11 Best customer data platforms (CDPs) in 2025: In-depth look

Customer data platforms (CDPs) help online businesses by:

• Aggregating customer data from multiple sources — like analytics tools, customer service software, CRMs, and point-of-service (POS) devices — into a single database.
• Resolving omnichannel identities and creating unified, 360-degree profiles of each customer.

Having all customer  data in one place helps companies overcome data silos, create detailed customer segments, and get a clear picture of the entire customer journey. 

However, CDPs can be very different beyond their fundamental data aggregation, identity resolution, and segmentation functionalities.

In this post, we’ll help you find the right CDP for your business by reviewing the 11 best CDPs and organizing them into two categories:

1. Actionable CDPs: In addition to their data unification and segmentation capabilities, these CDPs excel at activation — the process of using your data to create personalized experiences. They have built-in features and activation channels under one roof, like on-site, mobile app, web push, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and so on. This makes them a great choice for marketers looking to use their data to drive revenue and retention with personalized campaigns.

2. Access and Data Analytics CDPs: These solutions  are geared toward more technical roles and use cases — like data governance, data cleaning, SQL queries, and schema management. Their primary aim, after resolving, unifying, and analyzing customer data, is to push segments into downstream platforms. This makes them a better choice for data analysts, data scientists, and developers looking to manage their data, instead of using it to run personalized marketing campaigns.

Finally, we’ll also discuss frequently asked questions about the types of data CDPs can ingest and the differences between CDPs and other similar platforms.

Insider can aggregate all your customer data from online and offline sources in one place and use that data to drive affinity-and-intent-informed, personalized customer experiences across all touchpoints. Visit our website or schedule a demo with our team to learn more about our platform.

What is a customer data platform (CDP)?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a type of software that helps teams unify, centralize, and manage customer data from various sources into a single, accessible, and convenient database. This makes it easier to manage data, understand customer experiences, and build personalized marketing campaigns. 

Most CDPs can collect data from thousands of customer touchpoints — including websites, social media, email, sales, and customer support systems  — to create a comprehensive view of each customer.

The benefits of using a CDP

Depending on business needs and use cases, companies may

• Centralized data management as marketers get 360-degree views of all customers and avoid data silos.
• Better customer tracking and accurate insights as teams can analyze customer behavior across all touchpoints and understand their entire user journey.
• Personalized marketing campaigns as marketers can use their unified customer data to deliver tailored content, messaging, and product recommendations.
• Reliable data for decision-makers as CDPs can store historical and real-time data across the entire customer lifecycle.
• Compliance and data privacy as CDPs can help teams ensure data is stored and managed in a way that complies with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.
• Operational efficiency as teams can use built-in automation tools to streamline segmentation, campaign orchestration, reporting, and other processes

CDP vs DMP vs CRM: What’s the difference and which one do you need?

	Customer data platforms (CDPs)	Data management platforms (DMPs)	Customer relationship management (CRM)
Primary use case	Unifying customer data for personalized marketing and decision-making.	Organizing audience data for advertising and targeting.	Managing customer interactions, relationships, and sales pipeline.
Data sources	Integrates data from various sources including website, email, CRMs, and social media.	Mainly integrates data from digital advertising sources like ad impressions and clicks.	Integrates data from sales, support, and marketing customer touchpoints, often with email systems.
Data types	All customer data, with an emphasis on first-party data, e.g., transactional and behavioral, demographic.	Mostly third-party data, e.g., anonymous user data and browsing behavior.	First-party customer data, e.g., contact details, purchase history, and service requests.
Use cases	Personalized marketing, customer segmentation, real-time analytics, and omnichannel marketing.	Audience segmentation for ad targeting, lookalike modeling, and retargeting campaigns.	Sales tracking, lead management, customer support, and relationship management.
Example solutions	Insider, Segment, Adobe Real-Time CDP	Permutive, Adobe Audience Manager, Oracle Data Cloud	Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive

The top 11 CDPs in 2025

Now that you understand how CDPs work and what makes them different from DMPs and CRMs, let’s dive into the actual solutions. Specifically, we’ll be covering 11 CDPs organized into two categories — Actionable and Access CDPs.

