Skip to main content

With so many different customer data platforms (CDPs) available, figuring out which is the right one for your needs is challenging. You know you want a robust platform to help you collect, organize, and unify your customer data from multiple sources, but you need to figure out which option is best. In this article, I'll help you simplify your options by sharing my insights on the best customer data platforms to manage your customer data and create complete customer profiles for better marketing decisions, based on my own CX experience.

What is a Customer Data Platform?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a type of software that collects, organizes, and centralizes customer data from various sources to create a unified customer profile. This data can include information from websites, mobile apps, social media, and other marketing channels. CDPs help businesses better understand their customers, personalize marketing efforts, and improve customer experiences by providing a comprehensive view of customer interactions and behaviors.

Best Customer Data Platforms Comparison Chart

This comparison chart summarizes basic details about each of my top customer data platform selections. You can view pricing details and the availability of free trials or demos side-by-side to help you find the best software for your budget and business needs.

Tools Price
Quickbase From $35/user/month (billed annually, min 20 users)
Klaviyo.com From $45/month
Velaris Pricing upon request
Bloomreach Pricing upon request
Segment From $10/user/month (billed annually)
Totango From $249/month (2 users + 200 customer accounts)
Keap From $249/user/month (billed annually)
Customer.io From $100/month
Pimcore CDP Pricing upon request
Treasure Data Pricing upon request
Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

Compare Software

Overviews Of The 10 Best Customer Data Platforms

Here are my top choices for the best customer data platforms (CDPs) available today, accompanied by a short description of what each platform is best for:

Best no-code, highly customizable customer data platform

  • 30-day free trial + free demo available
  • From $35/user/month (billed annually, min 20 users)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.4/5

QuickBase is a leading cloud-based platform that specializes in enabling businesses to design and deploy custom applications with ease. This platform is particularly celebrated for its user-friendly interface and flexibility, allowing users from various technical backgrounds to craft solutions that precisely meet their operational requirements. Through QuickBase, companies can significantly streamline their workflows, foster collaboration among teams, and enhance their overall productivity, positioning QuickBase as a pivotal tool for organizational development and efficiency.

Why I Picked QuickBase: In the context of serving as a customer data platform, QuickBase demonstrates exceptional proficiency by facilitating the creation of customized applications tailored to manage and analyze customer data effectively. It shines by providing businesses with the tools to aggregate customer information from multiple sources into a unified database, offering a comprehensive view of customer interactions and behaviors. This capability enables companies to gain deeper insights into their customer base, personalize customer experiences, and make data-driven decisions. QuickBase's adaptability and ease of customization make it an invaluable asset for organizations aiming to leverage their customer data for strategic advantage, standing out as a versatile and powerful customer data platform.

QuickBase Standout Features and Integrations

Features include unmatched customization options without the complexity of coding. Users have the liberty to create database applications that are finely tuned to their unique business and sales needs. This characteristic is particularly transformative, as it levels the playing field, enabling individuals without a programming background to devise solutions that meet their precise requirements. As a result, teams can achieve highly specialized applications that mesh well with their workflows, an advantage not readily available with more rigid platforms.

Additional key features include no-code application development, real-time reporting and analytics, automated workflows, custom forms, granular permission settings, data integration capabilities, cross-application connectivity, mobile access, cloud-based architecture, team collaboration tools.

Integrations include Salesforce, Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, Box, Microsoft Office 365, QuickBooks, Zapier, Mailchimp, Tableau.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Comprehensive integration options
  • Strong automation and workflow capabilities
  • Highly customizable no-code platform

Cons:

  • Limited design customization for user interfaces
  • Steep learning curve for new users

Best for for managing customer data for ecommerce marketing

  • Free plan available
  • From $45/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.6/5

Klaviyo is a robust customer data platform (CDP) designed to help ecommerce businesses harness their customer data for more effective marketing. It consolidates customer information from various touchpoints, allowing businesses to create highly personalized marketing campaigns. By integrating with ecommerce platforms, Klaviyo empowers businesses to drive engagement and increase sales through data-driven insights and automation.

