In this Getting Started with the Customer Data Platform (CDP) guide, we will provide the initial steps and best practices for importing, cleaning, and enriching your data.

❓What is the Brevo Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

The Brevo Customer Data Platform (CDP) allows you to synchronize and unify your customer data from various data sources, such as your website, POS, or CRM systems. With the Brevo CDP, organize and analyze your data to build a 360° view of your customer data from all touchpoints, compute actionable scorings like RFM, and gather actionable insights!

By centralizing data, the Brevo CDP enables you to understand your customers better, target them with more relevant messages, and optimize your marketing strategies for improved engagement and conversion rates.

🎥 Check our video tutorial to learn how to use and set up the Brevo CDP ⬇️

🔌 Step 1: Connect your data sources and destinations to the CDP 

By default, your Brevo CRM sub-account(s) and the Brevo FTP server are already connected as your source and destination for your data in your Brevo CDP. However, you can import data from other data sources from the Connections menu:

• A Brevo CRM sub-account fed by APIs or plugins and integrations.
• A Database or Data warehouse such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or BigQuery.
• The Brevo FTP server to which your JSON or CSV files from your ERP, POS, or other systems are uploaded.
  When importing your data to the Brevo CDP via FTP servers, follow the CSV classic guidelines import them correctly. To learn more, check our dedicated section in the FAQs - Brevo Customer Data Platform (CDP) article.

Depending on the chosen data source, different types of objects can be imported: 

By default, new and updated objects are imported every hour to ensure relevant and up-to-date data.

🗂️ Step 2: Organize your data in a source catalog

After connecting your data sources to the Brevo CDP, go to the Sources menu to access your source catalog, where you can add and manage your different sources. 

1. Click Add a source and select the source and data entity you want to import into the Brevo CDP. For example, import the contacts of your Marketing Brevo sub-account.
2. For each source you import to the Brevo CDP, you need to configure its settings: 
   
   
   1. Choose one or several record keys. A records key is one or several columns considered unique identifiers for your source. For example, if you import a Contacts source entity, you can use your user ID, phone number, or email address columns as record keys, as they are unique to each contact. 
   2. Define source relationships between your source and others from the same dataset. For example, your Magento contacts are linked to your Magento orders via the magento_id or the email attribute. 
   3. Choose which data columns from your source data table you want to import into the CDP. By default, your record keys are automatically imported. 
   4. Add computed columns to enrich your dataset. To learn more, check our dedicated section Part 2: Enrich your data with SQL formulas or our scoring library.

📊 Step 3: Build master datasets out of your source catalog

Once you've imported all your source files, you have to create datasets to gather and unify all the data with the same entity from the Datasets menu. Datasets allow you to prepare and unify your data from different sources, enriched with scorings, to get it ready to be synchronized with your CRM, database or exported as a CSV file. 

When setting up your sources to the Brevo CDP, you select an entity for each which assigns it to the corresponding dataset. Each entity has its own dataset. By default, some datasets are automatically created and fed with the data from your Brevo sub-account. However, you can create additional datasets for other entities:

Part 1: Clean and unify your data for synchronization

Go to the Datasets > Configuration tab to prepare your data for synchronization. After naming your dataset, you will be able to: 

1. Enable and set up your data deduplication 
   Deduplication identifies duplicate records across various sources and merges them into a single and well-defined version thanks to identity keys. Each time a new column enters your dataset, its identity key is compared to the ones from your dataset to identify any duplicates. If several records enter your dataset at the same time, we ensure to identify duplicates amongst them.
   By default, the value from the most recent duplicate is retained. However, you can set up a custom merge logic for each column. For example, you can keep the first value for the acquisition_source column and the last for the phone column. 

   💡 Good to know

   Deduplication is enabled by default for Contacts dataset fed with your Brevo sub-accounts data, with the email and phone fields as identity keys. You can add other identity key columns or change the merging method if needed.

2. Map your dataset columns with the ones from your sources
   Choose which sources will feed your dataset and map their columns with the ones from your dataset. You can map your columns either from the Columns section of the Datasets > Configuration tab, or Dataset > Sources tab.
   Semantic fields are meta information that applies to all data from the same entity and are generic to all customers. Assign a CDP semantic field to each of your dataset columns to obtain custom scores and analytics dashboards that correspond to your type of data. For example, if a column from your dataset is named telephone or phone number, it corresponds to the Phone CDP semantic field. 

3. Apply normalization rules to unify and transform your data
   Apply normalization rules to your data if needed, such as applying uppercase to every data from the first column or performing a find and replace.

   ❓Should I apply normalization rules at the source or dataset level?

   For the columns you defined as record keys during your source configuration, we highly recommend applying transformation rules at your source level since your record keys need to be normalized before deduplication. However, for other columns, you can apply transformation at your dataset level to avoid having to apply them to all your sources one by one.

4. Add computed columns to enrich your dataset. To learn more, check our dedicated section below.

Part 2: Enrich your data with SQL formulas or our scoring library

Add computed columns to your datasets to combine data from several datasets for better customer segmentation! To enrich your data, you can either:

• Select ready-to-use scores from our library, such as:
  • RFM segmentation to know your customers better and highlight those who are the most loyal, or on the contrary, those who are less.
  • Purchase timing deviation to know whether a customer is ahead or behind the usual re-purchase cycle, and much more!
• Enter an SQL query to add concatenate, count, or if-then columns to your dataset. Join SQL query is not supported. 
• Create simple and custom aggregates such as SUM or AVG. For example, sum up the subscription price for subscription type A, or count the number of orders for category A over the last 2 years.

🔗 Step 4: Synchronize your data to your source destination

Once your data is unified, cleaned, and enriched, you can synchronize it with external systems, including your Brevo sub-account, to create targeted marketing campaigns and better understand your customer's behavior. 

Simply choose the datasets you want to synchronize and the destination source:

You can either synchronize the data of all your next new records or synchronize the data of your next new and existing ones.  

📈 Step 5: Analyze your data

This last step is where the magic and power of the Brevo Customer Data Platform take place! Now that all your data is unified and enriched, it is time to explore and analyze it from your Brevo Analytics dashboard.  

Default dashboards

From the Default dashboards section, find our pre-made dashboards, and get valuable insights on your customers from all your touchpoints and sources by visualizing, filtering, and analyzing their data:

Custom dashboards

You can also create your own dashboards to cross-reference data. For example, you can cross-reference the number of purchases per sales channel with the age of your main customers to better target them on the channels where they are most present:

When you save the results from your cross-reference data as a dashboard, you can find it in the My dashboards section. 

⏭️ What's next? 

• FAQs - Brevo Customer Data Platform (CDP)

🤔 Have a question?

If you have a question, feel free to contact our support team by creating a ticket from your account. If you don't have an account yet, you can contact us here.

If you’re looking for help with a project using Brevo, we can match you with the right certified Brevo expert partner.