What is a CDP?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a system that collects, unifies, and stores customer data from multiple sources at scale and makes it available for manipulation and distribution to systems of insight and engagement.

By eliminating isolated data sets through data merging and matching, a CDP empowers your business to understand your customers’ preferences and provide them with consistent and personalized experiences.

How to use the data provided by a CDP

To use the data a CDP offers in your marketing strategy and provide personalized customer experiences, follow these steps:

1. Integrate your data sources 

Businesses often have their zero- and first-party data scattered across multiple data sources. To effectively use a CDP, determine which relevant data sets to integrate into the system. 

The data sources you use might include your:

  • Enterprise resource planning system
  • Analytics platform
  • POS system
  • CRM system
  • Ecommerce platform
  • Marketing platform

2. Periodically review customer profiles

After integrating with your chosen data sources, your CDP will create a unified profile for each customer based on factors like:

  • Interactions with your website
  • Recent purchases
  • Engagement with surveys and marketing campaigns
  • Geographic locations
  • Demographic data 

Since this data is dynamic, your CDP will continuously sync and update customer profiles to make sure they’re reliable and relevant. This ensures you don’t send marketing messages to outdated email addresses and numbers or irrelevant messages that don’t align with your customer’s preferences.

3. Create customer segments

As your CDP generates customer profiles, you’ll observe that certain customers exhibit similarities, such as sharing a hometown or an interest in the same hobby. These similarities help you identify the customers who are more likely to respond to your email and SMS marketing strategies and plan how to approach them. 

Segment the customers with common traits to tailor your marketing efforts more effectively. This ensures you send your messages to the right target audience, helping you drive conversions and keeping your customers engaged and satisfied.

4. Create audience-led content

Segmentation deepens your understanding of your audience, enabling you to create content that aligns with their unique journeys. Based on the characteristics of your SMS and email segments, create personalized content for newcomers, repeat customers, and other specific groups.

While not all CDPs handle outreach and engagement, the good ones incorporate marketing capabilities so you don’t have to go to a separate system to manage marketing automation. For example, if your CDP identifies a segment of customers who frequently use coupons, it can trigger automated emails notifying them about upcoming discounts.

5. Analyze and adjust your marketing efforts

As you move forward with your marketing strategy, your CDP will keep matching and merging customer data to keep profiles up to date. This makes it easier to gauge and adjust the effectiveness of your marketing tactics on an ongoing basis.

3 benefits of using a CDP

Despite the common misconception that only large companies benefit from a CDP, businesses of all sizes should consider integrating this technology into their marketing efforts. Here’s why:

1. It enhances the user experience 

A CDP provides accurate and up-to-date information about each customer to everyone on your team. This ensures all team members have a unified view of the customer, so your customers receive a consistent, personalized experience regardless of the channel they use to interact with your business.

2. It improves the efficiency of your marketing efforts

Since a CDP continually provides insights into your customers’ pain points and preferences, it empowers you to anticipate customers’ needs. You’re then able to use this data to proactively tailor your marketing strategies to resonate with all customer segments, eliminating guesswork and saving you time on planning your initiatives.

3. It supports your growth

As your business grows and you get more subscribers, managing the increasing volume of customer data becomes difficult. A CDP scales alongside your business, effortlessly accommodating growing data volume.

Empowering your business with a CDP

While there are various CDPs to choose from depending on your company’s needs, some are more fitting than others. 

With a powerful CDP like Klaviyo, you can draw on zero- and first-party customer data for smarter decision-making and improved marketing ROI. Klaviyo CDP’s powerful data management tools make it easy to transform raw data into actionable insights.

Use Klaviyo CDP to:

  • Connect your tech stack data with 350+ pre-built integrations
  • Build and merge customer profiles for a comprehensive view of your customers
  • Predict customer behavior with advanced analytics
  • Personalize your marketing initiatives across channels

Ready to draw on zero- and first-party customer data and unify it for better marketing results? Sign up for Klaviyo today and experience data-driven success.

Additional resources