What is a CDP?

A Customer Data Platform is a platform that merges data from various data sources to create a singular, unified customer data warehouse that contains information on all contact points and engagements with your services and products. This information can then be segregated into nearly infinite ways to build more personalised marketing strategies.

The easiest method to demonstrate this is through an example. Consider an organization that is striving to improve its understanding of its customers. Their CDP will be utilized to gather data from platforms such as Facebook, the business’s website, email, and other tools where a customer may engage with the business. The CDP will gather all of those data sets, combine them into a uniform user profile that is readily comprehensible, and then render that profile available to other platforms that may require it, such as advertising platforms.

This process enables the business to gain more insight into its target audience and build more personalized GTM efforts. The organization may quickly construct an advertising audience depending on all those who have visited a given website page, as well as the real-time chat function of the company. Or, businesses may easily segment and examine data on website visitors who left mid-way before purchasing your product or solution.

Where are CDPs Trending in 2023?

Organisations have to cope with a plethora of data in the digital era. Organisations are increasingly gathering numerous forms of information on their customers from a variety of sources.

With the tremendous possibilities of CPDs, it’s a very reasonable guess that a majority of GTM teams will be implementing it into their existing Mar-tech stack by 2023. As per Statista Research Department, the CDP industry is expected to grow by 25% in 2023.

CDPs are predicted to become a must-have tool for growth teams. With a CDP, you’d get a more complete picture of each consumer’s activity as well as their past experience or buyer’s journey. This provides you with a deeper view of each consumer experience as well as what aspects led to their conversion from leads to sales.

The usage and implementation of CDPs extend beyond marketing. They’re also becoming popular among sales staff, customer success executives, IT teams, etc. Making customer information available to all departments concerned is critical to offering personalized experiences to prospects and customers, and CDPs enable multichannel personalization by providing a single overview of consumer profiles.

Why should Founders/Heads of Growth think of CDPs?

As an entrepreneur, you might think about how to build and utilise CDPs to maximise the potential of your company. If you’re wondering why your team should consider adopting a CDP, you’ve come to the right place. Further in this post, we’ll go over what a Customer Data Platform is and what it can do for you.


1. Using a CDP to comprehend consumer behaviour – A CDP is an effective tool for helping founders better understand customer behaviour and ICPs. Businesses can use a CDP to collect, store, and analyze consumer data across numerous platforms and device types in order to uncover behaviours and patterns in consumer engagement.

CDPs, for example, can measure how frequently people go to your site or the duration they spend on specific pages. This provides you with vital insight into the sorts of content that resonate most with various customers, allowing you to customize solution suggestions throughout your product line.


2. Process Automation to Save both money and time – Customer data platforms assist you to automate and streamline tedious procedures, allowing founders to concentrate on more vital creative areas of their operations. Furthermore, by automating procedures, organisations could cut costs that would otherwise be spent on labour.


3. Predict Consumer Demands and Target the Correct Audiences – Among the most important advantages of a CDP is that it may assist in identifying and targeting the relevant consumers by customer segmentation. You can divide customers into groups based on their specific interests if you have access to consumer data. You may then engage with them via product offers that are tailored to their preferences. This form of segmentation assists business owners in successfully targeting the relevant consumer, which leads to increased sales.

A customer data platform also enables organisations to use predictive analytics on various audiences. This enables founders to have a better understanding of consumer behaviours and take actions centred on those insights.


4. Monitor Performance Metrics to Improve Customer Lifetime Value – Customer retention is critical for long-term success. A customer data platform will enable you to keep track of the overall count of customers who has joined your company over time, as well as how many are actively using your services. Learning about the customer journey allows you to discover places where customers may get disengaged, as well as areas where interaction can be increased via optimisation.

Similarly, measuring customer lifetime value is really an important statistic to consider in order to evaluate performance. Customer lifetime value calculates how much each customer has invested or will spend on your products or solutions over the course of their association with your company.

How Does a CDP Work?

Let’s have a look at the various factors that make up a CDP and that are essential for your company to meet the CDP’s objectives.

1. Ingestion of Data

To begin, CDPs collect data together so that it can be linked to a person and a single record. With the CDP’s integration library, it can collect data from numerous sources. Such as Marketing automation systems, business intelligence (BI) solutions, data solutions, accounting platforms, etc.

2. Resolving Identity Problems and Processing Data

Secondly, one of the most difficult challenges in connecting all of these sources of data is duplication of the same contact in the database or having different information about the same individual in multiple channels. CDPs stitch together multiple ‘versions’ of a consumer or prospect to generate a single customer view.

