The 5 best enterprise CDPs and their key features (in-depth look)
Customer data platforms (CDPs) let brands unify their customer data from various sources into a single database and get a clear view of their customers’ journeys. These capabilities are important for most online businesses but especially for enterprises that use a plethora of solutions to store and analyze customer data. However, not all CDPs are created equal.
Updated on 23 Aug 2024
As we explained in our guide to the 7 best CDPs, we can differentiate between Actionable (or Campaign) CDPs and Data CDPs based on their native activation channels, personalization capabilities, and advanced technical features.
Enterprise CDPs are also very different from CDPs built mainly for smaller businesses. Their differences span across a wide range of key areas, like customer support, data retention, security, scalability, and more.
In this guide, you’ll learn about the essential enterprise CDP capabilities and how they cater to large businesses. We’ll also cover the five best enterprise CDPs, including:
- Insider
- Bloomreach
- Treasure Data
- Tealium
- Segment
We’ll also discuss each CDP’s category and use cases, so you get a better understanding of whether they’re a right fit for your business.
Insider’s Actionable CDP helps you bring all your customer data from online and offline sources into one place and create connected customer experiences that drive conversions, revenue, and retention. Request a demo or see how it works for yourself.
The essential capabilities of enterprise CDPs
Like all other CDPs, enterprise CDPs can aggregate data from various sources, create 360-degree customer views via omnichannel identity resolution, and build detailed customer segments.
However, they’re also quite different from regular CDPs because they’re built to resolve pain points that larger businesses experience. Here are seven key CDP capabilities that are vital to enterprise organizations:
- Versatile data ingestion and sharing. Enterprises tend to use lots of different systems to store customer data — like data lakes and warehouses, CRMs, CMSs, analytics tools, and channel-specific solutions. That’s why enterprise CDPs have lots of integration options (like native connectors, webhooks, SDKs, and APIs) to ensure consistent data flows across the entire martech stack.
- Experienced global support team. Enterprise software deployments can be very time-consuming. As a result, companies often don’t see a return on their investment (ROI) for months or even years. A good support team can help you overcome this challenge by creating a personalized implementation plan and guiding you through the process with relevant advice and hands-on setup assistance.
- Long-term data retention. While regular CDPs often delete customer data after a few months or a year, enterprise CDPs provide much longer data retention periods. For example, Insider’s Actionable CDP stores customer data for five years, and that period can be expanded further depending on your needs.
- Data security by default. Data security is always a must for enterprise organizations. That’s why enterprise CDPs have security certifications like ISO/IEC 27001 ISMS or SOC 2 issued by independent third parties. They also store data in specific regions to ensure automatic compliance with regulations like GDPR or CCPA.
- Activation channels. The more channels an enterprise CDP supports natively — i.e., without needing to pass data to downstream systems — the more opportunities it offers for consolidating your marketing stack and simplifying your workflows. This is a key advantage of Campaign CDPs over traditional Data and Analytics CDPs that often don’t have any built-in channels.
- Fast time to value. This is a function of having a good support team, flexible implementation options, broad channel support, and useful templates. When combined together, these factors result in teams being able to quickly use their unified data to launch campaigns and improve key metrics like conversion, revenue, and retention.
- Scalability. Most enterprises need to aggregate billions of data points, like events, behavioral info, IDs, survey responses, and much more. This requires enterprise CDPs to constantly scale and quickly process real-time data to ensure a smooth experience for marketing teams and end customers.
5 Best enterprise CDPs to consider (by category)
In this section, we’ll look at the 5 top CDP vendors for enterprise businesses — Insider, Bloomreach, Treasure Data, Tealium, and Segment.
The first two are Campaign (or Actionable) CDPs. They’re a better fit for marketing teams looking to aggregate their data and activate it across channels like on-site, email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp without needing third-party tools. This makes them a great choice if you’re looking to unify your marketing stack, overcome data silos, and personalize all customer touchpoints.