Actionable CDPs

These CDPs are designed to help brands understand their customers, build detailed customer segments, and create personalized experiences for them. 

Besides their data aggregation capabilities, these CDPs also have:

• Native support for various marketing channels, like SMS, email, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. This means you can use your data to run marketing campaigns across different channels without needing third-party providers (e.g., email marketing software, website personalization tools, and so on).
• Cross-channel marketing automation and personalization features. These features help you design a personalized experience for each customer across every touchpoint — from your website or mobile app through messaging channels like SMS and WhatsApp. 

This makes actionable CDPs a great choice for marketers and growth professionals looking to improve revenue, lifetime value (LTV), and customer acquisition costs (CAC) by showing relevant messaging, content, and product suggestions to the right customers at the right times.

#1 Insider

Insider brings together all your customer data and makes it easy to activate that data across your website, mobile app, and messaging channels.

Brands like AVON, Samsung, and Toyota use Insider to:

• Aggregate their customer data in one place and overcome data silos. Our Actionable CDP can ingest information from any online or offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, POS devices, customer support tools, data analytics solutions, marketing platforms, legacy systems, APIs, and so on.
• Get accurate, 360-degree profiles of their customers. Insider creates unified customer profiles based on implicit (e.g., behaviors and interests) and explicit data (e.g., survey answers), as well 120+ attributes (e.g., CRM IDs, phone numbers, and emails). Our AI-powered algorithms use this data to automatically predict customers’ likelihood to purchase or churn, their discount affinity, their potential spending, and more.
• Use their data to increase revenue, average order value (AOV), and lifetime value (LTV). Insider was built to help brands use their data to create personalized experiences and marketing campaigns across all touchpoints — including their websites, mobile apps, push notifications, email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. 

Insider has been consistently ranked as the leading CDP by G2.

Additionally, our focus on customer convenience has led to G2 ranking us as the top CDP in categories like ease of use and ease of admin.

Here are four ways you can use Insider’s Actionable CDP and broader capabilities to aggregate your data, understand your customers, and drive revenue.

1. Get an accurate, 360-degree view of all visitors and customers (based on implicit and explicit data)

The process of getting your data into a CDP can be difficult and time-consuming. To overcome this issue, our team of experts will: 

• Set up Insider for you (with no extra setup charge). We’ll help you get all relevant customer data into our platform. For example, we can aggregate behavioral data from Amplitude, sales data from HubSpot, customer support data from Zendesk, NPS scores from SurveyMonkey, performance data from Adobe Campaign, and offline data from POS devices.
• Analyze your site, analytics, and customer data before our first kick-off meeting. This lets us give you ideas for creating new campaigns immediately after the setup, so you don’t waste time wondering what to do with your aggregated data.

After the setup, you’ll get a dashboard full of useful stats and metrics about your visitors and customers, as you can see below.

You can also start making meaningful changes based on your data immediately, like:

• Offering discount coupons to customers with a low satisfaction score (based on data from tools like HubSpot, SurveyMonkey, and Zendesk).
• Personalizing your website’s content based on users’ browsing behavior in your mobile app (based on data from tools like Shopify and Salesforce Audience Studio).
• Notifying customers when there’s a decrease in the price of a product they’re interested in (based on data from tools like Microsoft 365 and Magento).

We’ll discuss various examples throughout this post, but if you want more ideas now, check out our interactive Actionable CDP Explorer.

Insider also lets you drill down into the individual profiles of each customer. 

The screenshot above shows a unified customer profile with explicit data like name and email, as well as implicit data like last purchased and abandoned products.

Each subsequent interaction with your brand is fed into this profile, which continuously enriches your dataset and creates a more accurate view of the customer.

However, Insider starts creating these profiles way before you’ve collected any personal data. 

For example, as visitors browse your website, Insider creates profiles for them in your Unified Customer Database with information about:

• The pages they visited.
• The price range they’re looking at.
• The products and attributes (colors, sizes, etc.) they’re interested in, and more.

As a result, you have profiles for your visitors before they’ve bought anything or even shared any contact data with you. Insider’s personalization capabilities help you use this anonymous, real-time data to turn visitors into customers faster and reduce CAC, as you’ll see in the next section.

