Companies today collect vast amounts of customer data from a wide variety of sources. With this proliferation of data collection, marketing has changed significantly, forcing organizations to adapt. Consumers expect personalized experiences that are targeted specifically to their needs. Marketing and business professionals must effectively manage and leverage their customer data to stay competitive.
In this blog, we will explore how marketing professionals have approached the challenge of effectively using their vast amount of customer data using Composable CDPs. We will then take a deep dive into the first element of creating a composable CDP–reliable data ingestion and centralization.
What is a CDP?
A CDP is a platform companies use to collect, store, and unify customer data so that marketing and business teams can easily build audiences and activate data for downstream operational tools.
The rising popularity of CDPs stems from a universal need among marketing and data professionals: a system that seamlessly collects and integrates customer data throughout the business. CDPs have become the preferred tool to fulfill this need– enabling companies to craft personalized marketing strategies for their customers.
Check out one of our recent blogs on What is CDP?.
Traditional CDP’s vs. Composable CDP’s
Traditionally, CDPs have been an out-of-the-box solution companies can buy and “plug and play” into their data infrastructure. These traditional CDPs are designed to gather and house their own data store—separate from the core data infrastructure. Because of this separation, data models are rigid, and the setup process is costly and lengthy.
In contrast, Composable CDPs represent a more flexible and integrated solution integrated into your existing data infrastructure. Data gets ingested, centralized, and deployed within your cloud data warehouse. This allows companies to use their pre-existing data tools and prevents the need for costly setups.
Why use Fivetran for Composable CDP?
The first step in creating an effective composable CDP is reliable data collection and centralization of customer data into a cloud data warehouse. Companies need to bring in data from a wide variety of sources to get a holistic view of the customer.
Customer data is everywhere and contains many points of contact, including personal identity, transaction, behavior, engagement, and more. This data is usually collected and stored in disparate sources, making it difficult for data teams to centralize their customer data and build a foundation for creating a composable CDP.
Fivetran Driven Ingestion
To solve these problems, many companies have used dedicated ETL tools to ingest and centralize their data. Fivetran is the industry leader in data integration, with over 200+ pre-built connectors. Fivetran supports centralizing data from hundreds of SaaS and on-prem data sources into cloud data warehouses like Snowflake AI Data Cloud. Your customer data is everywhere, and Fivetran is the tool that can be used to get your data and centralize it into one cloud location.
Benefits of using Fivetran to build a composable CDP:
Fivetran’s automated data connectors are prebuilt and preconfigured. After the initial setup, data is quickly and reliably transferred from the source to Snowflake in minutes.
Fivetran’s connectors support data sources across all departments and verticals, while traditional packaged CDPs focus only on Marketing and Sales use cases.
Fivetran can sync data as frequently as every 5 minutes, allowing real-time data access.
Fivetran connectors are easy to set up for non-technical users (usually takes 15 minutes). This speeds up the process of centralizing data, enabling quicker launch of a customer CDP.
Fivetran is built for the cloud and integrates seamlessly with other tools in the modern data stack.
Object Rationalization
In addition, Fivetran has partnered with DBT to create quickstart transformations that allow users to understand their customer data and create analytics-ready applications quickly. These quickstart transformations give an overview of the key objects of a data source that users will need to build a composable CDP.
The Salesforce connector is an example of the benefits of quickstart transformations. When data is initially synced with the Salesforce connector, over 700 tables are created, which can be overwhelming for data teams to sift through.
Using one of the many quickstart models available, data teams can quickly identify which key objects they need for their particular use case. Key objects for Salesforce customer data usually include customer tables, account tables, and user tables. While over 700 objects may be initially synced, 5-10 key objects are generally relevant for customer data.
Next Steps
If your business needs guidance on using Fivetran to ingest and centralize data or build a Composable CDP, contact phData today!
