Despite all the buzz and potential customer data platforms (CDPs) may offer brands looking to modernize their customer experiences, more than one-third of deployed CDPs deliver little to no value, according to the CDP Institute’s 2022 member survey.
A primary reason for that low success rate is the tension between marketing and technical teams. Marketers are looking for functionality and ease of use, while IT and data teams are focused on efficiency and data security.
“[Marketers] want to get to this nirvana of real-time personalization,” said Steve Sobel, global industry leader, media and entertainment at Databricks, during our recent webinar. “But, if you don’t have the support from data engineering and data science … getting to real-time personalization is going to be an impossibility.”
To avoid internal conflict, marketers should bring data and IT teams into the CDP buying cycle. Having buy-in and support can help in terms of driving personalization at scale.
Here’s what Atlassian, parent company of Jira and Trello, learned after a disappointing CDP deployment:
- Cross-functional involvement between marketing, data scientists and analysts, and IT is essential to success.
- Start small (e.g., by product or channel) and validate your choices before full-scale adoption.
- Centralized marketing data brings transparency and the efficiency needed to create meaningful audiences.
- Ensure the CDP fits within your business’s composable architecture and is compatible with your in-house and API-enabled tools.
- Prioritize platform reliability and scalability. This is especially vital if the CDP will manage large data volumes and complex data models.
“We definitely gave priority to business processes and first streamlined them based on current implementation, and then put tech toward the end of it,” said Atlassian’s Sravan Gupta, senior manager of go-to-market systems. “That’s one of the reasons why I think our [most recent] CDP implementation was more successful.”
Since adopting its new CDP strategy, Atlassian has decreased its time to market for omnichannel campaigns by 17%, spend on paid ads has gone down due to successful scalability, and its campaign velocity and revenue capture went up. The company’s goal is to deliver real-time ad personalization to customers.
Watch the full webinar.