How Adobe Real-Time CDP Improves Customer Journey

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are a new essential for today’s data-driven marketing world. These all-encompassing tools enable marketers to extend their roles beyond brand building and boost customer engagements and acquisitions to return valuable business outcomes.

At present, an enormous amount of data is generated daily and housed in different systems. All these are making data management a massive undertaking and manual tasks nearly impossible depending on the size of your database. Thus, a well-rounded CDP makes data ingestion, profile generation, segmentation, and cross-channel activations easier.

Adobe now offers a reliable CDP solution, Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP), built on top of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), for enterprises needing robust data management and performance.

In this blog, we explain the fundamental principles and positioning of RT-CDP within Adobe’s Experience applications. Read along to help determine whether Adobe RT-CDP is right for you.

Where RT-CDP Stands in Adobe’s Cloud-Based Experience Infrastructure

Adobe RT-CDP is an application offering enterprise organizations one of the richest yet straightforward solutions available today. This platform helps marketers to improve customer experiences and create long-lasting relationships with them. 

So, how does it align with the rest of Adobe’s applications?  

As you can see in the image below, Adobe consolidates its traditional marketing tools such as Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target & Adobe Audience Manager.

This architecture combines all these separate marketing tools. Also, it creates a single backend for enhanced maintenance, updates, and integrations. However, new solutions like RT-CDP, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), and Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) are natively built on AEP. A meanwhile classic solutions like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target is still on the roadmap to use AEP as a backend. 

With this approach, Adobe is introducing robust and future-proof applications enterprise organizations are sure to appreciate and RT-CDP is one of them. 

More on Adobe RT-CDP

In the begining, RT-CDP was introduced as an application service but was later changed and positioned as an “application”. This helps differentiate it from the actual services, like Adobe Experience Platform’s Identity and Segmentation Services.  

Under the application category of Adobe’s products fall Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Commerce, formerly known as Magento, and other classic applications. Moreover, the older apps are not using AEP’s structured backend yet and are only feeding data into the platform. 

So, there is a bit of a waiting period before we will see all these applications working as depicted. What’s to come is exciting, but what else can we look forward to with RT-CDP? 

RT-CDP Has a Promising Future in 1st-Party Data Context

As Google has already announced its’ “Privacy Sandbox” in 2019, they are shifting their data strategy towards first-party and away from third-party. Soon, third-party data, often used by marketers to track down unknown customers, will no longer be supported by browsers. 

Adobe RT-CDP was developed with this in mind. So, it supports first-party data-based customer engagement and acquisition. Also, you can manage customer journeys and profiles in one system without relying on third-party data, building trust with current audiences and potential customers. 

Now not only are first-party events and data visible within the platform. Additionally, the data governance and privacy capabilities built into RT-CDP that will keep your organization compliant and trustworthy. 

What Else Does RT-CDP Offer Marketers?

The prime feature of RT-CDP is streamlining the management of anonymous and real-time customer profiles in one system. But there’s more to it than that. 

RT-CDP can also solve other more extensive problems, such as delivering out-of-the-box customer experiences and:  

Single View of Data for Marketing 

Without the help of internal or outsourced IT teams, marketers can manage people and account profiles in real-time to deliver unmatched customer experiences. It becomes easier to create complete profiles, including company data and personal data. 

These profiles will be updated in real-time with known, unknown, internal, and external data, and RT-CDP features with identity resolution, and person-to-account matching capabilities to unify multiple records at once. 

Marketer-Friendly UI

Simple to use dashboards and drag-and-drop segmentation features to cut down on the time and effort necessary to perform routine tasks. Moreover, managing marketing workflows and processes with maximum efficiency and without outside help is much easier. 

Data Governance

With this application, marketing practices are automatically more responsible. Manage data access and comply with industry, organizational, and regional governance policies with RT-CDP.  

Customizable data labeling for public and private data and use-case policies set for each data label to identify inappropriate data access and a destination are standout features.  

Though Adobe RT-CDP offers many enterprises across industries, this CDP solution may not be for every organization. Here’s how you can determine which CDP is right for you.  

Extensible Application

RT-CDP is built on an API-first architecture. So, if a feature is not available, you can build it using the APIs. Also, AEP platform services like Query Services, Intelligent Services open up new capabilities in AI/ML which you can use without building big data science teams. 

Final Thoughts 

In this customer-centric business world, a hyper-personalized, consistent and timely customer experience is the way to success. Real-time customer data platform solutions, no doubt, are a must-have for marketers to stay ahead of the competition. 

A customer data platform solution for disparate data and disjointed journeys will improve your marketing efforts ten-fold. Instead of wasting loads of time on development and complex integration, focus on building a robust marketing strategy and maximizing results. 

To know more about RT-CDP and related services, contact us at marketing@nextrow.com.