What Is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
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What Is a Customer Data Platform?
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software that collects customer data from every touchpoint a business has — website visits, app usage, email opens, purchase history, support tickets, social interactions — and merges it into a single, unified profile per customer. That unified profile is then made available to other marketing and sales tools in real time.
CDP vs CRM: What's the Difference?
A CDP is often confused with a CRM, but they solve different problems. A CRM is built around managing relationships and sales pipeline data that's mostly entered manually by staff, while a CDP automatically ingests and stitches together behavioural and transactional data from many systems, resolving the same person across devices and channels into one profile without needing manual data entry.
How Businesses Use a CDP
Businesses use CDPs to power more targeted marketing — building audience segments based on actual behaviour, personalising website or email content, and feeding consistent customer data into ad platforms and analytics tools. Because the data lives in one place rather than scattered across disconnected tools, marketing teams can act on a fuller picture of each customer instead of guessing from partial data.