3. Segmentation of the Audience

The ability to identify audiences is a key capability of CDPs. It enables companies to be incredibly precise with their audiences. The idea is to find potential opportunities to advertise to, upscale or cross-sell to. You may construct case-specific audiences while also excluding persons from an audience.

4. Data synchronization & syndication

CDPs enable businesses to communicate data to other platforms, this is known as “data activation.” This compiled audience may now be shared with other departments and nurtured through the most suitable channels to enhance sales and profitability for a company.

RudderStack vs Segment

With more datasets than ever before, you’ve probably come across two of the main CDPs – Segment & RudderStack. In this comparison, we’ll highlight the features and pricing models for both platforms, as well as provide a basic framework for understanding when to utilise each platform for managing data.

Pre-built ETL connectors –

One of the most crucial factors to consider when choosing an ETL tool is if the solution integrates the data sources of your requirement. The number of connections available is a good indicator of a vendor’s capacity to assist your analytics team in centralizing data.

Segment provides over 75 prebuilt connections to data sources as well as hundreds of endpoints. As Segment is a CDP designed for marketers, the prebuilt connections focus on sources that collect and maintain customer data.

RudderStack provides robust SDK capabilities, making it simple to gather data across mobile applications and websites. Rudderstack provides 50+ out-of-the-box cloud sources.

Filtering and event transformations –

Even though you acquire data through a single integration, this does not indicate that each piece of data should be provided to every destination device in its current state. For instance, personally identifying information, like email addresses, should only be used where it is absolutely necessary.

RudderStack especially excels for budget-conscious companies. It includes transformations in their free basic plan. The catch is that transformations are programmed in code (JavaScript) within RudderStack’s user interface. Even if you don’t have to make any code modifications to your sources, you’ll need to dedicate some engineering work in order to take use of them.

Segment has a feature named “Functions” that provides similar capabilities. Functions are presented in public preview (open to everyone but still in progress) and are promoted as a mechanism to integrate Segment data to dozens of officially unsupported applications. In addition to Functions, Segment provides no-code filtering & transformations. There is, however, a catch: it is only offered as a Business or Premium feature (that you would need to purchase).

Schedule for warehouse support and synchronization –

Let’s consider intermediate event storage. The events you provide to RudderStack are not saved. Because warehouse destinations are just refreshed on a regular basis, you must set up your personal interim storage for any events you track. Segment, however, stores all events that it captures. This means you have no need to stress about storing event data during warehouse syncs.

The second consideration is sync frequency. Segment provides daily sync for workspaces on Team actions, but RudderStack can upload additional data to your storage every 30 minutes if desired. Segment’s sync period may be reduced to once per hour, but as you can anticipate, this will necessitate a change to their Premium plan, which may be significantly more expensive.

Compliance and security –

Because of how Segment & RudderStack handle storing events prior to being put into your warehouse, there’s really one critical aspect for privacy-conscious decision-makers to consider.

RudderStack’s “warehouse-first” method guarantees that no customer data will be stored on its servers. However,  Segment store all of the information you send through.

For businesses that truly desire complete control over their consumer data, RudderStack is a superior option. One could even self-host RudderStack’s open-source platform.

Pricing –

This is significant since the primary price difference between Segment and RudderStack is because Segment charges you according to monthly tracked users, however Rudderstack charges you based on monthly recorded events.

Segment pricing is appropriate for businesses with strong unit dynamics (high revenue per monitored user) and moderately engaged customers (up to 250 events/month). If you track over 250 events per month on average, you would need to upgrade to Segment Business, which includes personalised pricing. This pricing can easily go as high as $20k annually.

Rudderstack’s price is designed for businesses with less favourable unit economics (for example, a large ratio of site visitors & free users vs. customers) or you track only a little higher than 250 events each month.


Segment prices are generally determined by the number of monthly visitors.

a. Free: Covers 1,000 monthly visits and two sources.
b. Team: At $120 per month, you get 10,000 visitors per month, limitless sources, and a single data warehouse destination.
c. Business: Pricing is based on customized volumes, marketing tools, information management, roles and rights, individualised customer journeys, and HIPAA compliance.

RudderStack charges are mostly based on monthly events.

a. The free plan enables you to up to one million events each month (data can be gathered via SDKs and integrated into data warehouses)
b. Starter plan – This package begins at $500 per month and includes increased event volumes, close real-time data, support, and SLAs.
c. Growth Plan – Profiles, reverse ETL, ETL pipelines, and specialised support are included.
d. The enterprise package includes premium support, HIPAA compliance, and SSO.