The final three are Data and Analytics CDPs. They’re more suitable for technical teams (e.g., developers or data scientists) and use cases, like data governance, standardization, cleansing, and complex visualizations. They mostly rely on passing their data to downstream platforms for activation after it’s been aggregated and segmented.
#1 Insider
Type: Campaign (Actionable) CDP.
Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as for channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
Our Actionable CDP is ranked as the best CDP for enterprises by customers on G2:
1200+ enterprise brands in industries like fashion (Adidas), finance (Allianz), media (CNN), automotive (Lexus), cosmetics (AVON), telco (Vodafone), and more use Insider to:
- Consolidate their customer data and create unified, 360-degree customer profiles. Our platform can aggregate information from any online or offline data source, including CRMs, CMSs, APIs, POS devices, analytics tools, and more to give you a complete view of your customers’ journeys. Spotlight Retail Group used this capability to reduce campaign launch times by 80% and achieve a 37x ROI.
- Use AI-powered segmentation to home in on the right audiences for their campaigns. Insider lets you identify and target your audiences with 120+ attributes, including predictive behaviors like likelihood to purchase or churn, discount affinity, potential spending, and more. Adidas used Insider’s advanced segmentation to achieve a 259% increase in average order value (AOV).
- Reach customers on a variety of channels and personalize all their touchpoints. Insider’s broad channel support means you can unify and activate your data across your website, mobile app, email, SMS, push notifications, WhatsApp, and other channels without needing any third-party tools. Vogacloset used Insider’s data aggregation and cross-channel personalization capabilities to unify their data and activate it across their website, email, and WhatsApp, resulting in a 30x ROI.
In the next section, you’ll learn exactly how Insider helps enterprise teams unify their data and use it to create personalized customer experiences.
Global support team and extensive templates for fast implementation and ROI
As an enterprise-grade solution provider, Insider has over 1000 employees in 26 offices across six continents.
This enables us to consistently deliver fast, high-quality support to customers all across the globe, without relying on third-party agencies or system integrators.
Our expert support team can:
- Help you set up Insider’s CDP and get the right data into it (with no extra setup charge). This includes creating a personalized roadmap for your unique needs and tech stack, advising you during the implementation process, and ensuring all relevant data sources and stakeholders are involved.
- Provide timely assistance for all issues. Our large global presence lets us respond quickly to the needs of teams all over the world. Plus, our support experts have lots of experience in helping enterprise brands achieve their business goals.
- Analyze your customer data and migrate customer journeys for you. Our team can go over your analytics data and give you ideas for implementing or tweaking various marketing tactics. Also, if you have customer journeys, flows, or automations built in other platforms, we’ll migrate them to Insider for you, so you don’t have to build them from scratch.
Thanks to our focus on high-quality service, customers consistently rank Insider as the best CDP in terms of ease of setup, ease of use, quality of support, and time to value.
Our vast template library is another reason why Insider customers see a return on their investment very quickly. These fully customizable templates cover all sorts of channels and use cases, like:
- Email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications.
- Increasing lead sign-ups, celebrating customer milestones, reducing cart abandonments, and gamifying the user experience.
- And much more.
Our templates have enabled many customers to quickly launch campaigns and boost key metrics like conversion rates and revenue:
“Insider also offered us extensive support for various campaign types, including promotional, triggered, and transactional campaigns, and provided us with a range of templates that align with our specific campaign objectives. Among these templates, we particularly favor the CTA template and conversational template, as they enable us to deliver a more engaging and interactive onsite experience to our target audience. The result of this was a 15% boost in conversion rates.
Enterprise-grade data unification, segmentation, and long-term retention
Insider’s Campaign CDP can aggregate data from any online or offline source, including:
- Customer relationship management systems (CRMs), like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
- Marketing analytics software, like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel.
- Data warehouses and storage systems, like BigQuery and Amazon S3.
- Data and Analytics CDPs like Segment and Tealium.
