CDP (Customer Data Platform) — Customer Data Platform
What is CDP (Customer Data Platform)?
A CDP (Customer Data Platform) collects customer data from every source a business uses — website events, purchases, support tickets, messaging history — resolves it into one unified profile per customer via identity resolution, and makes that unified data available to marketing, sales, and messaging tools for segmentation and personalization. A CDP's defining feature is that other systems can act on its data directly, not just view a report generated from it.
More detail
A CDP differs from a data warehouse mainly in purpose: a warehouse is built for broad analytics and reporting, while a CDP is built specifically to make a unified customer profile actionable by marketing, messaging, and personalization tools in real time.
Warehouse sync (reverse ETL) is commonly how a CDP's computed traits and segments flow back out into the specific tools — an email platform, an ad network, a messaging campaign tool — that need them.
Frequently asked
- How is a CDP different from a data warehouse?
- A data warehouse is optimized for broad analytics and reporting across a business; a CDP is purpose-built to resolve customer identity into unified profiles and make that data directly actionable by marketing, sales, and messaging tools, often in real time.
- What makes a customer profile in a CDP 'unified'?
- Identity resolution merges data from every source — web, purchase, support, messaging — that belongs to the same real customer into one profile, instead of leaving that same person looking like several disconnected records across separate systems.
See also
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