In ecommerce, a CDP embedded in your CRM is a non-negotiable
The current state of the ecommerce landscape means that if you’re not putting your customers first, you’re basically toast.
But you know what’s really working for online stores? Making shopping feel personal for each customer, even when you’ve got tons of them. According to Klaviyo’s 2025 Future of Consumer Marketing Report , 74% of consumers expect personalization from brands.
But here’s the thing: a lot of online stores are struggling with this. They’ve got customer info all over the place, their marketing tools don’t talk to each other, and they can’t see the big picture of how customers interact with them.
This is where a customer data platform (CDP) comes in handy. A 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 activation channels, like marketing and customer service.
You can think of a CDP as the “central brain” of your online store. It grabs all your customer data from everywhere and puts it in one place. This gives you a clear picture of each customer so you can group them smartly and give them a consistent experience , no matter how they’re shopping with you.
But not all CDPs are created equal. In ecommerce, a standalone CDP might not be worth the cost and headaches it creates. An embedded CDP, though—that’s a different story.
In this guide:
- Traditional vs. embedded CDPs
- Ecommerce CDP benefits
- Ecommerce CDP use cases
- Choosing an ecommerce CDP
Traditional CDPs vs. embedded CDPs
In the past, turning raw data into actionable insights for your marketing was a daunting task. It took a lot of time and resources to gather data from various sources, clean it up, and analyze it.
Once you finally managed to make sense of the numbers, you still had to figure out how to apply those insights to your marketing strategies to encourage repeat purchases. It was a complex process that often left many businesses struggling to keep up.
CDPs were intended to solve this problem. But historically, they were designed for enterprises with substantial financial and developmental resources to invest in implementation, maintenance, and everyday operations. That left small to midsize businesses with unmet needs around data storage, unification, and activation.
Unlike a traditional CDP that exists as a standalone product, an embedded CDP is built directly into another system, like a CRM. It enables businesses to collect, unify, and activate customer data without a separate CDP, streamlining workflows and reducing integration complexity.
Whereas traditional CDPs focus solely on data unification, embedded CDPs combine data storage with activation. That makes it easier and faster for users to deliver hyper-personalized experiences, all within their existing platform.
By centralizing your customer data and making it accessible and actionable in an embedded CDP, you’re suddenly able to accomplish complex, powerful activities in just a few clicks, such as:
- Identifying high-value customers and personalize their journey
- Reducing cart abandonment with timely, relevant messaging
- Creating product recommendations based on browsing and purchase history
- Optimizing ad spend by suppressing existing customers from acquisition campaigns
- Improving customer retention through predictive analytics
To put it simply, a CDP helps you truly get to know your customers and engage them in meaningful ways across their entire lifecycle. For ecommerce brands looking to thrive in an increasingly crowded market, it’s becoming an indispensable tool for delivering standout customer experiences.
The benefits of using an ecommerce CDP
A CDP brings together all your customer data in one place, giving you a complete picture of your customers. This makes it much easier to tailor your marketing efforts to each individual.
Here are just a few ways an embedded CDP can help your ecommerce brand:
- It builds you a detailed picture of each customer. A CDP aggregates data from various sources, creating a single, comprehensive profile for each customer. This 360-degree view includes personal information like purchase history, browsing behavior, product reviews, customer service interactions, and marketing engagement.
- It makes shopping feel more personal across channels. With all that info, you can suggest products customers will love, send marketing messages that actually interest them, and even change your website based on who’s looking at it.
- It improves customer service. When your CDP is built into your CRM, your marketing and customer service teams are working off of the same customer data and profiles. That means during a support interaction, both AI and human agents can view recent customer interactions across your brand, understand and resolve issues faster, and provide more consistent service across channels.
- It saves you time, headaches, and money. No more info scattered all over the place or wasting time entering data by hand. And with an embedded CDP, there’s no need to sink more money into yet another tool. Meanwhile, your unified data foundation empowers you to target your ads better, write marketing messages people actually want to open, and turn more browsers into buyers. That means more bang for your marketing buck.
How real-life ecommerce brands use CDPs to increase revenue
Check out how a few real-life ecommerce brands use their CDPs to do great things:
1. Ruffwear drives incremental revenue and improves margins
Ruffwear , a brand specializing in durable outdoor gear for dogs, uses their CDP to boost customer lifetime value and improve marketing efficiency.
The company uses their CDP’s recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) analysis to gain fresh insights into their disengaged customers. It’s helped the team discount more efficiently to improve their margins: in just 6 months, the brand’s discount rate—ratio of discounts to sales—dropped 10% YoY, while overall revenue grew by 9% .
Ruffwear also uses RFM-triggered re-engagement flows to send personalized content to customers in their “Needs attention” or “At risk” segments, recommending bestsellers based on purchase history.
2. Nextbase drives revenue on autopilot and increases on-site conversions
Nextbase , a global provider of dash cams and smart dash cams, uses their CDP to dramatically improve web strategy and drive revenue.
With a pre-built CDP integration, Nextbase started personalizing on-site content for repeat buyers using a group membership API. The integration allowed them to show tailored product recommendations to existing customers based on their previous purchases—and move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach of displaying their hero product to every visitor.
The results were impressive: Nextbase saw a remarkable 122% boost in on-site conversion rates .
3. Helen of Troy sees 40%+ TCO reduction from consolidating in a CDP
Helen of Troy is the parent company composed of 15 major brands, ranging from home and outdoor giants to leaders in the beauty and wellness space.
