Bring your customers into the light with a digital CDP

For marketers, understanding your customers in meaningful ways is getting harder to do.

With third-party cookies sunsetting on Chrome in 2024, increased privacy regulation and the proliferation of digital channels, consumers are fragmenting. At most, brands have some owned data that give them a limited view of who their shoppers are.

But what if some of those blank spots could be filled?

A customer data platform (CDP) is designed to unify customer data to power personalized experience. The CDP industry stands at about $2 billion in 2022, and as brands try to build out stronger marketing models, this number will continue to grow. The most successful CDPs not only collect and match first-party data, but they do so with a strong identity solution.

Epsilon’s customer, a CDP solution, is the first of its kind to include exclusive digital data on browsing behavior across brand websites and the open web, meaning marketers can get more value in a privacy-safe environment for unique audience creation and insights.

Shining a light in the dark

CDPs are great tools for filling in first-party data gaps. Brands often have an incomplete and inaccurate view of individuals, which is exacerbated by their inability to connect a customer’s journey online and offline. This fractured view creates more opportunities for ad waste.

These dark spots are fueled by many things: Inaccurate identity of customers, limited view of attributes and interests, disconnected experiences, outdated privacy preferences and more. With a strong CDP solution, brands can actually get to know their customers.

And, with identity, they only deepen that connection.

Take our friend Capt. Walker Plank.

His preferred boat retailer—Ships Rrrrr Us—already knows a lot about him thanks to his brand loyalty over the years. This includes things like this email address, his mobile app and website behaviors, and some of his device behaviors. But this view is fragmented.

Now, imagine if Ships Rrrr Us were able to supplement some of this data. Segmentation scores help round out Capt. Walker Plank, some of which might change the way Ships Rrrr Us markets to Walker.

At Epsilon, through CORE ID, we create pseudonymized matches that build a bigger view of Walker, including what he buys, what he browses, what he watches and on what devices. This pseudonymized data enhances the rich first-party data a brand collects with other valuable and predictive signals.

CDPs that rely solely on first-party data are missing a key element. Identity solutions—like Epsilon CORE ID—provide a persistent, unified view of individual people. Brands can decipher what consumers want and need at the moment they’re ready to convert, even on a 1:1 level.

This not only helps brands reach consumers in moments where they need one another, but it fuels stronger, more persistent knowledge in the future. The customer lifecycle is not linear and consumer interests change on a day-to-day basis. Understanding them more deeply creates better pathways for continued learning.

The digital difference

CDPs worth their salt do more than just collect data, and Epsilon's Customer is the only offering that does so. For a strong CDP solution, brands need to have connected identity with enriched customer profiles.

Customer is powered by CORE ID which matches against 255 million unique IDs. From there, we partner with more than 14,000 publishers, including websites and apps hundreds of millions of people engage with every day. Because of this integrated system, brands can see real-time, person-level signals and attributes.

We can activate first-party data everywhere, harnessing the value of a client’s data to deliver the highest performing personalized audiences and measurement across owned and paid channels. All using one platform.

When working in tandem, these tools greatly reduce ad waste and improve overall marketing strategies. Customers are no longer in the dark and brands can speak to them with meaningful, personalized messages.