12 ways to use a customer data platform

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are a versatile tool in the martech stack. 

Whether you’re looking for a solution to power your personalization efforts, consent management, attribution tracking or other use cases where a point solution is available, a CDP is likely capable of meeting your needs.

Here are 12 ways your marketing team can use a CDP. 

1. A centralized hub for data and reporting

The first and most obvious way to use a CDP is as your centralized hub for data and reporting. If you don’t already have a centralized database for your customer data, a CDP can serve you well in that function.

But don’t assume that if you already have a customer database there’s no need for a CDP. There are plenty of other ways to use a CDP effectively in combination with other technologies, as I outline below. 

2. Audience segmentation and targeting

Individual systems don’t have the full picture on your customers. For example, your event management system can tell you who came to last year’s conference, but not which of those attendees subscribe to your magazine or purchased your holiday gift special.

With all the data available in the CDP, you can create complex segments and discover new opportunities, such as “no one who attended our webinar on retirement gets our retirement e-newsletter.” By aggregating data from multiple sources, the CDP enables dynamic segmentation of audiences based on behavioral, demographic and transactional data, allowing for more precise targeting. 

3. CDP as a source of truth

A lot of the data in a CDP comes from other “sources of truth” — like your email service provider, e-store or fulfillment house. There are some things for which the CDP itself can be an effective source of truth, such as user-specific web activity. Your web analytic tools also track web activity, but often they don’t allow you to see what specific users are doing. A CDP can. 

The CDP can also act as a source of truth for things it uniquely orchestrates, like on-screen dialogues or personalization.\

Dig deeper: The service model evolving around CDPs

4. CDP as your activation hub

A CDP is designed to house all of your customer data and connect to other systems, which can make it a good place to orchestrate campaigns. That’s not always true. Sometimes another system will have functions that surpass the functionality of your CDP. It’s often a question of maximizing the utility of each system with the CDP acting as the connective tissue.

For example, a marketing automation tool might be great at orchestrating email journeys, but it can’t manage SMS or ads. Since your CDP has a broader and deeper set of data on customers, it can be the central hub for multi-track campaigns. 

A closely related concept is customer journey mapping. A CDP can help map out detailed customer journeys by tracking behavior across various channels and touchpoints, offering insights into how customers interact with a brand over time. The CDP can also help with cross-channel and multi-site orchestration. CDPs can synchronize messaging and campaigns across channels (email, social, web, mobile apps, etc.) as well as across multiple websites. Orchestrating the campaign from a central source with access to all the customer’s data can ensure consistency of message and the relevance of the message in light of the customer’s current status. A CDP allows marketers to rely on a comprehensive view of the customer to drive interactions across all touch points.  

Remember that just because a system can do a thing doesn’t mean it does it well, or does it the way you’ll need for your specific use case.  

5. CDP as personalization engine

A CDP is well-positioned to personalize a customer’s experience. A very simple example would be when someone signs up for your e-newsletter and only gives you an email address. The CDP can match that email address to other records and provide the customer’s first name, city or other data to enrich records in other systems and help you personalize your marketing efforts. 

A CDP can also be a powerful tool for content or product recommendations, since it has access to the customer’s browsing and subscription history, job title, industry, past purchases and so on. 

Dig deeper: What the composability revolution means for CDPs

6. CDP for consent management

Last month I painted a somewhat idealistic picture of complete transparency and consent — where a company would get permission before collecting any data on a customer. Whether you want to go that far or not, a CDP is a great place to store this consent information, since consent can determine how you share data between systems. A CDP can make it easier to comply with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, especially when handling opt-in/opt-out requests and consent history across channels.

A very simple and practical application of consent management in the CDP is subscriptions to e-newsletters. You can control that in your ESP or your CDP. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches – the main question being which system needs real-time access to the data. 

7. CDPs for churn prediction

Using predictive analytics, a CDP can analyze customer behavior and engagement patterns to identify at-risk customers, enabling proactive retention strategies. Sometimes this can seem simple. If you run a streaming service, and someone hasn’t watched anything in a while, you can prompt them with offers that are similar to their known preferences. Other times, the relationship between behavior and on-going engagement isn’t so clear.

When you have all your customer data in the same place (the CDP), you can use AI to find those strange relationships, such as people who get at least two e-newsletters and listen to your podcast are more likely to stick with you, or, on the other side, people who used to comment on your articles and haven’t recently are likely to leave you.  

8. CDP for onboarding and retention campaigns

While it’s obvious that onboarding efforts should start immediately after a purchase, the same is true of retention. The CDP is a great place to manage this because it can identify new purchasers and manage cross-channel efforts to help with customer loyalty. The CDP can automate onboarding workflows and customer retention strategies with the benefit of access to all the customer’s data. For example, the CDP could walk a customer through an on-boarding checklist on every platform where the customer has contact with the brand. 

9. CDP for revenue attribution

Perfect revenue attribution is a will-o’-the-wisp because human decisions are enormously complicated. We don’t even know why we make most of our own decisions. A marketer with a spreadsheet certainly doesn’t. 

However, just as “perfect is the enemy of done,” so “perfect attribution” is the enemy of “good enough attribution.” 

A CDP can gather data from all (OK, most) customer touch points and help marketers make an educated guess as to which efforts were most closely correlated with a purchase. That can help marketers know where to focus their efforts, and which efforts to revise or abandon. 

10. CDP for customer service

Since the CDP gives you the closest thing to a “360 view of the customer,” it can be a useful resource for customer service reps. 

Dig deeper: CDPs, their close kin and how to choose between them

11. CDP for predictive modeling

AI and machine learning algorithms can help forecast customer lifetime value, next best actions and other critical business metrics. Even if the CDP itself doesn’t have those capabilities, it can be the central hub where that data is stored. 

12. CDP for testing and optimization

Running A/B or multivariate tests across different segments or channels using the data within the CDP can help continuously refine marketing strategies. The benefit of incorporating a CDP into such tests is that it allows you to compare results across segments. Your e-newsletter subscribers might react very differently than the rest of your audience, and that distinction might be lost in a generic A/B split test. 

These use cases demonstrate not only the versatility of customer data platforms, but also their essential role in helping organizations harness data more effectively, driving personalized experiences, operational efficiency, and long-term customer loyalty in an increasingly competitive marketplace. 

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