2. Segment your audience based on AI-powered predictions, events, purchase behavior, and much more

Having your customer data in one place is great for avoiding data silos and analyzing the customer journey. But in order for this data to benefit your bottom line, you need to use it to create personalized customer experiences (i.e., data activation).

Insider’s versatile segmentation helps you use your data to create individualized, cross-channel customer experiences that drive more revenue.

Here’s how:

As soon as your data is in Insider, our AI-powered algorithms create various predictive audiences based on:

• Users’ likelihood to purchase.
• Their likelihood to churn.
• Their discount affinity.
• Their potential LTV, and more.

You can also use our standard segmentation to target users based on their:

• Behavior on your site.
• Purchase behavior (frequency, amount, value, etc.)
• Email engagement.
• Triggered events, and more.

Finally, Insider also creates predefined segments of users who abandoned their carts, visited a product page but didn’t add an item to their cart, or interacted with you via a marketing channel (email, SMS, WhatsApp, etc.)

Again, you can take advantage of our powerful segmentation even if most of your audience is unknown (meaning you don’t have any contact information or personal data about visitors).

As unknown visitors browse your site, Insider collects their behavior data — which pages they visit, which products they like, the price ranges they’re looking at, and so on. 

Since most users usually don’t purchase on their first visit, Insider helps you bring them back to your site with personalized web push notifications.

All you need to do is send a pop-up to visitors, so they can agree to receive notifications from you (this doesn’t require any personal data). 

back to your site using personalized web push notifications, instead of retargeting them with expensive social media or search ads.

These notifications can also include discounts (for segments with a high discount affinity), a reminder to complete a purchase (for shoppers who already added an item to their carts), and lots of other personalization elements.

For example:

• Carrefour used push notifications to re-engage visitors who had abandoned their carts, leading to an additional $11,000 in revenue in the first month and a 350% uplift in conversion rates.
• Chemist Warehouse used push notifications to target users who abandoned a product page. These notifications included feature details, a photo of the last viewed products, and a personalized offer, which led to an 85% uplift in conversions.

You can learn more about the different types of web push notifications and the benefits of using them in our web push mastery guide.

3. Build and automate personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns

Insider support lots of channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, so you don’t have to use third-party tools to activate your data on them. This removes the need for complex integrations, simplifies your tech stack, and reduces the number of logins you need to manage.

Additionally, Insider’s personalization and automation capabilities make it easy to orchestrate customer journeys across all of these channels. 

For example, say you have a customer segment that repeatedly shows an interest in a product category on your site. When these customers come to your site but don’t buy anything, you can instruct Insider to send them an email with a special offer for products in that category.

If they still don’t convert, you can let Insider’s AI-powered next-best channel predictions determine which touchpoint to try next (SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.)

All of this is done through Architect — our tool for building individualized, cross-channel journeys through a simple, intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

You can also compare the performance of two or more path variations using our A/B Split Testing features. 

For example, you can test if push notifications bring more people back to the site than email. Or, you can check if following-up push notifications with an SMS or WhatsApp message yields a better result.

Plus, our Winner Auto-Selection lets you determine the best combination of channels, content, and offers for your goal — whether that’s increasing conversions, boosting customer engagement, reducing CAC, and so on.

Lastly, Insider also comes with tons of pre-made templates for each channel and use case, so you don’t have to start the personalization, automation, and A/B testing processes from scratch.

4. Analyze ROI and make data-driven decisions with pre-built and custom reports

As we said, Insider provides useful stats and metrics about your visitors and customers out of the box.

However, you can easily customize these reports to include data that’s relevant to you. For example, you can create custom funnels to analyze how users navigate important flows like checkouts or onboarding tutorials.

You can also analyze the success metrics for each channel you’re using, like email deliverability and open rates, web push clickthrough rates, SMS conversion rates, and so on.

These customizable reports and success metrics can help you:

• Determine the ROI of each channel or marketing activity. 
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your overall marketing strategy. 
• Make educated decisions about how to distribute your budget.

You can also create custom reports from scratch, like the Executive Summary report shown below. 

As you can see, this report contains lots of information that would be useful to high-level decision-makers, like revenue, new users, and channel success. 

