The difference between Emarsys, CRM, CDP and DMP

What is CRM?

A customer relationship management system (CRM) helps you manage and analyze interactions with current and prospective customers. The goal of a CRM system is to improve business relationships, increase customer satisfaction and boost sales by centralizing, automating and integrating customer data.

A CRM system supports various departments, such as sales, marketing and customer service, but it also gathers first-party data from customers and prospects into one place. This includes relational data such as contact information, preferences and customer status, which can be used for e-mail campaigns, call lists, and as a tool to track sales contacts.

A CRM:

• Collects first-party data
• Centralizes all customer data
• Generates basic statistics and insights
• Benefits sales, marketing and logistics

What is a CDP?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a software platform that allows you to collect first, second and third-party data. It combines all data into a single, comprehensive overview of your customer segments. This uniform view helps your marketing, sales and customer service departments offer a personal experience and communication across various channels and touchpoints.

This approach provides you with detailed insights into your customers and how they interact with your products and brand. Which products are customers seeing? Which ads are they interacting with? Who is the target audience for your new product? A CDP offers many insights and benefits.

A CDP:

• Provides first, second and third-party data
• Centralizes all customer and interaction data
• Generates helpful statistics and insights
• Benefits your commerce, sales, marketing and logistics departments

What is a marketing automation platform?

A marketing automation platform helps marketers automate marketing tasks. SAP Emarsys is a marketing automation platform that can send e-mails and text messages, segment target groups, prioritize leads and generate reports, among other things. This platform often includes additional functionalities that are supported by artificial intelligence and trained to identify patterns in relational data, making it a valuable tool to maximize customer data.

Examples:

• With Emarsys CRM ads, you can automatically create new target lists to show specific audiences certain ads on social media or search engines. This allows you to easily target people who unsubscribed to your newsletter or showed interest in a specific product category, for example.
• You can automatically send an e-mail to customers who are likely to (re)purchase a particular product, ask customers to leave a review five days after a purchase, or define smart target groups to promote seasonal campaigns on social media. With marketing automation, the possibilities are endless.

What is a DMP?

A data management platform is a tool that collects, stores and activates third-party data for short periods. While DMPs certainly have their strengths, investment in this type of software has declined in recent years due to stricter GDPR regulations that sparked a shift away from third-party data. Many companies are placing more value on software that can generate long-term data and insights.

Conclusion: the difference between Emarsys, CRM, CDP and DMP

These are all tools used to collect and process customer data. While they often have overlapping features, their individual focus is different.

• A DMP is considered relatively outdated, as it relies mainly on short-term, anonymous third-party data.
• CRM and CDP platforms can be extremely useful to companies. If you want to maintain and use customer and prospect data in e-mail campaigns or call lists, a CRM is ideal.
• If you want to use data from social media, websites and webshops to gain more profound insights into your target audience, we recommend a CDP.
• If you want to activate this data with automated marketing and communication campaigns to improve your customer experience and ROI, a combination of CRM and CDP with marketing automation software like Emarsys is the ideal solution.