November 23, 2022
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 min read

CDP vs. ESP: Which Will Benefit Your Business More?

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In today's digital age, businesses must utilize customer data to create personalized experiences that will nurture relationships and grow brand loyalty. But with so many data points to consider, it can be difficult to know where to start. This is where customer data platforms (CDPs) and email service providers (ESPs) come in. Both offer valuable features that help businesses manage their customer data and create targeted marketing campaigns. But which one is right for your business? Keep reading to find out.

What are the benefits of a CDP?

The benefits of a customer data platform go beyond simply providing tools and features to create email marketing campaigns. By pairing key user data with a suite of marketing tools—which can include an ESP—a CDP enables marketing teams to create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns that lead to higher revenue. Using a customer data platform for your marketing campaigns can make the difference in whether you reach your KPIs or fall short. Consider the following advantages:

Creating unified ICPs

A CDP makes sense of all the data it gathers through each touchpoint in the marketing lifecycle, making it easier to create unified customer profiles. These comprehensive customer views offer insight into real pain points, interests, wants, needs, and even firmographic data—often in real time. With unified ICPs on hand, your marketing team can execute new marketing strategies and create segmented, more personalized campaigns.

Saving time and resources through automation

In a data-driven world, automation is your best friend. It takes repetitive yet critical tasks off your to-do list so you’re able to focus on higher ROI initiatives. Automation also makes it possible for marketers to establish evergreen strategies that bring in a consistent and predictable stream of new customers and more data while also building brand awareness. In a CDP, you’re orchestrating cross-channel campaigns from one unified platform with all your data. This is an important benefit for marketing teams because the alternative is having to pull data from different sources, which is time consuming. Plus, without a centralized source of data, you set yourself up to create disparate campaigns from different channels without any real integrated strategy.  

Personalizing marketing campaigns

Today, marketing is all about personalization. About 76% of consumers get frustrated when they aren’t able to find a personalized experience with a brand. Yet you can’t launch a personalized marketing campaign without first gathering, cleaning, centralizing, and organizing your data to make it usable. A CDP also makes it easier to run hyper-personalized campaigns because it enables easy access to data from other sources. A CDP performs all these tasks, making it much easier for marketers to draw data-driven insights about what customers want and need by using browser behavior, purchase history, or even email engagement.

Using predictive models

Having the ability to predict the wants, needs, and sometimes even actions of customers will take any brand’s marketing efforts to the next level. Though not all CDPs offer this feature, using a CDP with predictive analysis capabilities enables brands to gain a competitive advantage by using it to:

  • Uncover new marketing opportunities
  • Optimize sales strategies
  • Improve resource management

Data becomes harder to use when it’s siloed inside different applications. A CDP works to unify zero-, first-, second-, and third-party data from all your data sources to help you improve your messaging and execute proactive marketing campaigns.

What are the benefits of an ESP?

An email service provider offers many advantages for businesses that are looking to improve their customer engagement and communication.

Managing campaigns with automation

ESPs enable marketers to manage customer contact lists, automate email campaigns, track customer engagement, and measure the success of their campaigns.The right ESP can save you a significant amount of time and effort, integrating with your data and cutting out much of the manual work with automation.

Testing and improving campaigns

Email service providers offer a lot of features to help you to improve your email campaigns. A/B testing, for example, allows you to test different versions of an email to see which performs better.ESPs also provide detailed reports on your email campaigns, which can help you understand what is working well and what needs improvement.Overall, an ESP can be a valuable tool for business communication.

CDP vs. ESP: The key difference

A CDP is a platform that helps manage data-driven marketing efforts, while an ESP is a service that allows marketers to create, automate, and send email campaigns to a list of subscribers.The key difference between them is that a CDP provides marketers with a 360-degree view of the customer, while an ESP only provides data about the customer's interactions with email.A CDP can help marketers segment their audience, track customer behavior, and optimize marketing campaigns. An ESP can help marketers automate their email campaigns and track the performance of those campaigns.

Choose the right CDP

How to choose between a CDP and an ESP

When choosing between a CDP and an ESP, you should consider your needs and objectives. If you're simply looking for a way to automate your email marketing efforts, then an ESP will likely be all you need. But if you want to manage and unify all your customer data from various sources, create customer segments, and better target your marketing campaigns, then a CDP with ESP features built in, like Simon Mail, is the way to go. Whether you choose to integrate a separate ESP platform with your CDP or opt for one with built-in features will largely depend on how much data you have to work with and how much you lean on marketing campaign efforts. Businesses with a smaller list of subscribers can run successful automated email campaigns with just an ESP. But those with a large amount of customer data will benefit from a CDP and ESP combination.

Fuel your data-driven marketing with Simon Data

Simon Data’s powerful CDP gives marketers the ability to collect, clean, and connect data from multiple sources, creating unified customer profiles. With Simon CDP, you can easily manage all your customer data via several functions:

  • Use Simon Mail to expertly craft and automate email marketing campaigns based on data
  • Collecting data from any source, including first-party, third-party, and social data
  • Cleaning and deduplicating data to create a single, unified view of each customer
  • Segmenting audiences for more personalized marketing
  • Enriching data with insights from customer behavior and interactions
  • Activating data in real time across all channels, including email, web, mobile, and social

Simon CDP is the only product that offers a complete set of data management capabilities all in one platform. This makes it easy for marketers to run data-driven marketing campaigns without the headaches of using multiple-point solutions.Request a demo today to see how Simon CDP can take your marketing efforts to the next level.

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