Let’s Recap: CDP vs. CEP vs. CMP
Just to recap - a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a powerful tool that allows businesses to collect, unify, and activate customer data to deliver personalized experiences across various channels. This is not the same thing as a Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) or a Data Management Platform (DMP). CEPs allow you to engage with customers. CDPs specialize in unifying your customer data into one place to increase your operational efficiency. A DMP is designed to collect and manage large, anonymized, second- and third-party datasets. These datasets are often used to create audiences for digital advertising campaigns. In contrast, a CDP is designed to collect and use first-party data in a systematic way for a variety of different purposes, such as A/B testing, segmentation and audience building, or real-time retargeting.
Different Flavors of CDP
CDPs come in different shapes and sizes, with different CDP flavors each designed to overcome a specific set of challenges. CDPs can come both as stand-alone, best of breed software components, or built into suites and integrated within martech platforms that offer multiple functionalities.
All CDPs collect, clean, and help organizations to structure their customer data all in one central unified place. In the age of data privacy and protection, another key element of CDPs is to establish governance mechanisms and censor some of the data points to protect user privacy. With the data that has now been cleaned and synthesized, customer profiles can now be built and segmented into audiences, or groups of customer profiles that share some behaviors or characteristics. Finally, all good CDPs have either an integrated activation layer or a related marketing automation tool which can be easily attached. Here the data, profiles, and audiences created are used to target potential customers with often automated marketing activities across different channels to initiate a call to action. Different CDP offerings excel in one or more of these different areas described.
Comparing Bloomreach Engagement, Twilio Segment, and Adobe Real-Time CDP
Three major players in the CDP market are Bloomreach, Twilio, and Adobe. The CDP offering at Bloomreach is called a Customer Data Engine and is paired with an omnichannel automation layer within the Engagement product pillar. Adobe’s real-time CDP (RTCDP) is a modular component of the Adobe Experience Cloud suite, which can be augmented with Adobe Journey Optimizer, Marketo Engage, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target, or several other tools to deliver intelligent customer engagement. Twilio’s CDP offering is called Segment and is arguably one of the most popular CDPs on the market at the moment, because of its wide implementation possibilities, developer-friendly SDK, and countless built-in connectors and integrations.
Let's compare some of their key capabilities and strengths in more detail:
1. Data Collection and Unification:
Bloomreach's CDP enables businesses to collect customer data from a large number of diverse sources, unifying it into comprehensive customer profiles. Data Sourcing and Enrichment is one of Bloomreach’s key strengths. Segment's strength lies in its ability to not only easily collect and integrate data from various channels, providing a unified customer view, but more importantly in its ability to forward data. With its comprehensive but singular SDK, Segment can track data once and then dispatch it to a wide number of destinations, without the need for multiple SDKs or libraries. This is most likely why Segment is so popular among developers. Adobe's CDP, part of Adobe Experience Platform, excels at real-time data collection and processing, creating unified customer profiles that can then be used by other applications across the entire Adobe ecosystem.
2. Real-Time Data Processing:
Bloomreach's CDP supports real-time data processing, allowing businesses to respond promptly to customer interactions. Segment is known for its real-time capabilities, processing data on-the-fly to enable immediate customer engagement. Adobe's CDP offers real-time data processing, empowering businesses to deliver personalized experiences in real-time. This all sounds remarkably similar, but real-time is not always real-time, there are differences. While many CDP offerings boast real-time capabilities, this often obscures the true processing and reaction capabilities of sometimes up to multiple minutes. Therefore, it is important for organizations to drill down and dig deeper when speaking to vendors and selecting which solution to implement.
3. Customer Segmentation:
Bloomreach provides robust segmentation capabilities, allowing businesses to create targeted customer segments for personalized campaigns. Segment excels in advanced segmentation, enabling deep data-dives as well as dynamic and precise customer grouping. Adobe's CDP leverages predictive analytics to create data-driven customer segments for proactive personalization. Both Bloomreach and Segment offer propensity modelling capabilities, where CDP data is processed by AI models to predict the likelihood that a prospective customer will buy. Bloomreach’s Recommendation Engine, for example, is a great way to retarget campaign budgets and focus marketing efforts on those prospects that are most likely to convert, potentially further reducing customer acquisition costs.