Why I Picked Klaviyo: Klaviyo excels as a customer data platform for ecommerce marketing due to its ability to gather and analyze data from multiple sources. It provides businesses with a comprehensive view of their customers, enabling them to segment audiences based on behavior, purchase history, and other criteria. This granular segmentation allows for targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with specific customer groups, leading to higher conversion rates and customer loyalty. Furthermore, Klaviyo's predictive analytics help businesses anticipate customer needs and tailor their marketing efforts accordingly, enhancing the overall shopping experience.

Klaviyo Standout Features and Integrations

Features include its powerful automation capabilities. Businesses can set up automated workflows that trigger personalized emails and SMS messages based on customer actions, such as abandoned carts, product purchases, or browsing behavior. This automation ensures timely and relevant communication with customers, improving engagement and driving sales. Additionally, Klaviyo offers robust A/B testing tools that allow businesses to optimize their campaigns by testing different messages, subject lines, and sending times.

Another key feature is Klaviyo's in-depth reporting and analytics. Businesses can access detailed reports on campaign performance, customer behavior, and revenue attribution, providing valuable insights into what strategies are working and where improvements are needed. 

Integrations include Shopify, Salesforce, Wix, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce (Magento), BigCommerce, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Instagram, Stripe, PayPal, QuickBooks, Zendesk, and Slack.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Advanced segmentation capabilities
  • Good analytics and reporting tools
  • Over 300 integrations available

Cons:

  • Can't embed videos directly into email campaigns
  • Can get pricey with more active profiles

Best for understanding health of customer portfolios

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing upon request
Visit Website
Rating: 4.6/5

Velaris is an AI-powered customer success platform designed to assist customer success teams in managing their operations more efficiently and improving customer experiences. The platform consolidates and enriches customer data into a single, user-friendly interface, offering insights for proactive, data-driven decision-making. 

Why I Picked Velaris: The platform allows users to find any type of customer data in seconds, measure and understand the health of their customer portfolio, and visualize data on clean, beautiful dashboards. Additionally, Velaris offers sentiment analysis to understand how customers are feeling at a glance, and custom objects to tailor the data to specific business needs. The integration of AI capabilities further enhances the platform by enabling proactive customer success management.

Velaris Standout Features and Integrations

Features include a drag-and-drop automation builder that enables users to create flexible automation workflows. This feature helps in automating internal and customer-facing actions. The platform also offers structured playbooks to standardize and speed up their processes.

Furthermore, Velaris' success plans help in managing account plans and proving ROI. Users can track customer outcomes' progress and ensure that they are meeting their goals. The platform even offers a customer portal where users can collaborate externally with their customers.

Integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Intercom, MailChimp, Outlook, Google Drive, HubSpot, Jira, and Salesforce.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • The tool offers automation features
  • Good customer data aggregation
  • AI-powered analytics

Cons:

  • New users may face a learning curve when getting started
  • Could offer more integrations

Best for integrating CDP functions with content management and search

  • Pricing upon request
Visit Website
Rating: 4.7/5

The Bloomreach suite comprises Engagement, Discovery and Content.

Bloomreach helps users collect, store, and analyze data to gain granular insights into customers’ preferences and behaviors. Bloomreach Engagement is an omnichannel marketing automation platform that unifies your customer data and helps design personalized experiences.

Why I picked Bloomreach: Bloomreach Engagement expertly combines CDP functions with content management for streamlined omnichannel orchestration of user journeys. Using Bloomreach, you can weave email and SMS marketing automation into your personalization strategies to build more effective and targeted ad campaigns.

Bloomreach also registers all your customer’s preferences across various channels such as websites, mobile apps and social media. Subsequently, the tool is great for e-commerce brands wanting to improve their customer engagement and conversions.

Bloomreach Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature of Bloomreach is that it stores data in an IMF (in-memory framework) format. This enables high read and write speeds, advanced reporting and dynamic data, and content management. 

