How many companies are in the same industry as you? Dozens, hundreds, thousands? Often, they all offer basically similar products with some differences in functionality. According to BuiltWith Trends' statistics, there are 26.6 million ecommerce sites worldwide in 2024, creating both vast opportunities and fierce competition in the digital marketplace. And it is digital marketing that helps you stand out and make your presence known.
Using modern technologies allows you to better understand your clients' behavior and needs to optimize interactions with them and, accordingly, increase sales. Customer data platforms and marketing automation systems are the flagships of such tools.
However, despite all the similarities, their goals and capabilities still have significant differences.
So, which tool should you ultimately choose?
To answer this question, we need to delve deeper into the topic. But first, let's understand the concepts.
What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
Have you ever tried to cook a dish using ingredients scattered all over the house? It'd be frustrating and time-consuming. The same thing happens when you have to bring together disparate pieces of information about your users from different sources.
Today's customer experience is more fragmented than ever. You're talking to clients on social networks, your home page, and via email. At the same time, they're using your mobile app, reading marketing content, and interacting with the support team, so you need to do something to coordinate all those interactions.
This is where CDP comes to the rescue.
A customer data platform is a marketing technology that unifies a company’s customer data from different channels to enable client modeling and to optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers.
In simple terms, each of these places stores first-party information. The job of a CDP is to analyze where data overlaps in these silos, organize it, and combine it into a single profile automatically and in real time.
Armed with this knowledge, you can create highly targeted and effective campaigns that truly resonate with your audience, driving engagement and sales.
Examples of such tools include Salesforce, Yespo CDP, BlueConic, Blaze, Tealium AudienceStream, and Amperity.
What is a Marketing Automation Platform?
Marketing automation is software that assists you with customer segmentation, as well as data and campaign management.
Unlike CDPs, MAPs enable you to prioritize essential tasks, automate repetitive processes without detracting from message customization, and streamline marketing activities. As a result, you save time and money, enhancing overall efficiency.
Simply put, marketing automation is about using software and technology to find new clients faster, increase loyalty among the existing ones, identify high-growth or highly profitable customer segments, and increase your engagement with them.
A proper MAP reduces human error and manages complex tasks such as measuring efforts, improving organizational efficiency, and predicting future scenarios.
The essence of marketing automation is that it provides precise audience segmentation based on customizable parameters. You can group specific lists and databases to gain deeper insights into each user, allowing for more effective personalization of communications.
Examples of such tools include Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Oracle Eloqua, and GetResponse.
How CDPs and Marketing Automation Platforms Collect Customer Data
Customer data and marketing automation platforms both play crucial roles in this process, but they do so with some differences.
CDP's approach
Such tools gather data from multiple sources and generate a unified profile. It includes all the data points associated with a customer, including their previous purchases recorded in the CRM system, interactions on your website, ecommerce platforms, or mobile apps, communication with technical support, social media activity, and more.
CDPs often use identifiers like email addresses or client IDs to merge data points associated with one person, ensuring all interactions are linked to their profile. This helps create a single customer view and tailor marketing strategies accordingly.
But what's even more essential is that these tools update data in real time, allowing you to respond instantly to any changes. And while you'll often see CDP vs. CRM headlines, it's actually CDP & CRM that works best.
MAP's approach
In turn, data is collected solely through marketing campaigns and lead generation. MAPs often use forms on websites and landing pages to capture information like names, email addresses, and other relevant data when users sign up for newsletters, download resources, or engage in promotions—without storing the entire customer history.
Marketing automation platforms also track client interactions, including website visits, email openings, and clicks on links. While all this data is not collected in real time in a single profile, it helps you score leads and optimize campaign management.
Still, the ideal option remains when MAPs are integrated with CDPs to improve targeting and segment messages based on unified customer profiles.
CDP vs.. Marketing Automation: Main Pros and Cons
Each tool has its advantages and disadvantages. CDP and MAP are no exception to this rule. To understand which solution will help you achieve your goals and objectives, you need to come face-to-face with both sides of the coin.
Customer Data Platform |
|
| Pros | Cons |
| Consolidates customer data from multiple sources into a single, comprehensive database. | Requires resources and expertise to integrate with various data sources and systems. |
| Creates a unified view of each client to deliver more personalized and effective messaging. | Demands an investment for implementation and maintenance, which can be challenging to justify, especially for smaller businesses. |
| Ensures consistent customer engagement across multiple marketing channels. | Takes time to set up the migration of existing data. |
| Provides real-time access to customer data, allowing you to make quick decisions based on the latest information available. | Needs dedicated resources for ongoing updates and maintenance. |
| Enhances marketing efficiency, reducing time spent on data analysis and integration. | Might get cluttered with duplicate or inaccurate data if not managed properly. |
| Improves ROI through more effective campaigns and better customer retention. | Raises privacy and security issues due to the centralization of large amounts of customer data without following GDPR and ISO standards. |
| Accommodates increasing volumes of customer data and evolving marketing needs without sacrificing performance. | |
With customer data stored in a CDP, you can gain more insights into their behavior, preferences, and needs, helping you and your team create more targeted omnichannel campaigns.
A customer data platform gives you the complete picture of your marketing and sales strategy in many ways. As first-party data collection becomes increasingly important, a CDP will become more critical, too. However, to get all these benefits, be prepared to commit not only to a significant budget but also to a team of technical experts.
