“Data is the new oil,” said famously mathematician Clive Humby. Companies today have access to more data than ever — purchase history, browsing behavior, preferences, and more. Even online window shopping can be turned into actionable insights. But if data is indeed the new oil, are you sure your barrel isn’t leaking?

While everyone acknowledges this new reality, businesses still fail to make good use of their data. Poor collection, data integration, collection, or usage leads to missed opportunities. In fact, an average knowledge worker spends over 11 hours per week chasing information scattered in various databases. Sounds grim? Maybe, but it’s not hard to fix — if you have the right tools. Or even a single tool.

Complete Roadmap to CDP Implementation

Once you’ve decided to proceed with a CDP (customer data platform), you might wonder: what’s next?

Migrating your martech stack to an entirely new tool sounds daunting. However, the steps outlined here will show you it’s more manageable, than you might think. When done right, the whole process can be completed in a matter of months.

Step 1: Objectives, use cases, and assembling a team

Align your team and get all stakeholders on board

First of all, prepare your team for what’s coming up. Depending on your business objectives and how much of the CDP functionality you intend to use, the whole process could require multiple team members.

Identify a Project Lead: a person who will be the focal point of the entire operation. For small and medium-sized businesses, this should be someone in a leadership position with a strong understanding of marketing and data, such as a marketing manager or CRM manager.

Larger companies should assemble a larger, cross-functional team involving key departments to implement the CDP.

Engage your developers. Modern CDPs have smooth transition processes, but some steps are easier with your dev team in the loop.

Inform the broader marketing team. While not everyone will work with CDP directly, creatives, designers and copywriters, should be aware of the changes.

Include other departments. Every organization has a different set of stakeholders involved. Customer service, sales, and legal teams may also need to collaborate. Senior executives, such as CMO and CTO, should keep their tabs on the whole process.

Many CDP providers offer expert help. Their integration teams can guide you, suggest the best course of action, help with staff training and change management, and streamline the overall process. 

Keep in mind, though, that the key stakeholders and team members should be assigned earlier when you’re just selecting your new CDP. We have an article on how to choose the right CDP here.

Create a robust strategy and formulate use cases

Once you’ve assembled your team, the next step is to define what you want to achieve. Here are some steps that will help you in this process.

Set clear, realistic objectives. It’s tempting to think of a CDP as the silver bullet that will solve all your problems. But it’s better to set achievable goals like “unify all customer data in one place” or “increase the repeat purchase rate by 5%” rather than trying to “grow 5X in 6 months.”

Establish solid KPIs. No strategy is complete without success metrics. Create measurable metrics to track your progress and show if you need to adjust your strategy along the way.

Outline the functionality you plan to use. Not every company is going to use 100% of their CDP’s features from day one. It’s worth having a plan for which tools you need right away, and which ones you’ll explore as you go.

Clearly define the functions and channels you plan to roll out right away and what you’ll need down the road. This directly affects the time and effort required for migration. This also ensures that you won’t have to go through the whole process again when you outgrow your CDP in a year or two. 

For example, if you only need a CDP for unified customer profiles and communication in 2-3 channels, the process will be much faster than integrating multiple channels, a mobile app, and personalized product recommendations. 

Write your use cases. Determine how the CDP will automate tasks like:

• Collecting and storing data from all your customers' online and offline interactions in one place.
• Using multiple communication channels simultaneously with full transparency and data sharing between them.
• Personalizing interactions with each customer based on all the data you've collected.

For example, you may want to collect and store data from all your customers' online and offline interactions in one place.

Or, you may want to use multiple communication channels at once with full transparency and data sharing between them. You may even want to personalize interactions with each and every customer based on all the data you’ve collected. 

Map out your data sources. Organize your data from existing databases, such as CRMs, and other data sources, like your website. This is crucial, as your choices for data mapping will affect how you proceed from here.

Step 2: Synchronize the contact database

Dive into your new CDP. We’ll skip the steps for creating your new account and assigning roles and access to your team members. These are really straightforward. 

Import your existing databases into CDP. During the previous step, you should have prepared a list of your existing databases to import. In the best-case scenario, you have all your customer data in a single place, like your CRM or an Excel spreadsheet.

If so, it won’t take you much time. You can either use a direct link between your previous database (such as BigQuery or PostgreSQL) and the CDP or try a third-party tool like Zapier. Alternatively, you can go with API (Application Programming Interface) or even CSV files. 

Merge and deduplicate data. If your data is scattered across multiple sources, you will have to take a few extra steps. Merge sources and ensure there's only one entry per customer. Most CDPs offer built-in deduplication. Most CDPs offer built-in deduplication.

Data cleansing. Before importing data into the CDP, clean and standardize data to ensure accuracy and consistency.

Data governance policies. Establish policies for data management, including data ownership, access controls, and procedures for data updates and corrections.