The software also seamlessly collates data between multiple data sources allowing you to instantly activate any additional marketing channels. Using this functionality, you can stay relevant using real-time audience insights and optimize campaigns. 

Bloomreach also has its own AI product, Loomi, that boosts conversions through informed recommendations. Loomi also predicts the probability of purchase, churn, return, etc.

Integrations include 130+ third-party applications, such as Amazon MWS, Attentive, Contentsquare, Freshdesk, MongoDB, Salesforce B2C Commerce, Shopify, Slack, SugarCRM, TikTok, Twitter, Zoho Subscriptions, and more.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Custom data tracking and quick real-time analytics
  • Loads of targeted segments based on browse and purchase behavior
  • Intuitive UI with AI tools for campaigns

Cons:

  • Complex web layers and reporting structure
  • No automatic dashboards for creating and tracking surveys

Best for ingesting user analytics data and distributing it to data warehousing third-party applications

  • 14-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $10/user/month (billed annually)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.5/5

Segment (by Twilio) is a leading customer data platform, having helped more than 25,000+ businesses worldwide collect, clean, analyze, and activate their user data to drive targeted marketing initiatives. 

Why I picked Segment: Segment leverages audience data in 450+ marketing tools that operate in real-time. These tools offer several useful features, including marketing automation, data analytics, email marketing, advertising, and more. 

Such a wide opportunity for data integration translates to the ability to gather customer information from multiple websites and mobile applications. You can then use that information to approach customers based on a thorough understanding of their pain points. Consequently, you can create customized real-time brand experiences for your customers.

Moreover, Segment offers a generous freemium plan. The free plan offers two data sources to collect information from and allows you to send the data to unlimited destinations. Moreover, the free plan also lets you create a comprehensive customer profile and track up to 1,000 users every month.  

Segment Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature of Segment is its data filtering and schema-locking capabilities that set defaults on event requirements to regulate data cleanliness. As a result, your data warehouses and integrations are guarded against rogue events. 

Additionally, Segment helps you align your marketing, engineering, and analytics teams with a shared data dictionary. Segment also migrates historical data to new integrations, unifies user histories across devices and channels to build comprehensive user profiles, and provides cross-domain analytics.

Integrations include 450+ third-party applications, such as Amplitude, Bucket, ChurnZero, Contentful, Drip, Freshsales, Gladly, Hotjar, Impact, Intercom, Looker, MadKudu, and more.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Enables building event pipelines across apps and integrations
  • Easy deduplication for streamlining real-time data updates
  • Handles PII information and GDPR and CCPA compliance well

Cons:

  • Struggles with large data volumes and loading data in one sync
  • Retrieving user data with frontend libraries can be difficult

Best for startups seeking flexibility in optimizing customer journeys

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $249/month (2 users + 200 customer accounts)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.3/5

Totango specializes in designing and optimizing customer journeys at scale. It provides access to real-time customer data, enabling you to take preemptive measures and nurture customers at various marketing touchpoints.

Totango is a favorite among scaleups and startups, owing to its flexibility and scalability in running the user journey throughout the customer lifecycle. Totango streamlines project onboarding via goals, KPIs, client segments, success plays, marketing, and other resources. 

Why I picked Totango: Totango helps startups and scaleups expand predictably by using time-based triggers, product telemetry, and other signals to tweak campaigns in real-time. Totango also features useful journey templates to start mapping customer journeys in minutes. 

Totango ships a customizable platform to design, build, manage, and assess various stages of your customer experience. It also makes account management with complex hierarchies a breeze. The platform offers an outcome-oriented solution design and modular pre-built building blocks.

Totango Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature of Totango is its early warning system that proactively assesses and notifies sales teams about waning customer health. The platform also offers executive reporting and dashboards to measure team performance and optimize workflows for increased productivity. 

Additionally, Totango enables customer engagement with NPS surveys and drives product adoption through its targeted campaigns. Totango also offers enterprise-grade privacy and security and complies with data compliance standards like SOC 2 and GDPR.

