• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 28, 2020

Data is coming in from many sources, and it is being routed to just as many places in-house, judging by The CDP Report 2020: The Rise of Customer Data Platforms, a study by Segment.

The result is a fractured experience for consumers, beginning with the marketing emails they get.

“Check your email inbox right now, and it’s almost a sure bet that you’ll find emails that call you by the wrong name, asking you to purchase something you literally just bought, or that clearly was meant for someone else, “ the study states.

The solution is to deploy a CDP, a tool that “lets you capture customer data from “wherever your customers interact with your brand,” Segment claims.

In the interest of full disclosure, Segment is a CDP itself: It processes 500 billion events per month, and claims a 60% increase in volume in 2019.

But it’s objective. For example, it notes that “Gartner recently placed CDPs in the peak of “inflated expectations.’

This means that “CDP buyers are expecting this technology to do more than it’s actually capable of,” it admits.

And, at the least, Segment is in a position to see usage patterns.

It reports that there are five main types of sources: Web (Analytics.js), Mobile (iOS, Android), Server (HTTP API, Node.js, etc.), and Cloud (Stripe, Intercom, etc.).

And on the other side, Segment reports that the average user of its CDP is sending data to eight tools, and that email marketing systems are No. 2 in the lineup. Here are the top 10:

1. Analytics — 83.6%
2. Email marketing — 41.5%
3. Advertising — 31.6%
4. Warehouses — 31%
5. Customer success — 26.2% 
6. Heatmaps & recordings — 21.5%
7. Raw data — 17.8%
8. CRM — 15.3%
9. Tag managers — 14.4%
10. SMS & push notifications — 12.3%

In contrast, only 9.3% are sending data to personalization platforms, 5.6% to attribution and 5.4% to A/B testing.

Drilling down to email, the most popular tools are: 

• Braze
• Customer.io
• Iterable
• MailChimp 

“In January, MailChimp exceeded a 60% share of the email marketing industry,” the study states. “Our data tells a similar story, with MailChimp being the most popular email marketing destination to send data to.”

CDPs help email because they  make data available in real-time,” the study continues.

The study concludes by making these predictions: 

1. 2020 will be the year CDP enters the mainstream.
2. Customer data platforms will have to balance privacy and personalization. 
3. Customer data platforms will move from adoption to automation.

Note: the latter would enable brands to send “a specific email based on the customers latest action, such as clicking on an ad or starting to use a competitor tool (tools involved could be Segment, Reply, Outreach, Datanyze),” the study says.