Master Data Management (MDM). Introduce MDM practices to maintain a single source of truth for customer data.

Connect data collection tools. Link your existing subscription forms or website widgets that collect customer data. This way, any fresh leads will be synchronized with your new CDP. 

Contact activity transfer. Import activity data of your contacts (e.g., clicks, opens, unsubscribes) to your new system.

Additional data transfer. Consider importing any additional data you might need for your marketing. Data points like contact statuses, open and click dates, or delivery rates belong here.

Step 3: Set up all necessary trackers

Modern data-driven marketing is nearly impossible without proper analytics and behavior tracking. And that’s what we’re going to work on next. There are two major things to establish here: web tracking on the website and events for trigger messages. 

Web tracking and website scripts

Gather data on your customers’ actions on the website to enable personalized communication and product recommendations.

With web tracking, you can access data like:

• categories or viewed/purchased products
• details of purchases
• clickstream data
• behavior on the website (e.g., pages visited, session duration, scroll depth etc.)
• user device type, model, browser, location, and more

There are three main steps to setting up web tracking on your website.

Install the web tracking script on your site. Your CDP should provide the script and detailed instructions for installation. This step is fairly straightforward, but it requires your developers to tweak your website’s code.

Upload your product feed. It contains all the important information about what you’re selling and is essential for product recommendations. 

Transmit the events. Ensure events like “Add to cart” or “Add to wishlist” are correctly transmitted to your CDP. 

Events tracking

Events signal changes in the user profile and are needed for automated transactional messages, segmentation, personalization, and analytics. 

Automated event tracking. Modern platforms offer a wide range of automated tracking capabilities that can be implemented with minimal setup. 

• Page views and navigation: these include which pages users visit, how long they stay, and their journey through the site.
• User interactions: events like clicks on buttons, links, and form interactions, including submissions and abandonments.
• Ecommerce events: product views, additions to cart, and completed purchases.
• User demographics and device information: these events cover basic information about users, such as their approximate location, language preference, device type, operating system, and browser.

Custom event tracking. While automated tracking covers many common scenarios, businesses often need to track specific actions unique to their goals. This is where custom event tracking comes into play. Some examples of custom events that businesses might want to track include:

• Wishlist actions (add to, remove from, or share a wishlist).
• Reviews and ratings (submit or read product reviews, rate products).
• Account actions (create an account, log into an account, modify account settings or preferences).
• Stock notifications (request stock alert) and many others.

To track custom events, businesses need to use the CDP's API. This is done by adding custom code to the website or application that sends data when specific actions occur.

When sending custom events via API, you can include additional parameters that provide context. For example, for an “Add to cart” event, you might include parameters for product ID, product name, price, category, and quantity selected.

This parametric data can be analyzed and used for segmentation to create highly personalized event-based campaigns.

Additional tracking considerations

While we've focused primarily on website tracking, it's important to acknowledge that comprehensive ecommerce tracking often extends beyond just your website. Here are some additional points worth considering:

• Mobile app tracking: Many businesses have mobile apps that require separate tracking setups, often using Software Development Kits (SDKs) provided by CDPs.
• Point of Sale (POS) systems: For businesses with physical stores, POS systems can be integrated to track in-store purchases and link them to online customer profiles.
• Social media trackers: Some social media platforms offer their own tracking pixels that can be integrated with your overall analytics strategy.
• Loyalty programs: These often have their own tracking systems that can be integrated with your main analytics to provide a more complete view of customer behavior.
• Ecommerce platforms: If you're using platforms like WooCommerce, OpenCart, or Shopify, they may have built-in analytics features or integrations with CDP providers.

Each of these systems can provide valuable data that, when integrated with your main tracking setup, offers a more comprehensive view of your customers' journey across all touchpoints.

The specific implementation will depend on your business model, the platforms you use, and your overall data strategy.

Step 4: Connect your communication channels

Connect channels

Connecting channels differ from one CDP to another, but in most cases, it’s a rather straightforward process: 

• Mobile channels: install the necessary SDKs.
• Messengers: prepare accounts and credentials to connect bots.
• Email: set up records, sender names, and warm up your domain.

Keep in mind that connecting a single channel shouldn’t be difficult or time-consuming. However, if you do multiple at the same time, this step will take more time.

Migrate existing templates and implement new ones

Before starting to send out messages, create templates with your branding. It used to be a tedious and time-consuming task. You’d have to get developers and designers on board, and the whole process could’ve taken weeks.

Modern CDPs often include intuitive, easy-to-use message editors that allow marketers to create templates without developers. Spend time here to ensure your messages are ready when needed.

Step 5: Collect a 360-degree customer profile

Now you’re ready to get started with one of the most powerful features of any CDP: collecting a 360-degree customer profile. Here’s good news — if your initial data was good, most CDPs will create these automatically, so there’s not a lot of work for you to do.

Ensure deduplication using external IDs to avoid multiple entries for the same customer.