If you want to see how Insider can help your business aggregate all customer data in one place and use it to boost sales, retention, AOV, and LTV, book a live demo with our team.

#2 Bloomreach

Bloomreach is an eCommerce personalization, engagement, and marketing automation platform. Its CDP  is called a “Unified  Data Platform” and it can collect data about customers from various sources. 

Features:

• Personalization: Tailors the customer experience via personalized content and product recommendations.
• E-commerce optimization: Enhances product search, merchandising, and navigation using AI and machine learning.
• Content management: Provides a flexible content management system (CMS) to create, manage, and distribute content across digital channels.
• Customer insights: Offers detailed analytics and insights to understand customer behavior and improve engagement.
• Omnichannel integration: Supports a seamless experience across multiple touchpoints like web, mobile, and email.

Pros:

• Highly personalized experiences: Advanced AI-driven personalization enables businesses to deliver highly tailored experiences.
• Scalable: Designed to scale with growing businesses, handling complex content and e-commerce operations.
• Seamless integration: Integrates well with various third-party platforms and systems, including marketing automation and CRM tools.
• Flexible CMS: Allows businesses to create and manage content with ease, improving website management.

Cons:

• Learning curve: The platform can be complex to implement and use to its full potential.
• Cost: It can be pricey for smaller businesses, as it’s often targeted at mid-to-large enterprises.
• Requires technical expertise: To fully leverage its capabilities, technical expertise may be required, especially in custom integrations.

Note: Click here to see how Bloomreach (left in the screenshot below) compares to Insider (right).

Learn more: 11 Top Bloomreach competitors & alternatives (by category).

#3 Salesforce Marketing Cloud CDP

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing platform that combines products for email marketing, journey orchestration, personalization, content management, and more. One of the key products in this stack is the Marketing Cloud CDP.

Features:

• Unified customer profiles: Combines data from various sources to create a single customer view.
• AI-powered insights: Uses Salesforce Einstein for predictive analytics and smarter decision-making.
• Journey builder: Automates and personalizes cross-channel customer journeys.

Pros:

• AI and automation: Leverages AI and automation for improved marketing efficiency.
• Seamless integration: Integrates deeply with Salesforce products (like its CRM) for a unified solution.
• Personalization: Enables highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.

Cons:

• Complexity: Can be difficult to implement and customize without technical expertise.
• Cost: Expensive, making it more suitable for larger enterprises.
• Salesforce ecosystem dependency: Best suited for Salesforce users, with some limitations on third-party integrations.

Note: Click here to see how Salesforce Marketing Cloud (right in the screenshot below) compares to Insider (left).

Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives.

#4 Emarsys

Emarsys is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that was acquired by SAP in 2020. Their CDP is called an “Integrated Data Layer” and it combines, cleanses, and analyzes data to create a single customer view. 

Features:

• Omnichannel marketing: Supports campaigns across email, SMS, push notifications, social media, and web.
• AI-Powered personalization: Uses AI to create personalized content, product recommendations, and experiences.
• Customer segmentation: Advanced segmentation based on customer behaviors, purchase history, and demographics.
• Real-Time analytics: Provides actionable insights and performance tracking for continuous campaign optimization.

Pros:

• Omnichannel reach: Enables consistent messaging across various marketing channels.
• AI-driven insights: Personalizes campaigns with AI to improve targeting and engagement.
• User-friendly: Intuitive interface that makes it easy to create and manage campaigns.
• Scalable: Flexible and suitable for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.

Cons:

• Limited customization: Some advanced customizations may require developer support or expertise.
• Learning curve: New users may take time to fully understand all of the platform’s features.
• Integration complexity: Integrating with certain third-party tools can be challenging.

Note: Click here to see how Emarsys (left in the screenshot below) compares to Insider (right).

Learn more: 9 Best Emarsys competitors and alternatives (detailed review).

#5 Adobe Real-Time CDP

Adobe’s Real-Time CDP lets businesses unify, segment, and activate first-party customer data in real time for personalized marketing, analytics, and customer experience optimization across multiple channels. It’s part of Adobe’s Experience Cloud — a suite of solutions for marketing, sales, and commerce teams.

