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CDP – How to find the right Customer Data Platform

Do you finally want to manage your volume of customer data cleanly and use it properly for your marketing? A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is virtually indispensable for successful, personalized marketing. Find out here what advantages the platform offers marketers.

  • Dieser Artikel wurde am 7. April 2026 aktualisiert.
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irst-party data is one of the most important raw materials for marketing: it gives us crucial insights into our customers’ behavior, from which we must derive further communication measures. Unfortunately, however, managing it is anything but easy.

Many different data sources—here a newsletter subscription, there a purchase in the online shop, over there a purchase in brick-and-mortar retail—often lead to a chaotic picture. All it takes is two different email addresses or even just a typo in the email and you suddenly have two separate records—even though it’s the same person. And how can we feed the knowledge gained from the data back into the marketing channels again in a simple and automated way? CDPs were developed precisely for these challenges and use cases.

Customer Data Platforms

What is a CDP?

A Customer Data Platform is a system that consolidates first-party data—i.e., a company’s own customer data—cleans it, and creates a single, carefully curated customer profile from the heterogeneous information. By additionally using machine learning algorithms, customer behavior patterns can be predicted, enabling your marketing team to run highly targeted campaigns. A CDP also optimizes orchestration by feeding content back into the digital source channels.

Which customer data should you include in a CDP?

To create as accurate a picture as possible of individual customers, a Customer Data Platform should contain all data from your company’s sales and marketing channels: campaign, behavioral, and transaction data from websites, social media, shop systems, mailings, call centers, apps, and other channels.

What benefits does a CDP offer?

“Personalization” has been one of the buzzwords in marketing for several years. But personalization is only as good as the quality of the data. If important information is missing—for example because a different email address was provided during a transaction—your personalization will never be optimal. And this is where a CDP helps you, by intelligently consolidating and cleansing first-party data and creating a 360° view of customers. You will probably lose a large portion of customer records after the implementation of a CDP—but the individual records gain enormously in quality and value.

The customer profile created in the CDP therefore enables better personalization as well as customer segmentation according to geographic, demographic, and behavioral criteria.

Further benefits include:

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Simplified access to customer data—you no longer have to search in different systems, but have a single source of truth for your MarTech stack at hand.

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Data export to the data warehouse for further analysis of the data.

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Use of customer data for different marketing channels—you can push it directly from the CDP back into the source channels.

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Features for automated email campaigns.

When do I need a CDP?

A CDP is particularly suitable for companies that collect a lot of data from various sources and have a large customer base—in short: companies that handle large volumes of data. This mainly affects B2C companies. But B2B companies are also aggregating more and more data that they should use for personalized campaigns or for retargeting on social media. Whether B2C or B2B: the customer journey is becoming increasingly complex.

If data is meant to be the foundation of your marketing, then you should keep it clean and manage it as centrally as possible in order to develop your subsequent measures and campaigns from it. And that is exactly what a CDP supports you with. At some point, you will probably reach the point where your data can no longer be managed in any other way than through a CDP.

What are important functions of a CDP?

The functions and features of a Customer Data Platform include:

Core functions

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Collect, analyze and centrally consolidate first-party data

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Standardize customer profiles and create a clean, unified customer view

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Segmentation based on geo-, demo- and psychographic criteria

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Predict behavior patterns using machine learning

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Feed marketing content back into the various channels

Common features

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Conversion Tracking

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Data Governance

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Data Masking

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Data Migration

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Data Quality Control

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz E-mail Marketing

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Real-time Data

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Engagement Tracking

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Campaign Management/Analytics

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Lead Qualification/Management

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Predictive Modeling

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz ROI Tracking

What types of CDPs are there?

The CDP Institute distinguishes four types of CDPs:

Data CDPs
These CDPs merely collect data from various systems, create customer profiles, and store the data so that external systems can access it. “This is the minimum set of functions required to meet the definition of a CDP.”

Analytics CDPs
In addition to data management, these CDPs offer additional analysis and visualization capabilities. “The applications always include customer segmentation and sometimes extend to machine learning, predictive modeling, revenue attribution, and journey mapping.”

Campaign CDPs
In addition to the data and analytics functions, these CDPs enable personalized messages to customers, content or product recommendations, outbound marketing campaigns, and more.

Delivery CDPs
These CDPs have the functions of the other CDP types, but can be linked to all your digital marketing channels. “Delivery may be through email, website, mobile apps, CRM, advertising, or several of these. Products in this category often started as delivery systems and added CDP functions later.”

You should ask yourself these questions when choosing a CDP

There are several providers of Customer Data Platforms, so you should ask yourself a few questions in advance to find the right software for your needs:

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Is there enough First Party Data available to create meaningful customer profiles by merging it?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Do you want to use a CDP for a simplified data overview, or do you need analytics tools for segmentation as well as cross-channel campaign functions?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Which target customers do you want to reach with your campaign, and through which channels do you want to address them?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz What information do you need for personalized marketing campaigns?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Do you need Real Time Data?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Is the CDP compatible with your tech stack?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Which systems must have interfaces (CRM, email software, analytics tools, social media tools)?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Which employees should work with the CDP? Which departments need to be involved in the (onboarding) process?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz Is the CDP set up in a way that the marketing team can work with it independently after setup, without IT support?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz In which languages must the user interface be available?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz In which region/in which country must the software’s servers be located? Keyword: GDPR-compliant

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz How extensive do the provider’s onboarding and support services need to be?

Matchilla - Matching-Plattform und Marktplatz What budget range per year/month, or per employee, have you planned?

Important: To leverage the full potential of a CDP and run successful campaigns, the structures within the company often need to be optimized and transformed. This enables marketers, analysts, and sales to work productively and closely together.

How can I efficiently find the best possible CDP?

Implementing a CDP means an enormous change in data management for companies: various departments need to be involved and multiple data sources must be “tapped into”. This doesn’t happen within a few days. That’s why it’s crucial to choose the right process when selecting the software. And that’s where Matchilla helps you:

The matching process saves you the time-consuming research involving search engines, comparison lists, etc. On our platform, you’ll find catalogs of criteria and, combined with the personal expertise of the Matchilla team, you can match the three most relevant providers to your requirements.

The best part: using the platform as well as the matching with providers is free of charge and non-binding.
Match CDP providers now
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About the Author

Till Zier is CPO at Matchilla and, as a MarTech and data expert, reports in the MatchZINE on news and trends in the areas of automation, analytics and data.

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