One way of handling this is through external IDs. This approach allows you to create a single identifier for each customer, so there are no duplicate entries in your database.

However, chances are that not all customer profiles will be complete. If that’s the case, there are two things you can try to do.

1. Go through your existing databases and look for the ones you haven’t included in your initial import. Maybe there’s something you can add from your legacy order data or customer support data.
2. Run campaigns to capture more data. Website widgets or promotions are perfect for encouraging customers to provide more data in exchange for something, like a discount coupon.

Step 6: Set up communication workflows and create segments

Make your CDP the central hub for marketing activities by using its extensive automation and data activation features.

Create new and transfer existing workflows and sequences

Audit and transfer existing workflows. Check your email marketing tool, SMS provider, and any other service you use for sending out messages. Then, transfer all sequences from your previous tools into your CDP. In most cases, migrating these as exact duplicates is a good place to start.

Improve with new capabilities. However, you should examine your workflows and look for ways to improve them using your new capabilities. Maybe you can add more conditions or channels, or even try advanced features. Don’t be afraid to test ideas, if it doesn’t work out, you can always revert to the previous version.

Create new workflows. A CDP is a powerful tool that allows the creation of complex flows. Integrate different channels into a single sequence to meet marketing objectives.

Create customer segments

Transfer existing segments from your previous solution or create new ones after the database import.

You can do this by utilizing 360° customer profiles, along with your interaction data for segmentation.

Identify primary objectives and create strategic segments based on customer lifecycle, activity, demographics, products used, and so on.

Create smaller segments for specific tasks, such as targeted promotions or narrow use cases. Begin with the vital ones and work from there.

Use advanced methods. Consider Parametric segmentation, RFM, behavioral, or even AI-powered predictive segmentation.

Step 7: Preliminary tests and launch of the first campaigns

After weeks of preparation and setup, you're finally ready to launch your first campaigns. Approach this phase methodically to guarantee success. The specifics will vary greatly by business, but here's a general approach to testing and launching:

1. Start with small-scale tests:
   • Begin by sending small test campaigns to your own accounts.
   • If everything works correctly, proceed with test campaigns targeting smaller, carefully selected audience segments.
   • Use these tests to verify that your tracking, segmentation, and delivery systems are working correctly.
   • Monitor key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
2. A/B testing:
   • Conduct A/B tests on various elements of your campaigns, such as subject lines, email content, send times, and call-to-action buttons.
   • Use the results to optimize your campaigns before scaling up.
3. Cross-channel consistency:
   • Ensure your messaging is consistent across different channels (email, SMS, push notifications, etc.).
   • Test how your campaigns appear on various devices and email clients.

Remember, the goal of this testing phase is to identify and resolve any issues before they affect your entire customer base. It's better to take a bit more time in testing than to rush into a full launch that could potentially damage your brand reputation or customer relationships.

Step 8: Analyze campaigns and expand

Let your new campaigns run for a few days and monitor them closely for any signs of errors or discrepancies. If you find any issues, investigate the root cause. It could be some technical issue that your developers should fix. Start with manuals or technical documentation.

If you can’t find a solution this way, don’t hesitate to reach out to your CDP’s support team. They are familiar with the platform and know how to resolve any issues. 

And if everything is working correctly, then simply wait until you have the results you can analyze. Once the numbers are in, review the performance. If everything is okay, it’s time to plan more campaigns. 

However, if the results aren’t what you expected, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and see what could be improved. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to nail it. Don’t worry if you don’t succeed on your first try.

How Yespo makes it easy to integrate CDP into your business

At Yespo, we’re well aware that transitioning to a CDP may feel like an enormous task. That’s why we did everything to make the process as painless and simple as possible for you:

• Extensive library of resources for both marketers and developers to answer your questions.
• Seamless integration. Our API and SDK make existing data and resource integration straightforward. It’s an easy process that eliminates the need for tedious manual implementation. Yespo automatically generates 360° customer profiles based on the data you’ve imported into our system.
• Ready-made integrations. Use plugins like our WooCommerce plugin or link your tools to Yespo through Zapier.
• Template support. Import your existing HTML messages for all future campaigns.
• Dedicated support team. Our team is available to assist with any challenges you might be facing when migrating to Yespo. You can always contact them here: info@yespo.io 

Conclusion

Implementing a CDP may seem complex, but by following the outlined 8 steps, you can streamline the process and make it more manageable.

From aligning your team and defining clear objectives to integrating data sources and setting up communication workflows, each step brings you closer to unlocking the full potential of your customer data. 

Remember, success lies in cross-team collaboration, from developers to marketers, and in having a well-thought-out strategy aligned with your business goals. Once implemented, your CDP will allow you to gain deeper insights into your customers, automate processes, and personalize communications.

If you’re ready to take the next step and empower your business with a CDP, reach out to us. Our experts will gladly guide you through the entire process.

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