Using Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to Improve Marketing Outcomes

Benefits of CDPs for Marketing Teams

CDPs offer numerous benefits for marketers, including:

Unified Customer Profiles: CDPs create a single, unified profile for each customer, bringing together data from various sources.
Streamlined Data Management: CDPs simplify data management by providing a centralized location for customer data, reducing the complexity associated with multiple systems.
Compliance and Security: CDPs ensure compliance with regulations such as GDPR and help protect sensitive customer information.
Omnichannel Identity Resolution: CDPs resolve customer identities across multiple channels, enabling a cohesive view of the customer journey.

How do Marketing CDPs differ from Traditional CDPs?

While all CDPs can aggregate data to create a single customer view, they can be very different when it comes to their other use cases. Based on these differences, we can distinguish between two types of CDPs:

1. Data and Analytics CDPs: These solutions focus on data collection, analysis, and visualization but lack the tools necessary for marketers to activate customer data.
2. Actionable CDPs: Designed specifically for marketers, these CDPs go beyond data collection and analysis, providing built-in features for activating customer data across multiple channels.

Data and Analytics CDPs

These first CDPs aren’t built for data activation. They can consolidate customer data and help data teams with customer data management but don’t necessarily offer marketers the tools they need to activate data across channels.

These solutions are known as Data CDPs and Analytics CDPs. While there’s overlap between these categories, each one has unique areas of specialization:

• Data CDPs: Enable data control and data manipulation. They allow companies to manage and integrate various types of data.
• Analytics CDPs: Focus on visualizing the data, helping teams run analyses and obtain insights.

These early CDPs are geared towards more technical roles and use cases, such as data governance, data cleaning, and schema management. And even marketers who have the technical skills necessary to take full advantage of these CDPs still have to move their unified data downstream to marketing platforms to activate it.

Actionable CDPs

Actionable CDPs, sometimes called Campaign CDPs, excel at activating customer data, making them a great choice for marketers.

Like the previous CDPs, these can also create a single source of truth for all customer data and bring many profiles into one customer database. However, they also have the necessary tools for using that data to create successful marketing campaigns across channels.

For example, Releva’s CDP can gather customer data points from tons of different sources, including:

• APIs
• CRMs
• Analytics platforms
• Content management systems (CMSs)
• Data lakes, data warehouses, and other raw data sources

By bringing all of this data into one place, Releva’s CDP allows you to align your marketing efforts, create predictive segments, and develop personalized experiences across 8+ channels (website, mobile, web push, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more).

Marketing CDPs: 3 Example Use Cases

After a marketing CDP has unified your customer data, you can activate that data by developing personalized, cross-channel experiences at scale. Here are three things you can do with the foundation provided by Releva’s CDP:

Like all CDPs, Releva creates unified profiles for known customers, i.e., those who have shared contact information with you. However, our CDP also creates profiles for anonymous visitors on your site or app. These profiles contain key information, including:

• What pages they visited
• Which products they’re interested
• What attributes they’re considering (colors, sizes, prices, etc.)
• And much more

With this information, you can use website personalization to show anonymous visitors relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations. Plus, you can bring them back to your site with targeted push notifications.

Put simply, Releva’s CDP and personalization tools let you tailor the experience of anonymous visitors to increase conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs. This is a crucial capability if you want to make the most out of your marketing budget since the majority of traffic on most websites comes from anonymous visitors.

As anonymous customers share contact information with you, like their emails and phone numbers, their unified profiles will become even more detailed and accurate. You’ll be able to scale your personalization efforts across their preferred channels and ensure their entire journey with your brand is tailored to their interests.

Example #2: Prevent Customer Churn through RFM scores

Releva’s marketing CDP takes segmentation to the next level by providing advanced analytics capabilities that help you identify high-value customers, increase retention, and reduce churn. One of the key features of Releva’s CDP is its RFM score analysis, which segments customers based on their Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value. This analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior, allowing you to tailor your marketing efforts to specific groups.