4. Cross-Channel Marketing Orchestration:
Bloomreach’s Engagement pillar - which includes the CDE, AI modelling, analytics and a strong omnichannel automation layer - enables businesses to activate customer data across multiple channels, including email, web, social, and mobile. Segment's strength lies in its cross-channel activation, allowing businesses to deliver consistent messages across various touchpoints including native email and SMS channels, custom channels, socials, and 400+ channel integrations that come out of the box. Adobe's CDP seamlessly integrates with other components of the Adobe Experience Cloud, enabling comprehensive cross-channel marketing orchestration with Marketo Engage, Adobe Experience Manager, or Adobe Campaign. This all works well when you are working within the Adobe Ecosystem and pushing to standard channels like web, email, or socials – but integrating out-of-suite third-party tools and targeting custom channels may be more difficult.
5. Analytics and Reporting:
Bloomreach's CDP provides analytics and reporting features to measure marketing performance and customer interactions. Segment offers data visualization tools and real-time insights to optimize marketing efforts. Beyond that, Segment’s analytics capabilities are set apart from the competition because the CDP offers convenient integrations with over 300 analytics and growth tools including Google Analytics, Amplitude, or MixPanel, to name a few. Adobe's CDP provides real-time data visualization and actionable insights for data-driven decision-making. Not only for e-commerce but also for product development, but only via other Adobe Experience Cloud components such as Adobe Journey Optimizer or Adobe Analytics, for example. Because of their advanced analytics and reporting capabilities through other tool components and ease of integration with third-party tools, Segment and Adobe are often preferred in enterprise settings.
6. Data Privacy and Compliance:
Bloomreach ensures data privacy and compliance, allowing businesses to manage customer consent and data governance. Segment, also sometimes referred to as a Consent Management Platform (CMP), prioritizes data security and compliance with relevant data protection regulations and customizable protocols which can be implemented. Adobe's CDP adheres to strict data privacy standards, providing tools for managing customer consent. This is where Adobe shines with patented data governance models and a wide array of advanced tools for regulated industries. Features like data-source labelling and policy creation, with automated enforcement preventing violations, makes Adobe’s RTCDP highly capable of ensuring compliance.
7. Integration and Scalability:
Bloomreach's CDP is designed to integrate with existing systems and scales to handle large datasets. It is highly performant and fast and is often paired with marketing automation and analysis modules but can also be expanded for other applications through their Content and Discovery pillars. All in all, Bloomreach is great for medium and large e-commerce applications but only addresses a part of enterprise needs in other industries when considered from a CDP perspective. Segment probably offers the most developer-friendly APIs for seamless integration and has the greatest number of built in connectors. Segment is often seen in enterprise implementations because it is built to handle massive data volumes and can be integrated into almost any existing technology stack with ease. Its CDP capabilities can be paired with Twilio Engage for multi-channel orchestration, Twilio Flex – a digital engagement hub for sales and customer success managers - or Twilio Marketing Campaigns where email marketing campaigns can be created and managed via SendGrid. Since Segment aims to be a best of breed product focused on CDP, the activation layer does not offer as much functionality as other solutions. Adobe's real-time CDP is part of the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem, offering seamless integration with other Adobe solutions and thereby convenient expandability into almost any desired marketing operation for enterprises, from asset creation and management, to differentiated AI models for different industries and applications. This one-stop-shop platform approach makes Adobe versatile in its application possibilities and its hosting on AWS makes it highly resilient and scalable.
In conclusion, Bloomreach, Segment, and Adobe all offer robust CDP solutions with distinct capabilities and strengths. Bloomreach excels in data collection, unification, ease of use for marketeers and most of all its cross-channel activation and engagement capabilities in real-time. Segment stands out with its data forwarding capabilities, advanced segmentation, and singular SDK with an incredibly large and varied number of developer-friendly integrations and built in connectors. Adobe RTCDP, part of Adobe Experience Platform, provides a comprehensive solution, with real-time data processing, predictive analytics, and data governance and privacy protection capabilities which are often required at the enterprise level. This is all due to its seamless integration within Adobe's ecosystem.
Ultimately, the choice between these CDPs depends on a business's specific needs, scale, and existing technology stack. Each platform offers unique advantages, empowering businesses to drive customer-centric strategies and deliver personalized experiences across multiple channels. What do the CDP and Engagement requirements of your business look like? Which CDP have you implemented and why?
We would love to hear about your experiences.
