What is CDP?

A CDP (Customer Data Platform) is software that collects customer data from a company's different sources (website, app, CRM, ecommerce, support), unifies it at the person level and sends those unified profiles to marketing and advertising tools as segments. It is designed to be used directly by marketing teams.

Last updated: 20 October 2026View as Markdown

In short

In practice, a CDP ties website behaviour, app usage, purchases and support history to the same person, so marketing works from one profile instead of scattered records. A CRM manages the sales relationship and a data warehouse serves analysis; the CDP turns unified profiles into audiences that tools can act on. Some companies skip a packaged CDP and unify profiles in their warehouse, then push them out with reverse ETL. A cart abandoner, for example, can join an email flow and an ad audience on the same day.

Key points

A CDP unifies customer data from many sources into one profile per person.
A CRM manages sales relationships and a data warehouse serves analysis; a CDP builds marketing segments.
Unified profiles are sent to email, advertising and personalization tools as audiences.
A composable setup uses the data warehouse and reverse ETL instead of a packaged CDP.
Unified data makes personalization, segmentation and ad audiences more accurate.

CDP, CRM and data warehouse

	CDP	CRM	Data warehouse
Purpose	Unified customer profile and segments	Sales and relationship management	Analysis of all data
User	Marketing	Sales, service	Analysts, data team
Data	Behavioral and identity data	Contacts, companies, deals	All kinds of data

Instead of buying a CDP, some companies use a "composable" setup built on a data warehouse: profiles unified in the warehouse are sent to tools with reverse ETL.

Why it matters

Unified customer data improves the accuracy of personalization, segmentation and ad audiences. Which setup fits depends on data volume and the team: marketing data warehouse.

Last updated: 20 October 2026