RFM Score Analysis: A Deeper Dive

Releva’s RFM score analysis assigns a score to each customer based on their:

• Recency: How recently they made a purchase
• Frequency: How often they make purchases
• Monetary: The total amount spent by the customer

By combining these scores, you can identify high-value customers who are likely to make repeat purchases, as well as those who may be at risk of churning.

Additional Advanced Analytics: Churn Probability Score and Retarget Prediction Score

Releva’s CDP also offers two additional advanced analytics features:

• Churn Probability Score: This score predicts the likelihood of a customer churning based on their behavior, allowing you to proactively target at-risk customers with personalized retention campaigns.
• Retarget Prediction Score: This score identifies customers who are likely to respond positively to retargeting efforts, enabling you to optimize your marketing spend and maximize ROI.

Example: Putting Releva’s CDP into Action

Let’s say you’re an e-commerce company that sells outdoor gear. Using Releva’s CDP, you segment your customers based on their RFM scores and identify a group of high-value customers who have made frequent purchases in the past 30 days.

You also notice that a subset of these customers have a high Churn Probability Score, indicating they may be at risk of switching to a competitor. To retain these customers, you create a targeted email campaign offering them exclusive discounts and loyalty rewards.

Meanwhile, you use the Retarget Prediction Score to identify customers who are likely to respond positively to retargeting efforts. You then serve them personalized ads on social media, showcasing new products that align with their interests.



Example #3: Leverage Online-Offline Intelligence, including Real-Time Location

With Releva, you can:

• Send location-based push notifications or webhooks whenever customers are walking by your brick-and-mortar store. These notifications can include items that these customers have on their wishlists.
• Show online product recommendations based on an individual customer’s offline transactions.

Benefits of CDPs for Marketing Teams

As mentioned earlier, Actionable or Campaign CDPs move beyond the functionality offered by Data and Analytics CDPs. Here are some key benefits of Actionable CDPs in terms of marketers’ workflows and campaign success.

Clear, 360-Degree Customer Profiles

For marketers, the most immediate benefit of the actionable CDP is a clear, 360-degree customer profile. For example, here’s how a customer profile looks in Releva’s CDP:



For most marketing teams, customer data is stored in different systems, like email tools, social listening software, SMS solutions, CRMs, and so on. Marketing CDPs help you overcome these data silos by:

• Integrating customer data from all digital systems and touchpoints.
• Ingesting real-time data and bringing first, second, and third-party data into each unified customer profile.

The resulting 360-degree customer profiles give you the full customer picture in one place and help you uncover key customer identifiers (contact info, CRM IDs, demographics, etc.), behaviors, and preferences.

Connected Marketing Stack and Smooth Data Flow

The best CDPs have excellent integration capabilities, guaranteeing the right data flows into one centralized, actionable location. That’s how they ensure valuable customer data doesn’t remain siloed off in various disconnected systems.



For example, Releva integrates seamlessly with hundreds of solutions across 20+ categories to give you a 360-degree view of your customers. Plus, our support team constantly helps customers uncover and connect to the right data sources as quickly as possible.

Here’s one review on this topic from Elitza Dushkova, an Online marketing manager in the furniture industry:

“We are extremely pleased with the speed of everything Releva does – seamless integration, the easy communication, the effective conversations and the results we see in the system.”

Smarter Predictions Based on Highly Targeted Marketing Segments

Some Actionable CDPs can also create AI-powered predictive audiences. For example, Releva goes beyond standard segmentation characteristics like demographics, devices, or platforms and pre-made segments such as cart abandoners. Our machine learning algorithms analyze customer data to come up with predictions about customers’:

• Discount affinity.
• Likelihood to churn.
• Likelihood to purchase.
• Projected customer lifetime value (CLTV)
• And more.

Cross-Channel Personalization and Journey Orchestration

Marketing teams can use Actionable CDPs much more in their day-to-day compared to Data or Analytics CDPs because they have marketing automation tools, personalization capabilities, and activation channels natively incorporated with the CDP.

Releva’s platform shines in this regard, with intuitive personalization capabilities and a customer journey builder that works across multiple channels. You can use them to create individualized, cross-channel customer experiences without having to pass your data to other systems, which saves hours of manual work, prevents data inaccuracies, and helps you drive revenue, conversions, and retention.

