The Low Down: CDP vs Data Warehouse
CDPs (customer data platforms) and CDXPs (customer data experience platforms) are an essential part of the omnichannel retailer’s ecosystem; deployed to enhance the customer experience and increase marketing ROI.
However, simply bolting a CDP onto an existing tech ecosystem can create yet another data silo, and add significant integration complexity. It also reduces the agility of your tech ecosystem, because changing applications and services in the future (not least the CDP itself) means rewriting multiple integration interfaces and migrating historical data.
By contrast, integrating a CDP via Datitude’s Integration Hub streamlines the integration interfaces, not just for the CDP, but for the entire tech ecosystem, reducing the time and cost of CDP deployments or replacements (as well as other applications which share data with the CDP).
All data processed through Datitude's Integration Hub is stored in Datitude’s Data Lakehouse*, providing a “single source of truth” against which reporting and analytics for the whole business can be performed, not just for the marketing team.
If you're considering a CDP vs data warehouse, then yes, CDPs are essential and valuable. But deploying them alongside Datitude’s platform (combining Integration Hub, Data Lakehouse and advanced analytics) means your marketing team get the most from the CDP, whilst the wider business benefits from simplified and streamlined integrations and holistic, entire-business reporting and analytics.
In-Depth: Five Reasons You Need a Data Warehouse as well as a CDP
As an omnichannel retailer, the chances are you have a CDP or CDXP and use it to automate and optimise customer interactions:
Relevant, personalised content and recommendations at an individual or customer segment level, based on an understanding of the previous behaviours of that customer/segment, delivered via the right touchpoint (email, website, advertising etc), at the right time.
Behind the scenes, the CDP provides tools for:
Customer segmentation
Cohort selection for promotions and campaigns
Campaign creation, orchestration and activation
A-B testing, what-if scenarios
Campaign attribution, analysis.
CDPs clearly play a huge and valuable role in ensuring you get the best possible return on your marketing investment.
To perform at their best, retailers need to feed customer data from ALL touchpoints into the CDP: website analytics, online orders, online advertising and, where they have it, customer data gleaned from stores too.
To be able to recommend products, many retailers provide the CDP with a product feed too, sometimes layering stock availability on top for added relevance.
So if the CDP has all your customer data, why do you need a data warehouse as well?
Five reasons:
1. Streamlined Integration
Many CDP providers we work with tell us they undertake complex integrations “because we have to, not because we want to”.
Except, they don’t “have to”. There is a better way:
Datitude provides your CDP with a single, complete and curated data feed, to the CDP’s specification, meaning;
A faster project implementation at a lower cost
Datitude handles the necessary data transformation
Datitude's Integration Hub orchestrates and streamlines data for your ecosystem, reducing complexity – instead of creating more data feeds, you actually reduce the number of data feeds.
If you don’t have a data warehouse, chances are all your point solutions are currently integrated on a point-to-point basis, which means you have several critical interfaces to monitor, support and keep up to date. A CDP, requiring feeds from, and back to, several systems, just adds to the complexity.
Virtually all CDPs will insist on data being provided in the format specified by them, which means retailers must take on the data transformation themselves, a considerable drain on time and budgets.
The Datitude Integration Hub can significantly reduce the number, and complexity of integration interfaces, undertaking the “heavy lifting” of de-duplication, enriching, normalising and transforming data.
One of the outputs from the Integration Hub is the feed to the CDP, in the CDP’s preferred format and to their spec. But it goes way beyond that:
The Datitude Integration Hub also orchestrates the sharing of relevant data between one system and another.
And, an integral part of the process is to validate the consistency and accuracy of the data, with any discrepancies investigated and remedied.
In short, your CDP can focus on achieving the best marketing ROI for you, whilst Datitude provides the expertise needed to manage your integration challenges resulting in:
Significant savings in cost and time
A single, complete, curated and validated data feed to the CDP
Better outcomes.
2. A “Single Source of Truth” For The Whole Business, Not Just Customer Data
Data flowing through the Datitude Integration Hub is stored in the Datitude Data Lakehouse. But it’s not just the customer-related data which exists in the CDP, it’s all the cross-functional data too:
Orders (in-store, online, concessions, marketplaces, wholesale), payments, products, price, cost, stock, returns, exchanges, purchase orders, budgets, customers, online and offline marketing.
