Redpoint Global is a marketing technology company that provides an industry-leading Customer Data Platform solution (CDP). Redpoint is one of the most mature and comprehensive CDP’s actively selling in the market today. Redpoint is unique to many of its competitors in that it offers full scale, enterprise grade data integration and management capabilities as well as sophisticated segmentation, targeting, machine learning and digital engagement functionality. The Redpoint platform is certainly packed with a lot of marketing power!
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Unfortunately, many companies who have bought Redpoint and made it through the initial implementation now find themselves feeling overwhelmed. There is often uncertainty about the features offered within the suite, how to set things up, the best way to support the platform and most importantly how to get the full value from solution. The product suite can be perplexing to the inexperienced. Existing documentation often doesn’t help clarify concepts to implementation or use case examples. Redpoint has so many capabilities that it is often hard to know the best way to solve for something or where to begin. This feeling isn’t all that uncommon when compared to other full featured CDP’s or enterprise marketing technologies though. The main difference with Redpoint is that there are very few knowledgeable helping-hands in the marketplace to explain what the tool can truly do for you, at your company, with your data and how to make that happen.
Solvenna is that decoder ring.
Below are some clarifying points about Redpoint’s software to help level set on its capabilities. Redpoint consists of two primary components (specific licensing depends on your contract):
- Redpoint Data Management or RPDM or DM (lots of acronyms!)
- Within RPDM, there is an optional module for what they refer to as MDM. More to come on this later, but this is mostly a data governance tool. True data quality routines, identity matching and master record match/merge occurs within the base RPDM module. This is a very robust integration technology (differentiator!).
- Redpoint Interaction Management or RPI or Intelligent Orchestration
- Things can get a bit more confusing here. RPI is somewhat of an umbrella term made up of critical segmentation and targeting capabilities. These capabilities can be leveraged and expanded upon for what Redpoint calls Real Time Decisions (RTD). Additionally, some customers may also have purchased Automated Machine Learning (AML) to utilized pre-packaged models to predict the ideal message for an individual. While AML doesn’t technically live under the RPI umbrella, marketing teams ultimately benefit from using the AML by invoking those models during batch or real-time interactions processed by RPI. Confused? Stick with us, we’ll continue to explain.
This is a very powerful suite of capabilities. Redpoint can support the most complex marketing situations. Don’t let the number of acronyms and product name changes over the past few years scare you away.
Below is a slightly more detailed explanation of these tools and how they can be used at your company. If you still feel lost and need additional help navigating the product options, please contact us here and we’ll talk you through the key concepts in a 30-minute free consult. Did somebody say “free“?
Redpoint Data Management or RPDM.
RPDM is an enterprise grade, fully scalable data ingestion, data quality, cleansing engine offering batch and real-time 1st/2nd/3rd party identity resolution and management capabilities. Yes, ETL and ELT. The most important aspect of your CDP solution will be the quality of the underlying data. Slamming dirty data into a marketing cloud, an activation or deployment tool is a common recipe for failure across marketing departments and common CDP project misstep. RPDM provides the tools to address this issue in an easy-to-use, no-code/low-code environment.
RPDM enables companies to have the most sophisticated marketing and analytics data capability as part of their CDP platform. This is a true differentiator for Redpoint. RPDM supports integration with any channel, device or touchpoint. It supports an “Open Garden” ecosystem allowing companies to connect to new systems as upstream or downstream vendors change over the years. This means that you will not be locked into any single vendor or activation layer. For example, email send execution has become a commodity. If your company wants to switch their email service provider down the road, the Redpoint platform will enable an easy transition. The RPDM solution comes with more than 300+ native connectors allowing companies to push data to or from Redpoint to common applications ranging from Salesforce, SendGrid, Cheetah Digital, Adobe, LiveRamp, Twitter, PowerBI, Azure, AWS, Snowflake, Teradata, and many more.
RPDM is what is used to perform identity matching of known and anonymous customers / prospects. RPDM supports both basic deterministic as well as the more advanced probabilistic matching. This is another key differentiator to many applications in the CDP space. Redpoint is one of the few that provide probabilistic matching capabilities. Deterministic matching assumes a direct match on specific fields (e.g., email to email, phone to phone, id to id, etc.) while probabilistic allows you to create a range of likely matches based on more complex yet common variations (e.g., names such as Tim and Timothy can still match, address variations based on acceptable ranges can match, cross-field precedence, trust by field and source can be set, etc.). Given the common desire to combine customer data from a variety of online, offline, 1st and 3rd party data sources; probabilistic matching will be an invaluable component of the system.
Lastly, RPDM includes an optional MDM component. The MDM tool from Redpoint allows companies to manage their mastered data; a data governance tool if you will. The MDM tool could be used by data stewards or data owners to update customer records based on possible matches or other related manual data maintenance activities. The heavy lifting of all data management is done within the base module of RPDM, but MDM enables a tool for internal users to view and interact with the data on a per record basis.
Redpoint Interaction Management or RPI
RPI is an all-in-one platform to serve as the Campaign Management, Targeting and Real-time Marketing solution. RPI (include link: https://www.Redpointglobal.com/orchestration) is a feature rich, end-to-end customer journey, targeting and segmentation platform that is fully integrated with the underlying data management sub-system. This gives marketers an easy way to interact with the underlying data and to create sophisticated multi-touch, omnichannel customer interactions. For example, this is where selection and targeting rules for recurring campaigns are defined and executed. Multiple channels are supported, including: email, SMS, push notification, outbound call, and/or outbound direct mail to ensure the optimum message is delivered via the optimum method. RPI is also where the marketing team would go to build out a real time Next Best Action campaign that could be deployed to the website or call center to alter a prospect or customers experience based on real time interrogation of their combined online/offline data. Redpoint enables these real-time interactions through their Real time decision (RTD) offering. Being under the RPI umbrella, assets and other shared objects serve as reusable components regardless of their final implementation. For example, creatives used for a targeted email segment can be shared with the website targeting that same segment via RTD.
Automated Machine Learning (AML)
AML is another acronym under the RPI umbrella. AML gives the marketing and analytics team a tool to build, train and deploy customer and prospect models. AML provides marketers with a library of models that can quickly adapt to customer journeys and deliver increased personalization at scale with benefits such as: reduced operational expense and increased productivity, increased customer lifetime value and revenue.
AML provides an easy-to-use interface that allows the non-data scientist to leverage this next frontier of intelligent marketing through their provided templates. Data scientists can continue to leverage their skills in identifying key identifiers and groupings to further refine these models. Training and model optimization is entirely self-contained within AML leading you to the ideal model for the data provisioned.
These scoring models can in turn be embedded within any RPI interaction to augment and inform the segmentation and targeting behavior. Meaning, an AML model built to predict the probability of purchase product A versus product B can now be leveraged in your email campaigns AND in a website with RTD enabled. One model deployed and leveraged across multiple channels.
AML provides a single interface to support your AI and predictive modeling capabilities that is very marketer friendly (it is not a black box). It supports multivariable predictive modeling and machine learning. You do not, however, need to have AML setup to perform segmentation and targeting. These activities will be handled by the base RPI product. AML is additive and gives marketing teams more sophistication to “score” people in real time based on machine learning. This is an optional component of the Redpoint ecosystem. You could alternatively call to your internal model scores from within the base RPI or RTD functions to apply scoring too (e.g., call to R, SAS or another scoring service).
Still confused? Feel free to contact us here and we’ll walk you through all of this during a free 30-minute decoder ring conversation.
We’ll provide more information over the coming months about each of these tools and provide tips on how to best incorporate them into your MarTech stack. Our next topic will be an overview of our RPDM audit framework.