Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform integrates customer data from many systems and apps for marketing, sales, commerce, and service teams. This means an entire business can enjoy viewing and accessing data on a single platform collected from:
Look at what else Salesforce’s Data Cloud can do for businesses:
1. Create Customer Profiles for Personalized Experiences
Since Salesforce gathers data, it should also create comprehensive profiles for customers. It does this with features that merge a customer’s data into one Salesforce record from all your channels. Data Cloud is great for collecting the following information to build customer profiles:
Ensuring that data is stored in a single location gives all employees at businesses a trustworthy place to access valuable customer information. Then, they can study the data to better understand their audience. These insights can be used to create personalized campaigns and content for customers.
2. Boost Productivity with Personalization
By accessing customer profiles in Salesforce CDP, many business teams can elevate their personalized experience strategies. For example, Salesforce CDP can push relevant data to marketing, commerce, and service teams so that these professionals can create custom interactions on their apps for customers.
How Does CDP in Salesforce Work?
When businesses have Salesforce CDP set up in their systems, they get to eliminate data silos, build complete customer profiles, and leverage that same data to create more personalized experiences than ever before. Better tailor-made experiences lead to an increase in customer engagement and business growth!
Let’s look at the features that make Salesforce CDP trusted by businesses worldwide:
Collect Data
As of 2024, Salesforce CDP integrates with various data sources, such as:
Some of these connections need to be integrated using APIs, but once Salesforce CDP is set up correctly for data collection, it can gather information daily, weekly, or in real-time.
Consolidate Data
By using identity resolution solutions powered by advanced algorithms, Salesforce CDP can combine fragmented customer data. Imagine automatically merging these types of customer data into a single profile:
This Salesforce feature is essential to creating a complete customer profile without duplicated information in your database!
Activate Data
Once customer data is collected and consolidated, it is stored securely in Salesforce CDP. Then, marketing, service, sales, and other teams in an organization can access customer data for activation in various business projects.
Gather Data Insights
Although there are many more helpful features of Salesforce CDP, the last one we will cover is “leveraging the platform for collecting data insights.”
With Salesforce CDP, segmentation strategies are possible. Analysts get the power to segment their information dynamically. But what does this mean? Essentially, they can create specific audience segments based on the following factors collected in real-time:
Analysts can then use the information to create customer segments for those individuals that have:
Teams can then study their dynamic segments to create campaigns that enhance customer relationships.
Salesforce CDP Pricing
As fantastic as Salesforce CDP sounds, we still need to hear the cost. Pricing is difficult to find on the official website, and a quote is recommended for custom business needs. So, make sure to contact a Salesforce agent for your specific budget requirements.
However, we can tell you that you pay for the services you use on Data Cloud via Data Services Credits and Segmentation & Activation Credits.
If you want to use Data Cloud specifically for marketing initiatives, you can pay €108,000 per organization per year for the Starter edition. By signing up for Data Cloud, marketing teams will be able to enjoy the following on their CRM platform:
Remember to contact Salesforce for precise figures!
Benefits of Using a CDP
Salesforce’s CDP might be pricey, but it improves business operations and helps teams connect with customers on new levels. Let’s examine some advantages of choosing Salesforce as your Customer Data Platform.
Marketing Personalization
The first benefit of Salesforce CDP is that marketing teams can create better-targeted customer campaigns. They do this by studying and leveraging data from the customer profiles stored in Salesforce. When marketers use Salesforce CDP for marketing campaigns, they create relevant ones that make customers and leads want to engage with the company.
Marketing teams are also spoiled with Salesforce CDP’s “data activation” in real-time. This means they can create custom interactions based on a customer’s current behaviors. For example, marketing teams can send customers product recommendations in real-time based on their preferences and behaviors.
Account Suppression
This Salesforce CDP feature helps marketing professionals improve their campaigns by excluding specific customer profiles or accounts from projects. One of the benefits of removing customer accounts is to ensure that the inactive or irrelevant ones are removed from campaigns. These customer accounts could be:
By excluding these customer accounts from campaigns, marketers can save their efforts and focus on high-value leads and the right customers.
Customer Insights
Salesforce CDP gives businesses valuable insights by transforming customer data into actionable intelligence. For example, marketers get to work with AI-driven segments when they connect Salesforce CDP with Salesforce Einstein AI. This powerful integration analyzes customer data patterns and can then recommend predictive segments to marketing teams.
Key customer insights from Salesforce CDP can include:
CRM Vs. CDP
So, do you need a CDP (Customer Data Platform) or a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform?
A CRM system and a CDP are essential Salesforce tools. They were built for different purposes and have unique features. Take a look at the table below which outlines the differences between CRM and CDP.
| CRM | CDP | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | A CRM is designed to manage customer interactions and processes for sales, marketing, and service teams. | A CDP gathers, merges, and activates customer data from various channels. |
| Functionality | Businesses use it to manage lead data, sales pipelines, services, and customer support. | It gives businesses a complete view of customer data through unified profiles, which is helpful for segmentation, data analysis, and marketing personalization. |
| Data Scope | Supports transactional data entered by sales and service teams, such as contact details, sales history, emails, and customer service interactions. | Collects and combines customer data from internal and external sources, such as websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms. |
| Data Management | A database to store customer interactions and manage processes for customer-facing teams. | It is more than just a platform to manage customer interactions. It also gives businesses a central location to store customer data from various sources. Different business units can then use the single source of truth data to personalize customer experiences and perform predictive analysis. |
Have you decided which one your business needs?
Wrapping Up Salesforce Customer Data Platform
That covers our article on the Salesforce Customer Data Platform! If you need to gather customer data from various sources and merge it in real-time, we suggest Salesforce as your CDP of choice. It can resolve identities and store data in a single location so that all your departments can use it in meaningful ways in apps and projects.
With Salesforce CDP, you can automatically collect data and elevate experiences that relate better to customers.
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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.