Integrations include 45+ tools, such as Amazon S3, Chorus, Dropbox, Gong, Google Cloud Storage, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Jira Software, MS Teams, Monday, Pendo, Slack, Zendesk, and more. 

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Successplays feature to help CX teams standardize user experience
  • Easy and configurable journey mapping
  • Customer health score tracking and analysis

Cons:

  • Product usage aggregation sometimes creates blank accounts
  • Logging updates on touchpoints takes many clicks

Best for small businesses

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $249/user/month (billed annually)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.2/5

Keap is a versatile business automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software designed to help small businesses enhance their operations and enhance customer engagement. It provides a comprehensive solution for managing customer data, automating marketing and sales processes, and tracking customer interactions. 

Why I Picked Keap: I picked Keap because of its robust capabilities in managing and leveraging customer data effectively. Keap's contact management system allows businesses to store and organize comprehensive customer profiles, including interaction history, preferences, and purchase behaviors. This centralized data repository ensures that businesses have a complete view of their customers, enabling personalized and targeted communication. Additionally, Keap's automation features help with repetitive tasks, ensuring timely follow-ups and consistent engagement throughout the customer journey.

Keap Standout Features and Integrations

Features include its customizable landing pages, which facilitate lead capture and conversion. Businesses can create tailored landing pages to attract potential customers and gather essential contact information, which is then integrated into Keap’s CRM system. Another notable feature is lead scoring, which helps businesses prioritize their leads based on predefined criteria, ensuring that the most promising leads receive timely attention and follow-ups. 

Furthermore, Keap's dynamic form creation allows businesses to design custom forms for various purposes, such as surveys, event registrations, or feedback collection. These forms can be easily integrated into websites or emails, making it simple to gather and organize customer data. 

Integrations include QuickBooks, Zapier, WordPress, Shopify, Gmail, Outlook, PayPal, Stripe, Leadpages, and ScheduleOnce. 

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Robust CRM features
  • Good business automation capabilities
  • Extensive customization options

Cons:

  • Pipeline reporting could be improved
  • May be pricey for businesses with limited resources

Best CDP with a visual workflow builder

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $100/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.2/5

With Customer.io, you can easily automate messaging campaigns. Data Pipelines (the CDP product of Customer.io) is great for collating first-party data from various sources, including websites, applications, databases, and warehouses. Consequently, you can consolidate accurate customer data and leverage insights to kickstart personalized interactions with customers across mobile and web channels.

Why I picked Customer.io: Customer.io leverages real-time behavioral data for personalized and relevant communications. This involves sending messages via emails, push notifications, SMS, in-app messaging, and more. The tool supports Android, iOS, React Native, and Flutter mobile software development kits (SDKs).

Moreover, Customer.io has a data-driven audience segment and a visual workflow builder. The builder is ideal for hyper-targeted campaigns. You can also set up triggered drip sequences that keep the engagement going when your customer performs a desired action. Overall, the workflow is simple to set up and has great automation possibilities.

Customer.io Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature of Customer.io is turning your segments into ad audiences by connecting data to your desired ad platform. 

In addition, you can use library languages (including Ruby, Python, Go, and others) to submit event data from your application to Customer.io. 

Integrations include almost 200 third-party applications, such as Appcues, Help Scout, Jira, ManyChat, Nexmo, Productboard, Shopify, Smartsheet, Stripe, Twilio SMS, Zapier, Zoom, and more.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Support for liquid data makes highly detailed personalization possible
  • Easy creation of campaign workflows for emails
  • Robust customer segmentation and A/B testing capabilities

Cons:

  • Lacks the ability to schedule messages on a daily or weekly basis
  • Requires a better automation builder

Best open-source CDP for automating data integration, unification, modeling, and personalization

  • Pricing upon request

Pimcore’s modular CDP is an excellent open-source data management platform owing to its flexibility, 100% API-driven architecture, composable technology, quick time-to-market, and robust global partner network of more than 130 solution providers.