Marketing Automation Platform |
|
| Pros | Cons |
| Reduces time spent on repetitive tasks, simplifying scheduling and planning for future activities. | Faces challenges adapting to complex or rapidly changing conditions due to scalability limitations. |
| Cuts costs by optimizing resource allocation, allowing employees to focus on more impactful responsibilities. | Relies only on the customer data added to the CRM system or obtained as a result of your marketing activities without integration with the CDP. |
| Enhances audience segmentation by automatically refining target groups based on preferences, demographics, and engagement behaviors, thereby increasing conversion probabilities. | Restricts creativity through rigid platform limitations and automated workflows. |
| Provides comprehensive tracking, measurement, and monitoring capabilities, enabling informed decision-making and strategic planning based on customer insights. | Depersonalizes communication with customers because of data fragmentation. |
| Delivers tailored content that resonates with users, guiding them toward making informed purchasing decisions. | Becomes a heavy burden on the budget, as finding a single universal platform that covers all your marketing tasks is tough. |
| Helps re-engage clients with relevant products or services through remarketing, ensuring sustained interest and interaction. | Overlooks nuanced customer needs that require a more personalized approach and individual touch. |
Marketing automation platforms streamline processes, freeing up time and resources by optimizing routine tasks such as scheduling and enhancing performance.
Good MAP helps scale your marketing efforts around real people. This includes lead nurturing, sending emails, social media planning, and improving tracking and analytics. While marketing automation has many uses, the price for this might be a loss in personalization and the effectiveness of your activities.
CDP vs. Marketing Automation: Points to Consider
If you still have doubts about which tool to choose—customer data or marketing automation platform—then ask yourself the following questions:
Your primary goal
Are you looking to consolidate customer data from multiple sources, or do you need to automate marketing tasks and campaigns?
Customization level
Are you looking for advanced personalization options based on comprehensive customer profiles or plain targeted messaging?
Accessibility
Do you need real-time access to customer behavior tracking to inform marketing strategies?
Ways of using data
Are you focused on customer segmentation, personalization, and predictive analytics, or do you need to execute and manage marketing campaigns? Or both with one tool?
Scalability options
Is your business experiencing rapid growth and requiring the advanced data management and automation capabilities available with a CDP?
Technical expertise
Does your team have the appropriate knowledge and experience to manage a complex toolkit of customer data platforms?
This checklist can help clarify whether a CDP or MAP best fits your company's needs. In case both tools received the same number of points, then we saved the last question for you:
Are you ready for the longer-term but much greater ROI that a customer data platform can provide, or are you content with the lesser results of a marketing automation tool here and now?
CDP vs. Marketing Automation: Examples and Use Cases
To finally dot the i's and cross the t's, let's consider a pretend-yet-realistic situation. Imagine that you want to send an email to your best customers.
What would this look like using a CDP?
Step 1. First, it can help you analyze your customers' behavior. To determine your best clients, you can segment them based on various criteria, such as purchase frequency, total spend, or product preferences. It's no longer a guessing game when you want to communicate with people.
Moreover, some CDPs, such as Segment, Yespo, and BlueConic, are now actively using AI tools for predictive segmentation, product recommendations, and content editing, which helps you interact with customers even more accurately.
Step 2. Then, you can use the data gathered by your CDP to build targeted campaigns. Once you've identified your best customers, creating a customized email specifically for them is easy.
Step 3. Behavioral data analysis gives you a pretty good idea of the messaging and creativity that will work for your audience. When creating your email content, you can personalize it based on your customers' preferences, interests, and past behavior. Thus, you're not only reaching the ideal audience but also sending them custom-made content.
Step 4. Lastly, a customer data platform lets you optimize and measure your results.
Once you've sent an email to your best clients, you can track the performance of your campaign and measure its impact on the customers. A CDP will help you see how many of them opened the email, clicked on a link, and made a purchase. You can then use this data to optimize your future campaigns and improve your total ROI, ROMI, CR, and AOV.
And this example applies to more than just sending emails. Understanding your audience can benefit literally every marketing strategy you implement, whether you use this knowledge to create targeted campaigns for your digital ads or website content that addresses your customers' needs. While we won't go into detail here on how to choose a CDP, it's still a key consideration.
What would this look like using a MAP?
When using a marketing automation platform to create and launch an email campaign for your best customers, the situation is slightly different.
Step 1. A MAP will also help you segment the audience to identify your best clients, but it will do so based solely on data from your CRM and information gained from previous marketing activities.
Step 2. Moving on to the content part. While the CDP provides advanced personalization using a 360-degree customer view, in this case, it may be quite superficial and limited to predefined segments and behavior related to marketing interactions.
Step 3. You then schedule the email at times that have previously shown high engagement rates and set up a trigger system according to subsequent client behavior.
This strategy will be more linear and focused on planned messages. Without real-time data, you won't be able to adjust emails based on immediate customer actions, meaning the campaign will be less dynamic and responsive.
Step 4. Now, it's time to use the reporting dashboard to track metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. This data can help you adjust your email timing, subject line, and even call-to-action later, but it doesn't provide a deep dive into how different touchpoints impact customer journeys.
It would seem that the result is the same—both CDP and MAP allow you to send an email to your best clients, but the key differences lie in their functionalities and approaches to managing and utilizing customer data.
Final Thoughts
In summary, utilizing a MAP might be more about executing and automating personalized marketing campaigns, while a CDP empowers you to gain a holistic understanding of your clients and leverage that data for highly responsive communication.
It's up to you to decide which one suits your goals and objectives best.
It's worth noting that using both tools in tandem will give you significant benefits, allowing you to run campaigns that not only perform well but also resonate deeply with customer needs and behavior.