CDPs bring an end to infinite requests for data

This CDP topic deep dive for engineers focuses on something you probably don’t enjoy doing, but are likely called on to do quite often: ship data to marketing and product teams.

Customers today produce a staggering amount of data. This is great for marketers, since it allows them to connect with users in more personal ways and uncover opportunities to innovate on products. There’s just one problem. Using this data effectively places a huge demand on an extremely valuable resource: your time. 

Let’s take an example. Say a marketing team wants to send targeted emails to customers who have made a purchase in the last 30 days, and this email should include text, images, and links based on each recipient’s preferences. If new data points need to be collected, your front end team has to deploy new SDKs across the company’s apps, sites, and other touchpoints, and validate that the data is accurate and consistent across platforms. If the data does exist but it’s in a location like a data warehouse, the data team may have to write complex queries to retrieve and aggregate it, then either upload it to a separate system where marketing can use it or hand it directly to the team that requested it.

This one data request was a significant diversion from your primary focus––developing and improving upon core product features. Moreover, if new dependencies had to be implemented, your apps probably got bigger and slower––something you certainly want to avoid. The worst part, though, is not the lost time or gained megabytes––it's that your team got nowhere by shipping this data, and built nothing that will make the next request any less onerous.

Luckily, there is a way to stop pushing the boulder up an infinitely tall mountain of data requests. With a Customer Data Platform (CDP) acting as a central hub in your data stack, individual vendor SDKs can be replaced with a single point of access for all of your customer and event data. CDPs also deliver direct integration with the most commonly used tools for advertising, analytics, engagement, A/B testing, segmentation, and other functions, empowering marketing and product teams to easily add and remove vendors, and direct the flow of data without enlisting your team’s support.

The hours you once spent manually dealing with single integrations are yours once again, to spend building the core features and functionality of your product. Learn more about how a Customer Data Platform can help your teams ship products, not data. To learn about more ways in which CDPs directly benefit engineering teams, check out these other topic deep dives for developers.

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