Why I picked Pimcore CDP: Pimcore’s CDP is adept at managing structured master data, digital assets, and all kinds of unstructured data. Pimcore’s CDP assists businesses in four major aspects—integration, unification, modeling, and data personalization. 

The tool can gather first-party, third-party, and individual-level customer data from various sources in real-time. It can then merge these datasets to create single customer views, after having identified the anonymized users and de-duplicating any inaccurate information.

Pimcore CDP Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature of Pimcore’s CDP is its enterprise webhooks feature. It can help you transform customer management by launching real-time marketing campaigns, distributing personalized information, and maintaining data homogeneity across platforms. The software also comes with a customer management framework plugin that automates any actions in the workflow and executes it using the integrated tools.

Additionally, Pimcore CDP emphasizes user-centric configuration, automatic validations, visual evaluations, and integrated analytics, to promote data governance. The platform also has robust ACL (Access Control List) and RBAC (Role-based Access Control) functionalities that ensure effective data quality management.

Integrations include tools like Adobe Commerce, Alumio, Celum, Drupal, eBay, Idealo, Matomo, Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Shopify, Snapchat, Cue Storefront, and more.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • REST-based web service allows easy integration of features with other apps
  • Works on an open-source data model with a well-established partner network
  • Robust catalog and digital asset management

Cons:

  • Lack of advanced front-end capabilities
  • Platform is more suited to developers than business users

Best for powering connected customer experiences through unified user data

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing upon request

Treasure Data is an enterprise customer data platform that unifies data from marketing, sales, and service teams to create exceptional user experiences. The software mainly uses IoT devices to build customer profiles and provides access to top-notch database management tools.

Why I picked Treasure Data: Treasure Data offers different versions of its CDP capabilities for marketing, sales, and service departments. The platform aims to help users activate customer data across various functions and channels. As a result, organizations can overcome the challenges of siloed data and work in tandem to improve customer experiences.

Moreover, Treasure Data uses machine learning algorithms to create narrow customer segments based on AI-powered analysis of customer behaviors.

Treasure Data Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature of Treasure Data is its customer data cloud: Users can integrate data and resolve identities for building unified customer profiles. Additionally, this feature empowers businesses to collate customer experiences across various departments.

Treasure Data offers a clean UI and several out-of-the-box data connector options. The tool also has a recommendation engine and robust data enrichment features.

Integrations include 170+ third-party applications, such as Adobe Commerce, Adobe Marketo Engage, Amazon Advertising, Branch, Cordova SDK, DataRobot, Facebook Page Insights, Google Ads, Instagram Custom Audiences, Klaviyo, Mode Analytics, Salesforce Pardot, and more. 

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Data integration is efficient
  • Processes raw data to create a confined report
  • Speed recording of events and other user activities

Cons:

  • Lacks the ability to update segments or activations in bulk
  • Customer reporting needs additional enhancement

Other Options

Here are a few more customer data platforms that didn’t make my cut but are still worth checking out:

Related CX Software Lists

If you still haven’t found what you’re looking for here, check out these related customer experience management tools that I’ve tested and evaluated.

Selection Criteria for Customer Data Platforms 

Now, you may be wondering whether you should trust recommendations from some stranger on the internet. This is why I’d like to explain how I curated my list of the top 10 customer data platforms. I evaluated and compared several industry-best CDPs using recent market research and reviews to narrow down the options.  

As a seasoned CX lead with years of experience in customer service, I then assessed each tool based on its core functionalities and key features:

Core Functionalities

A data management platform (DMP) helps businesses organize and analyze large sets of customer data for better targeting and personalization. Here are the basic functionalities that each of the ten tools on my list possesses: 

  • Customer data platforms collect data from various sources to create a unified customer profile
  • Seamless integration with existing data sources, such as CRM systems, email marketing tools, API documentation, and other data repositories 
  • Strong identity resolution capabilities to unify customer data from multiple touchpoints and build comprehensive ideal customer profiles (ICPs)
  • Advanced segmentation of customer data based on visitor behavior and demographics