Dynamic Personalization across Channels

Releva lets you tailor every element of the customer journey to each user’s behaviors, interests, and preferences. Our platform supports 8+ channels natively, including websites, mobile apps, email, web push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.



For example, using Releva’s on-site personalization capabilities, you can personalize the banners, categories, product recommendations, and site search results that customers see. You can also use Facebook ads on your site or app, which are great for driving engagement, product discovery, and revenue.

Overall, Releva’s personalization suite helps ensure you’re taking every opportunity to generate more revenue, improve conversion rates, and maximize your marketing spend.



Targeted, Cross-Channel Journey Orchestration

Releva has built-in tools that let you orchestrate seamless customer journeys using omnichannel marketing automation.

Our powerful customer journey builder can help you build, automate, and personalize campaigns at scale. It makes creating individualized customer journeys easy with features such as:

• Next-best channel predictions, which analyze your customers’ past behaviors and automatically use the channel they’re most likely to engage on.
• Send at optimal time, which analyzes engagement data and automatically sends each message at the time customers are most likely to engage with it.
• Pre-built templates for different channels and use cases, like increasing conversions, generating leads, gamifying the shopping experience, and more.
• Cross-channel A/B testing, which lets you compare different messages, CTAs, journey flows, send times, or any other element against each other to see which one produces better results.
• Native support for 8+ channels including SMS, email, WhatsApp, web and app push notifications, on-site, in-app, and more.


Unify your Customer Data and Drive Growth with Releva’s Marketing CDP

Releva provides native support for 8+ channels and includes AI-powered segmentation and automation capabilities ideal for companies looking to build personalized cross-channel customer experiences.

We’re rated as the best and easiest-to-use customer data platform (CDP) on G2. Our support team will help you get all your customer data into one place so you can focus on segmenting your audience, uncovering insights, driving revenue, and maximizing your marketing budget.

Join 500+ global brands, from high-growth startups to enterprise players that use Releva to unify their data and personalize each step of their customers’ journeys. Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Releva can help you reach your revenue goals.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about CDPs

What’s the difference between CDPs and DMPs?

CDPs and data management platforms (DMPs) collect and organize customer data but focus on different types of information and have different purposes.

DMPs are for storing third-party data to help advertisers and ad agencies segment and target audiences via paid ads. DMPs cannot accept first-party data and primarily operate with anonymized data, including cookies, devices, and IP addresses.

CDPs use all kinds of data, including first-, second-, and third-party data, to help brands remove data silos, understand customers, and build detailed customer segments. More versatile than DMPs for marketing, CDPs can be employed in various use cases beyond paid advertising, like unifying all customer data and creating personalized omnichannel customer journeys.

What’s the difference between CDPs and CRMs?

Customer relationship management system (CRM) providers such as Salesforce store customer interaction data like emails, support tickets, sales demos, and contracts. They help marketing, customer support, and sales teams track interactions with leads and customers. Their focus is on interactions with customer-facing teams (particularly sales and customer support).

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

What kind of ROI can I expect from using a CDP?

The ROI of using a CDP depends on your specific business goals and industry. However, studies have shown that companies that use CDPs to personalize their marketing efforts see significant improvements in customer engagement, retention, and revenue growth.

For example, a study by Forrester found that companies that use CDPs see an average increase of 10% to 20% in customer lifetime value (CLV) within the first year of implementation.

Another study by Gartner found that companies that use CDPs see an average increase of 15% to 25% in revenue growth within the first two years of implementation.

Final toughts

Releva’s CDP is a powerful tool for marketers looking to unify their customer data and drive growth through personalized cross-channel experiences. Our platform provides native support for 8+ channels, AI-powered segmentation and automation capabilities, and a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to get started.

Don’t just take our word for it – join 500+ global brands that have already seen the benefits of using Releva’s CDP to drive revenue growth, improve customer engagement, and increase retention. Book a demo today to learn more about how Releva can help you reach your revenue goals.