- Other popular SaaS tools, APIs, and more.
You can find a complete list of our 100+ integrations in our website’s Integration Hub
Our solution can also ingest all types of relevant information including:
- Events.
- User IDs.
- Device information.
- Channel interactions.
- Demographics and location data (if available).
- First-party data, second-party data, or third-party data.
This allows our platform to create accurate, 360-degree profiles of all your customers.
For example, the screenshot below shows such a profile. As you can see, the profile contains essential insights for data-driven marketers, like the customer’s name, contact information, channel reachability, purchase history, and even predicted behaviors.
By default, Insider stores this unified customer data for five years.
As an added bonus, Insider’s CDP creates unified profiles for anonymous visitors. This enables you to personalize their website experience in real-time and send them relevant web push notifications, resulting in higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs.
Insider also offers tons of audience segmentation options. For example, our platform creates predefined audiences of people who abandoned their carts, abandoned a product page, interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and more shown below.
You can narrow down your segments by specifying users’ devices, operating systems (or specific versions), locations, demographics, and lots of other characteristics. Lastly, our AI-powered predictive audiences enable you to put the finishing touches on your segments by targeting customers based on their:
- Likelihood to purchase or churn.
- Projected lifetime value.
- Interest clusters.
- Discount affinity.
- Attribute affinity.
- Lifecycle status.
In short, Insider’s CDP can power your marketing campaigns with reliable customer data, while its segmentation capabilities help you easily home in on the right audiences.
Build-in activation channels and advanced personalization
Traditional Data and Analytics CDPs are all about data unification, identity resolution, segmentation, and governance.
Despite being very useful for different teams, these CDPs are limited in the sense that they don’t have built-in activation channels. That’s why they have to pass their data to downstream systems like email marketing platforms, push notification software, and personalization tools for activation. This process works but at the price of creating new data silos and adding complexity to marketing workflows.
Insider’s broad channel support, advanced personalization features, and customer journey builder help you avoid that issue.
After your data is unified in Insider’s CDP, you can immediately start activating it across your website or mobile app. Our platform lets you personalize every element of your site or app — including content, messaging, and product recommendations — based on each customer’s behaviors and preferences.
For example, you can easily start delivering personalized product recommendations on:
- All website pages.
- Product or article pages.
- Product category pages.
- Cart pages.
You can choose between a wide variety of recommendations, which can be organized into two broad categories:
- User-based, where our AI automatically matches every product recommendation to each individual user. This is a great way to automate product discovery and drive conversions because you can be sure that all customers will be shown the most relevant products.
- Other recommendation strategies, like most popular items top sellers, frequently viewed or purchased products together, and many others shown below.
These tactics can help you boost conversion rates, which is crucial for making the most out of your marketing budget. For example, Dover Saddlery used Insider’s personalization suite to increase conversion rates by 5%, drive $2 million in incremental revenue, and achieve a 29x ROI.
Thanks to Insider’s broad channel support, you can also scale your personalization efforts and drive customer engagement across all touchpoints, including:
- SMS
- Push notifications
- Mobile stories (via InStory)
- Site search results (via EUREKA)
- And more.
Finally, you can also use Architect — our cross-channel journey builder and marketing automation solution — to bring all these touchpoints together into a consistent customer journey.
Architect lets you build, automate, and personalize cross-channel campaigns using a simple drag-and-drop editor and plenty of proven journey templates.
Plus, Insider’s AI algorithms ensure that each journey message is:
- Relevant: Again, Insider can tailor all content, messaging, and product recommendations to each customer across your website, mobile app, email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and all other channels.
- Timely: The Send-Time Optimization feature analyzes each customer’s behavioral patterns, determines the right time to contact them, and automatically sends each message at that time, so you don’t have to guess or A/B test (although Insider also has built-in A/B testing).
- Sent on the right channel: The Next-Best Channel feature also analyzes recipients’ behaviors to find out which touchpoint is best in each scenario. This is a great option if you’re not sure how to continue a journey beyond a certain point.