Today, Helen of Troy’s home and outdoor division uses a CDP to store customer data, share it between marketing channels, and turn their existing customer transaction data into even deeper personalization. Consolidating 3 of their brands’ tech stacks into a CRM with a built-in CDP saved Helen of Troy over 40% on total cost of ownership .
“Managing a separate CDP vendor at a huge cost—it’s just not something that we wanted to take on,” says Anthony S., VP of DTC ecommerce for home and outdoor division at Helen of Troy. “This way, we have email, SMS, and our CDP all in one platform that we’re already using. Less integration, less work, and less cost.”
3 questions to ask when choosing an ecommerce CDP
Finding the perfect CDP is like searching for the perfect pair of shoes: it has to be the right fit. But there are a lot of options out there, and they all claim to be the best.
Here are the key features you should look for when shopping for a CDP:
1. How will it handle my data?
Look for:
- Easy integration: You want a CDP that plays nice with your existing tools—or, better yet, one that’s embedded so no data syncing is required between your marketing, service, and analytics platforms.
- Data storage: Look for a CDP that can store all your customer data, not just bits and pieces. This gives you a complete picture of your customers over time.
- Data cleaning and unification: Your CDP should be able to take data from different sources and merge it into a single, accurate customer profile. It should also clean up messy data and remove duplicates.
- Outbound syncing: The CDP should be able to send your unified customer data back out to your advertising platforms, data warehouses, and other destinations. This ensures insights are actionable across all channels.
- Programmatic data access: Additionally, data should be accessible via webhooks and APIs to support use cases like onsite personalization.
- Monitoring: You’ll want features that help you keep an eye on your data quality and alert you to any issues.
2. What kind of intelligence features does it offer me?
Look for:
- Comprehensive reporting: Your CDP should give you a clear view of your overall business performance. Look for customizable dashboards and reports.
- Actionable insights: Your CDP should surface recommendations that help you make smarter marketing decisions, such as what products to promote to maximize up-sell opportunities.
- Advanced segmentation: The platform should let you slice and dice your customer data in various ways, with features like recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) analysis, customer funnels, and product performance insights.
- Marketing activation: Your CDP should make it easy to use your customer insights in your marketing efforts. Look for features that help you create targeted campaigns based on your data.
3. Can it show demonstrable ROI?
- Resource efficiency: The CDP should save your team time and effort compared to your old way of handling data.
- Incremental revenue: Your CDP-powered marketing efforts should lead to an increase in sales.
- Cost savings: The CDP should help you eliminate unnecessary expenses, like time spent building integrations or ad spend on customers who’ve already purchased.
Remember, the best CDP for your business is one that fits your specific needs and goals. Don’t get dazzled by fancy features you’ll never use. Instead, focus on finding a platform that solves your current data challenges and can grow with your business over time.
And don’t be afraid to ask for a demo or trial period before making a decision. You want to make sure you’re comfortable with the platform before committing to it.
Not all CDPs are built the same
Today, putting customers at the centre of your strategy is the only way to succeed. But with customer data scattered across various platforms, creating a seamless shopping experience can be a real challenge.
An embedded CDP like Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP) could be just what you need. KDP is the centralized customer database that comes built-in with Klaviyo B2C CRM . Unifying marketing, commerce, and service data in a single, actionable platform, KDP goes beyond the traditional CDP in a variety of important ways. It empowers you to:
- Consolidate your ecommerce tech stack. You don’t have to manage a separate, standalone CDP. Reduce your CDP licensing costs and management overhead.
- Unlock immediate value from your data. Connect your data faster with 350+ pre-built integrations with leading ecommerce and tech apps.
- Create one unified customer view. Empower your marketing and service teams to access a shared, real-time customer view, so you can deliver a single ecommerce brand experience.
- Access lifetime customer profiles. KDP stores every ecommerce data point for as long as you need it. And with a lifetime lookback window, you can create segments based on any historical data point.
- Enrich your data with agentic AI. Traditional CDP vendors upcharge AI, but Klaviyo AI is included out of the box. Predict ecommerce data points important to your brand, like churn, lifetime value, and future purchases, to take proactive, impactful action when it matters, and use AI agents to personalize experiences for customers throughout the journey.
- Act on prescriptive, helpful guidance. Tools like RFM analysis don’t just leave you with raw RFM scores. Instead, they group your customers into segments like champions, loyal, needs attention, and at-risk. Klaviyo also suggests actions to take, such as sending messages to re-engage RFM segments.
- Speed up insight to action. With native activation channels, your ecommerce data is always available to use in real time within existing marketing and service workflows, like creating an abandoned cart flow or responding to a return request via support ticket. Klaviyo also supports exporting data to third-party destinations for deeper insights and personalization.
Klaviyo Marketing customers get a set of free, standard KDP features included, such as identity resolution, profiles, predictive analytics, and segmentation.
But you can also upgrade to Advanced KDP for access to advanced data management, the ability to export data to third-party destinations, and access to advanced insights like RFM analysis, product catalog insights, and more.
Because KDP is built on a powerful data infrastructure that centralizes customer data and makes it robustly actionable for highly targeted marketing, it enables you to do more, more effectively, with the data you already have in your tech stack.
Are you ready to enhance your customer interactions and boost your revenue? Or are you still grappling with disorganised data and missing out on valuable insights?
Explore how KDP can help you create highly personalized shopping experiences. Get a demo