A practical guide to CDPs for retail teams

Customer relationship management platform (CRM)

Tracks individual customer profiles and purchase history

Contact records, order history, marketing and customer service engagement

Marketing, customer service, retention teams

Data management platform (DMP)

Builds anonymous audiences for advertising

Cookie-based, expires quickly

Media buyers, advertising

Data warehouse

Stores all business data

Everything, structured and unstructured

Data teams, IT, analysts

CDP

Unifies and activates all customer data

Behavioural, transactional, profile

Marketing, customer service, retention teams, IT, data teams

Unified profiles

Consolidates data from all sources into a single customer view

Lifetime data retention

Stores historical data without expiration limits

Unlimited lookback for segmentation

Lets you segment based on behaviour from any time period

Predictive analytics

Forecasts customer lifetime value (LTV), churn risk, next order date, average order value, and more

Real-time segmentation

Updates segments instantly as customer behaviour changes

Webhooks and APIs

Connects to any system in your stack

Pre-built integrations

Offers ready-to-use connections to the other tools your tech stack

No-code transformations

Cleans and standardises data without developer help

Identity resolution

Merges duplicate profiles using smart matching rules

Custom objects

Stores data beyond standard profiles and events

Data warehouse syncing

Imports enriched profile data and custom models from your data warehouse

Enterprise security

Provides multi-brand account management and compliance features