For a real-life example of Insider’s cross-channel personalization capabilities, check out our case study with Slazenger. They used Architect to:
- Deliver relevant and timely messages across all channels.
- Entice shoppers to return with tailored price drop notifications.
- Recover lost revenue with cross-channel cart abandonment flows.
This helped them generate a 700% increase in customer acquisition and a 49x ROI after just eight weeks of using Insider.
For more details on how Insider can help you unify customer data, segment your audiences, and drive revenue, book a live demo with our team.
#2 Bloomreach
Type: Campaign (Actionable) CDP.
Bloomreach is an eCommerce personalization platform. It offers a Customer Data Engine that can ingest data from sources like other CDPs, CRMs, data lakes, data warehouses, and more. Bloomreach also natively supports activation channels like email, push notifications, and SMS and offers headless CMS capabilities for building landing pages, managing content, and integrating with eCommerce platforms.
Learn more: 11 Top Bloomreach competitors and alternatives (by category).
#3 Treasure Data
Type: Data and Analytics CDP.
Treasure Data is a Customer Data Cloud that unifies data and ensures compliance and security. As an enterprise solution, Treasure Data’s CDP is versatile and can be useful for marketing, sales, customer support, and technical teams. It’s also a pure CDP in the sense that it supports technical use cases like data hygiene and advanced analytics but doesn’t have built-in activation channels (instead, it relies on integrations with Campaign CDPs or channel-specific solutions).
#4 Tealium
Type: Data and Analytics CDP.
Tealium is a platform that combines a few key products:
- Audience Stream CDP, which creates unified customer profiles.
- iQ Tag Management, which helps companies manage their customer data and marketing tools across web, mobile, IoT, and connected devices.
- EventStream, which is a data collection and delivery solution for mobile, IoT, and connected devices.
- PredictML, which uses machine learning to provide useful customer insights and predict the likelihood of customer behaviors.
- Data Access, which gives marketers a single source of clean customer data.
#5 Segment
Type: Data and Analytics CDP.
Segment is a pioneer in the CDP world as it popularized the category as a whole. Although the company was acquired by Twilio in 2020, Segment still exists as a standalone product. As a classic CDP, Segment supports plenty of technical data management features and use cases, like cleaning, transforming, and loading customer data, customizing data pipelines, reverse ETL, and more. Segment is also among the few enterprise customer data platforms that has pricing plans for small businesses.
Unify your data and personalize all customer touchpoints with Insider
Insider is a perfect enterprise CDP and marketing platform if you’re looking to:
- Unify customer data from any online or offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, APIs, POS devices, analytics software, and more — and get accurate, 360-degree customer profiles.
- Keep your customer data secure by default and comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR.
- Work with an experienced, global support team that can guide you through the implementation. Our experts have lots of experience working with global enterprise brands and can answer questions and resolve issues quickly.
- See a meaningful ROI as fast as possible. Insider’s combination of broad channel support, ease of use, proven templates, and an experienced support team ensures you can aggregate your data and use it to drive conversions, revenue, and retention as quickly as possible.
- Overcome data silos, simplify your martech stack, and save resources. Insider’s activation channels enable you to unify your marketing stack into a single, enterprise-grade platform. There’s no need to buy, learn, and manage separate channel-specific solutions.
- Personalize every touchpoint in your customers’ journeys. Insider’s advanced personalization suite enables you to tailor content, messaging, and product recommendations across your website and mobile app, as well as external channels like email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, chatbots, and more.
Thanks to our platform’s versatility, Insider is highly ranked by G2, IDC, and Gartner across a plethora of categories (besides CDP), such as:
Lastly, Insider is a great choice for marketers looking to tap into the full potential of AI. Our suite of AI tools and features (called Sirius AI) can build segments, craft and optimize customer journeys, write subject lines and body copy, engage in two-way conversations across WhatsApp and chatbots, and much more.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.