ALL this data is stored in the Data Lakehouse; only a fraction of this data is stored by a CDP.
So implementation of the Datitude Data Lakehouse brings a comprehensive data layer and a holistic view of omnichannel business performance to your business.
3. Comprehensive Reporting and Analysis that Goes Way Beyond Customer Insights
Your CDP will offer reporting and analysis on key customer and marketing metrics, but it:
won’t offer reporting and analysis for the entire business
adds yet another data silo to an existing range of silos.
Without a data warehouse, you’ll need to pull different data from different systems, juggling spreadsheets to try and reconcile and make sense of it all. Holding all your customer and marketing data exclusively in your CDP just adds to the time and effort involved in achieving a holistic view of the business.
Including your customer and marketing data in the Data Lakehouse (as well as in the CDP) gives you the “single source of truth” for reporting and analysis across the whole business.
The Datitude App is the window into that source of truth and enables your business to analyse and report on every aspect of business performance – quickly, easily, and with total confidence in the output:
No more juggling spreadsheets
No more time lags: reports and workbooks are refreshed automatically with the latest data
No more data gatekeepers: scheduled reports are delivered automatically to those who need and use the data
Options for BI tools such as Tableau and Power BI
Datitude's Excel Add-In enables those who prefer to work in Excel to use their tool of choice whilst maintaining complete data integrity.
The Datitude Data Lakehouse and Datitude App are designed to be used by your Executive team, IT, Finance, Merchandising, Customer Service, Digital / Ecommerce, Trading and In-Store teams, as well as your Marketing and Customer Experience teams.
4. The Most Comprehensive Data Source To Train Your AI And ML Models
You may already be using Artificial Intelligence (AI)/ Machine Learning (ML) tools. If not now, you will be soon. And that means having data available to train your models. The broader and deeper, and the longer the history, the better the data will be for training. In turn, the insights and forecasts resulting from the AI/ML tools will be more accurate and valuable.
The Datitude Data Lakehouse is the most comprehensive, complete and validated source of business-wide data, and stored in an environment designed specifically to facilitate its interrogation.
5. Agility and Futureproofing: Add New Applications To The Ecosystem With Minimal Complexity; Exchange Old for New At Speed And With No Loss of Data
Technology does not stand still. Your business changes and evolves. Requirements change, and better solutions emerge.
You want to be able to plug a new CDP into your stack quickly and easily. It’s complicated if you need to integrate it with multiple other applications; it’s straightforward with the single interface to the Datitude Integration Hub.
You need to be able to swap new for old. It’s not easy if all your data history is held within the previous application silo; it’s not easy if the new application maps its data differently to the previous one. Migrating your history from one application to another becomes a real headache, but it’s straightforward if all your data history is held in the Datitude Data Lakehouse: zero data migration requirements.
To Wrap It Up: Get More From Your CDP With Datitude
The Datitude Integration Hub and Data Lakehouse can significantly enhance the value you derive from your CDP/CDXP:
CDPs can be deployed faster and at reduced cost
A single, complete and curated data feed from Datitude to the CDP means marketing teams can get the most from the CDP with reduced integration needed behind the scenes
Whilst the CDP holds all the relevant customer data, the Datitude Data Lakehouse becomes the “single source of truth” for reporting and analytics for the whole business.
Get more from your CDP with Datitude. It’s not CDP or Datitude…it’s CDP + Datitude.
* The Datitude Data "Lakehouse" combines a data warehouse and data lake. It's a petascale cloud-based service running on AWS and uses Redshift and S3 as the appropriate technologies for data ingestion, structuring, storage and retrieval of both structured, and unstructured, data.
About Datitude
Datitude is transforming how businesses connect, integrate, and unify their data. Our award-winning data platform and service provide the unifying framework to enable businesses to get what they need from their data, when they want it, in the format they need. A true single source of truth. No silos.
Datitude’s platform is proven to deliver and is trusted equally by mighty retailers and fast-scaling brands who need better access to their data, and valuable intelligence and actionable insights they can rely on.
If you're struggling to integrate, access or understand your data and need expert help, call us on +44 (0)20 3003 5000 or email hello@datitude.co.uk.