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Tools & Platforms

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Software that unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single view for marketing and personalization.

Definition

A Customer Data Platform collects, unifies, and activates customer data from multiple sources including your product, billing system, support tools, and marketing platforms. It creates a single customer profile that can be used to personalize email content, trigger automations, and segment audiences based on complete behavioral and attribute data.

Why It Matters

Your email platform only sees what you send it. Without a CDP or equivalent integration, you are personalizing with incomplete data. A CDP connects your product usage, payment history, support interactions, and marketing engagement into one unified view. This enables truly personalized email that responds to everything a customer does.

How It Works

A CDP ingests data from multiple sources via APIs, SDKs, and integrations. It resolves identity across systems (matching the same person across tools) and builds a unified customer profile. This profile syncs to your email platform, enriching subscriber records with data from across your stack.

Best Practices

  • 1Integrate all data sources that matter for personalization
  • 2Ensure identity resolution works correctly across systems
  • 3Define which data points should sync to your email platform
  • 4Use CDP data to create sophisticated segments
  • 5Automate data flow rather than relying on manual syncs
  • 6Audit data quality regularly to catch integration issues
  • 7Start with the highest-impact data sources first

Unified Data Model

Sequenzy combines data from your product, Stripe, and custom events into unified subscriber profiles. Segment and personalize based on the complete picture.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Not necessarily. Simple setups can use direct integrations between your product and email platform. A CDP becomes valuable when you have multiple data sources, complex personalization needs, or want a single source of truth across marketing tools.

Focus on data that drives personalization and segmentation: product usage indicators, subscription status, customer lifetime value, recent activity, and key attributes. Avoid sending everything. More data creates more complexity without proportional benefit.

An email platform sends and manages email. A CDP unifies data from multiple sources. They serve different purposes and often work together. The CDP feeds enriched customer data to the email platform, which uses it for targeting and personalization.