Features:

• Real-Time data collection: Collects and processes customer data in real time from various touchpoints.
• Unified customer profiles: Aggregates data from multiple sources to create a single, comprehensive customer profile.
• AI-powered insights: Leverages Adobe Sensei AI to provide actionable insights and predictive analytics for marketing strategies.
• Cross-channel activation: Allows for seamless execution of personalized campaigns across web, mobile, email, social, and other channels.

Pros:

• Real-time data processing: Enables timely and accurate customer insights for immediate personalization.
• Integration with other Adobe tools: Seamlessly integrates with products in the Adobe Experience Cloud for a holistic marketing solution.
• Advanced AI & analytics: Utilizes AI-driven insights to enhance campaign effectiveness and decision-making.
• Scalable: Suitable for businesses of all sizes, especially enterprises with complex data needs.

Cons:

• Complex setup: Requires significant time and resources for implementation, especially for large datasets.
• Learning curve: Due to its robust features, users may need time to fully master the platform.
• Cost: Can be expensive, particularly for small to mid-sized businesses.
• Requires technical expertise: Customization and advanced configurations may require technical assistance.

#6 Optimove

Optimove is a flexible marketing platform that offers tools for data unification, cross-channel engagement, and automation across email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, web, and digital ads.

Features:

• Predictive analytics: Leverages AI to predict customer behaviors and optimize future marketing efforts.
• Customer segmentation: Advanced segmentation capabilities based on customer lifecycle, behavior, and other attributes.
• Campaign automation: Automates personalized marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
• Integration with marketing channels: Integrates with email, SMS, web, and other marketing platforms for omnichannel activation.

Pros:

• Advanced analytics: Provides deep insights into customer behavior and predictive modeling for improved targeting.
• Omnichannel marketing: Allows businesses to reach customers across a variety of channels with personalized content.
• Ease of use: Intuitive interface that simplifies campaign creation and management.
• Effective customer retention: Focuses on retention strategies using segmentation and personalization to drive loyalty.

Cons:

• Complex for new users: Advanced features may require time to master, especially for beginners.
• Integration challenges: Can require significant effort to integrate with non-native tools or legacy systems.
• Limited advanced customization: Some complex customizations may require developer assistance.
• Limited industry expertise: Mostly focused on the iGaming sector with very little experience in industries like eCommerce, automotive, and finance.

#7 ActionIQ

ActionIQ is a CDP that helps businesses centralize and activate their first-party data, enabling personalized marketing, customer insights, and better decision-making across various channels.

Features:

• Data unification: Consolidates data from multiple sources into a single, unified customer view.
• Advanced segmentation: Allows businesses to create granular segments based on customer behaviors, preferences, and attributes.
• Customer insights: Provides deep insights into customer behavior and trends through analytics and reporting.
• Integration: Easily integrates with various marketing, analytics, and business intelligence tools to activate customer data across platforms.

Pros:

• Data centralization: Creates a single, comprehensive customer profile by integrating multiple data sources.
• Flexible and scalable: Suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises with complex data needs.
• Advanced segmentation: Advanced segmentation tools enable highly personalized marketing strategies.
• Strong integration capabilities: Integrates seamlessly with existing technology stacks, including marketing, CRM, and analytics tools.

Cons:

• Complex implementation: Initial setup and data integration can be time-consuming and require technical expertise.
• Learning curve: The platform’s wide range of features may take time for teams to fully learn and utilize.
• Customization challenges: Some advanced customizations may require technical resources or support.

Access and Data Analytics CDPs

These CDPs focus on more technical use cases like: 

• Data governance and standardization.
• Diagnosing and fixing data quality issues. 
• Loading data into warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake.

This makes them a great choice for data analysts, data scientists, and developers who want to manage, transform, and analyze their data.

At the same time, these traditional CDPs don’t support as many native channels or personalization features as the Actionable CDPs. This means you’ll need to integrate them with third-party tools (e.g., email tools, SMS solutions, or WhatsApp marketing software) to activate your data across channels, which can make their setup and workflow complex and reliant on developer assistance. 