Key Features

Providers of customer data platforms offer tools and services to help companies manage and utilize their customer information effectively. In addition to the core functionalities mentioned above, here are some key attributes of the customer data platforms that made my list:

  • Supports data privacy and compliance: The tools I selected ensure and augment data compliance with global and local security standards such as GDPR and CCPA.
  • Has a user-friendly interface: Each of the CDP tools I chose has an intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface for non-technical users to access and analyze customer data. They also come with customizable dashboards and reporting tools for data visualization.
  • Predictive analytics: The tools I selected are equipped with predictive analytics that allow businesses to anticipate customer preferences. This helps them plan for future enhancements and integrations as well as ensure adaptability to future customer data and marketing technology trends.
  • Multichannel data collection: By integrating multichannel data, businesses can gain a holistic view of customer interactions across different touchpoints.
  • Marketing Tool Integration: A marketing platform leverages customer data to create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns.

Usability

I offered my software recommendations based on the intuitiveness and accessibility of their UI for different users with varying levels of expertise. The tools also come with robust data visualization and reporting capabilities that make it easy for users to understand data trends and insights and generate custom reports. They also have onboarding resources, usage documentation, and responsive customer support teams.  

Data Security

The customer data platforms I’ve included in my list ensure the protection of sensitive customer data and compliance with both international and local compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. The CDP tools also support role-based access control (RBAC) and authorization methods such as multi-factor authentication.

Software Integrations

The customer data platforms I’ve included in my list are equipped with seamless integration capabilities that enable them to fit into your existing tech stack like a hand in a glove. The tools exhibit compatibility with various data sources for the smooth exchange of customer data in an automated manner. The CDP tools also allow flexibility in integrations with custom third-party applications for data enrichment and personalized customer experiences.

Pricing

The customer data platforms I’ve included in my list come with affordable pricing plans, especially considering their array of customer data management capabilities. Pricing should be scalable, transparent, and offer value for money. I’ve also mentioned which CDP tools have free trials and plans so that you can choose one that aligns with your budget and long-term operational costs.

Benefits of a Customer Data Platform

Here are a few benefits of using a customer data platform:

  • Eliminates multiple data silos and transforms fragmented customer data into valuable insights
  • Offers sales and marketing teams a unified view of the customer
  • Leverages both historical and real-time data
  • Centralizes data into a single repository
  • Segments audiences based on demographic and psychographic information
  • Streamlines workflows for operational efficiency

Also check out how customer success strategies can help you drive customer adoption and reduce regular churn.

People Also Ask

Here are some relevant FAQs on customer data platforms that explain how they work in a bit more detail:

How do customer data platforms work?

A customer data platform (CDP) centralizes and assimilates customer data from diverse sources and marketing touchpoints to create unified customer profiles. These profiles encompass demographic data such as age, gender, location, etc. They also comprise psychographic data such as behavior, preferences, lifestyles, online browsing habits, interactions with the brand, and more.

CDPs enrich data consolidation and ensure proper data cleansing for accurate customer profiling. With CDPs, you can spearhead data-driven decision-making and personalized marketing initiatives. The best CDP software also has features to assist businesses in navigating the complexities of contemporary data management and privacy compliance.

CDPs act as a single source of truth for your customer data. A culture of CX data literacy can lead to more personalized interactions and higher customer satisfaction.

What are the 4 types of customer data?

The four types of customer data are:

1. Identity Data: Information that identifies the customer, such as name, email address, phone number, and social media profiles.
2. Descriptive Data: Detailed information about the customer, including demographic details, career, lifestyle, and family status.
3. Behavioral Data: Data on how customers interact with your brand, such as purchase history, website visits, email interactions, and social media activity.
4. Transactional Data: Records of the customer’s transactions, including purchase history, order details, payment information, and returns.

These data types help businesses create a comprehensive customer profile to improve personalization and customer experiences. And analyzing trends using big data in CX can reveal valuable customer insights.

What’s the difference between a CDP and a CRM?

Customer data platforms (CDP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems have related but somewhat different functions.