#8 Twilio Segment

Segment is the company that made CDPs popular in the first place. Like Emarsys, Segment was also acquired by an enterprise company in 2020 (Twilio) but still exists as a standalone CDP. Features:

• Data unification: Aggregates data from various sources (web, mobile, apps) to create a unified customer profile.
• Integrations: Connects with a wide range of tools and platforms for seamless data activation, including Twilio Engage
• Real-Time data streaming: Provides real-time data processing to ensure up-to-date customer insights and personalization.
• Powerful segmentation: Allows businesses to segment customers based on behavior, demographics, and more to create targeted campaigns.

Pros:

• Ease of use: User-friendly interface that simplifies data integration and management.
• Wide integrations: Integrates easily with hundreds of third-party tools, creating a seamless marketing stack.
• Real-time data processing: Enables businesses to make timely, data-driven decisions and deliver instant personalization.
• Scalable: Suitable for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, with flexible pricing options.

Cons:

• Complex setup for advanced features: While easy to start with, setting up advanced features and integrations can be challenging for non-technical users.
• Cost: Pricing can be high, especially for smaller businesses or those with large volumes of data.
• Limited analytics capabilities: While it provides data integration, deeper analytics may require additional tools or integrations.

Click here to see how Segment (right in the screenshot below) compares to Insider (left).

 #9 Tealium

Tealium is a CDP that combines five different products:

1. Tealium AudienceStream CDP , which creates unified customer profiles from various data sources. 
2. iQ Tag Management, which helps companies manage their customer data and marketing tools across web, mobile, IoT, and connected devices.
3. EventStream, which is a data collection and delivery solution for mobile, IoT, and connected devices.
4. PredictML, which uses machine learning to predict the likelihood of certain customer behaviors.
5. Data Access, which gives companies a single source of clean customer data.

 #10 mParticle

mParticle helps brands build a single view of their customers, create segments, and utilize predictive analytics. This CDP supports lots of data integrations with tools for product, development, and marketing teams, including Insider, Google Analytics, BigQuery, and Amazon RedShift.

Features:

• Data integration: Collects and integrates customer data from various sources, including mobile apps, websites, and CRMs.
• Real-Time data streaming: Processes data in real-time to deliver up-to-date customer insights and enable instant decision-making.
• Audience segmentation: Allows for granular segmentation of customer data based on behavior, attributes, and other criteria.
• Cross-Channel activation: Enables businesses to activate customer data across multiple marketing channels, including email, mobile, and social media.

Pros:

• Wide integration ecosystem: Integrates with a broad range of marketing, analytics, and customer engagement tools.
• Real-time data: Provides actionable, real-time insights to improve customer engagement and personalization.
• Scalable: Suitable for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.
• Customizable: Offers flexible configurations to meet specific business needs and data requirements.

Cons:

• Complex setup: Initial implementation and data integrations may require technical expertise and resources.
• Learning curve: The platform’s feature set can be complex to learn for new users.
• Pricing: Can be expensive, particularly for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets.

 #11 Treasure Data

Treasure Data is a CDP that combines batch and real-time data to personalize journeys with Al. 

Features:

• Data integration: Unifies data from multiple sources, including web, mobile, CRM, IoT, and more, into a single customer profile.
• Real-Time data processing: Provides real-time data ingestion and processing to ensure up-to-date customer insights.
• Advanced analytics: Offers powerful analytics tools, including machine learning models and data visualization to gain deeper insights.
• Audience segmentation: Enables advanced customer segmentation for targeted marketing and personalized campaigns.

Pros:

• Flexible data integration: Integrates with a wide variety of data sources, making it versatile for different business needs.
• Scalable and customizable: Suitable for businesses of all sizes with customizable features to meet specific requirements.
• Powerful analytics: Offers strong analytics and machine learning capabilities to derive actionable insights.
• Real-time data: Ensures that businesses can act on the most up-to-date information, driving timely decisions.

Cons:

• Complex implementation: Setup and integration can be resource-intensive and may require technical expertise.
• Learning curve: The platform’s robust feature set may take time for users to master, especially for those unfamiliar with data engineering.
• Pricing: Can be costly for smaller businesses, especially if extensive data processing and integrations are needed.

Bring Your Customer Data in One Place and Use it to Drive Revenue With Insider

Insider’s Actionable CDP can aggregate all your customer data from any relevant source into one place. Our team will help you get that data into Insider as fast as possible, so you can focus on what really matters — segmenting your audience, uncovering valuable customer insights, and driving revenue.

Plus, Insider’s personalization features and broad channel support — including email, SMS, WhatsApp, on-site, and more — will help you create individualized, cross-channel customer experiences.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a customer data platform (CDP)?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a type of software that helps teams unify, centralize, and manage customer data from various sources into a single, accessible, and convenient database. CDPs can collect data from different touchpoints — including websites, social media, email, sales, and customer support systems  — to create a comprehensive view of each customer.

How does a customer data platform work?

CDPs work by gathering, consolidating, and organizing data from various sources into a unified database that creates comprehensive customer profiles. The process includes a three important steps:

1. Collecting data from different sources.
2. Integrating that data into a centralized database.
3. Unifying that data and creating omnichannel customer profiles.

After that, CDPs can also help teams segment and activate their data across channels through various personalized marketing strategies.

What are the benefits of a customer data platform?

Some of the key benefits of using a customer data platform include:

• Centralized data management as marketers get 360-degree views of all customers and avoid data silos.
• Better customer tracking and accurate insights as teams can analyze customer behavior across all touchpoints and understand their entire user journey.
• Personalized marketing campaigns as marketers can use their unified customer data to deliver tailored content, messaging, and product recommendations.
• Reliable data for decision-makers as CDPs can store historical and real-time data across the entire customer lifecycle.
• Compliance and data privacy as CDPs can help teams ensure data is stored and managed in a way that complies with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.
• Operational efficiency as teams can use built-in automation tools to streamline segmentation, campaign orchestration, reporting, and other processes.

Who needs a customer data platform?

A CDP is particularly beneficial for organizations that deal with large volumes of customer data and aim to improve their customer experience, marketing efforts, and overall business strategy. This often includes businesses in the eCommerce, finance, media, healthcare, technology, automotive, education, travel, and telecommunication sections.

Which is the best customer data platform?

The best CDP will depend on your business’s specific needs, workflows, and budget. For example, Insider is an ideal CDP for marketers looking to unify and activate their data across all channels from one place. Other CDPs like Segment or Treasure Data might be a better fit for developers and data analysis looking to perform more complex data operations while relying on integrations with other tools for activating their data. 

Are CDPs the same as DMPs?

CDPs and data management platforms (DMPs) don’t do the same thing. While they both collect and organize customer data, they focus on different types of information and are used for different purposes.

• DMPs are mainly used for storing third-party data with the goal of helping advertisers and ad agencies segment and target audiences via paid ads. 
• CDPs make use of all kinds of data, including first-, second-, and third-party data to help brands remove data silos, understand their customers, and build detailed customer segments. 

Overall, CDPs are more versatile than DMPs, as they can be employed in all sorts of use cases beyond paid advertising, like unifying all customer data, personalizing on-site experiences, and creating multichannel customer journeys.

What’s the difference between CDPs and CRMs?

Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) like Salesforce store customer interaction data like emails, support tickets, sales demos, and contracts. They’re used by marketing, customer support, and sales teams as a single source of truth regarding interactions with leads and customers.

CDPs provide a single place to store all customer and visitor data, regardless of its source. This can include customer interaction data, but it can also include behavioral data, event data, survey data, and much more. This makes CDPs a better choice for companies that want a unified view of the data generated at each customer touchpoint, not just through interactions with the sales and customer support teams.

What are the different types of data that CDPs use?

CDPs can aggregate different types of data, including:

1. Basic customer information, like names, email addresses, phone numbers, and demographic details.
2. Behavioral and interaction data, such as website visits, product purchases, message channel interactions (e.g., email, SMS, and WhatsApp), and frequently used features.
3. Attitudinal data, like survey responses, net promoter scores (NPS), customer effort scores (CES), and preferences.

Depending on the data source, CDPs can also work with first-, second-, and third-party data. However, most brands have shifted their focus toward first-party data due to strict data privacy regulations (like the GDPR and CCPA) and recent privacy updates from Google and Apple.