A CDP focuses on combining and centralizing customer data from multiple channels and sources to produce a single customer profile that enables data analysis for personalized marketing. A CDP emphasizes data consolidation and enrichment for effective targeting and conversion purposes. It can delve into primary, secondary, and tertiary data and enable customer segmentation and cross-channel personalization in real-time. CDPs prioritize first-party data instead of third-party data.

In contrast, a CRM focuses on sales, support, and relationship management while managing and tracking interactions with current customers to inform and optimize future campaigns. A CRM is focused on managing customer contacts and building connections. It frequently includes features like lead tracking, sales forecasting, and customer support capabilities. It can delve into first-party data only but cannot prioritize third-party data. CRMs also do not come with real-time capabilities.

Ultimately, both CDPs and CRMs are essential for customer engagement and retention and making sense of the B2B customer journey for further optimization and success.

What is identity resolution and how does it work?

Identity resolution is the process of accurately identifying and connecting data silos related to a single customer. The data comes from multiple channels and sources and helps create a comprehensive user profile. Here is how it works:

  • Data collection: A CDP gathers customer data from various marketing channels, including website visits, emails, previous purchases, chat interactions, and more.
  • Matching and deduplication: To match and eliminate repeated information, a CDP uses algorithms that examine identifiers to see if they are unique to one person only.
  • Identity stitching: Once the matches are discovered, a CDP unites the data elements to create a comprehensive customer profile.
  • Continuous updating: A CDP updates consumer profiles in real-time to reflect changes in preferences, behavior, or contact information as new data is gathered.
  • Personalization: With precise identity resolution, marketers can leverage data insights to craft tailored marketing strategies targeting ideal customer profiles with highly personalized content, offers, and experiences.

Check out which types of customer data you should be using to better understand your target consumers and personalize buyer journeys for them.

What is customer journey orchestration and how does it work?

Customer journey orchestration is the management and optimization of the entire customer experience through the design and automation of a sequence of personalized interactions and touchpoints across various channels. Here is how it works:

  • Data integration: A CDP gathers customer data from multiple sources, such as CRM systems and marketing automation platforms.This data includes customer demographics, behaviors, preferences, and interactions with the business. There are several ways to collect customer data, and with a CDP, you can do so while staying GDPR-compliant!
  • Customer segmentation: Marketers categorize consumers based on their demographic and psychographic insights derived from a CDP.
  • Journey mapping: Businesses further develop graphic blueprints of the customer journey for each segmented audience group, outlining key touchpoints and interactions. These journey maps detail the customer’s actions, decision points, and potential paths toward conversion. This is where customer journey analytics help extract valuable insights from customer interactions and implement those to map the path toward positive business outcomes further.
  • Personalization: Marketers then customize content and communications for each consumer category using the data they’ve acquired. The campaigns can then be used to target the relevant audience segment using various automation solutions including email, SMS, social media channels, and the company website.
  • Optimization based on feedback: Marketers can continuously optimize journey maps for an effective customer experience by monitoring and analyzing user interactions in real-time, thanks to a CDP.

Ultimately, customer journey orchestration ensures that customers have consistent and effortless brand experiences across all touchpoints. This further encourages customer satisfaction, loyalty, and thus, retention.

Other Customer Data Software Reviews

Before you switch tabs, you can check out these other types of software if you’re interested in managing customer journeys and ensuring memorable customer experiences:

Subscribe for More Customer Success Insights

Choosing the right customer data platform for your business can be overwhelming. However, it can help you centralize and unify visitor data from numerous sources and create comprehensive customer profiles. This further enables you to personalize user experiences and improve customer engagement, satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.   

I hope my guide helps you select the ideal CDP tool for maximizing the potential of customer data and streamlining its management for effective marketing, sales, and customer service operations, resulting in sustained business growth.

At The CX Lead, we are here to provide valuable insights and recommendations on improving customer experience for your business. Subscribe to our newsletter to learn about the latest trends and strategies in customer success from the best CX professionals worldwide!