This explainer is for Australian marketing, data and IT leads weighing a CDP before a vendor demo. "CDP" can also mean other things in IT (Cisco Discovery Protocol, for one); this post covers customer data platforms only.
What is a customer data platform, in plain terms?
The CDP Institute, an industry body set up in 2016 (the term itself dates from 2013), defines a CDP as "software that creates and maintains a persistent, unified customer record that is accessible to other systems". Three words in that definition do the work:
- Persistent. The profile is kept and updated over time, not rebuilt for each campaign.
- Unified. Records from different systems that belong to the same person are linked into one profile.
- Accessible. Other systems can read the profile and its segments. A CDP that only feeds its own email tool is a marketing platform with a database, not a CDP.
The Institute's directory lists more than 240 CDP vendors, so test any product against all three words, not its marketing.
How does a CDP work?
Every CDP, packaged or built, has the same five parts:
- Ingestion. Connectors, APIs and event streams bring in data from your CRM, ecommerce platform, booking or point-of-sale system, service desk, website and app analytics, and marketing tools. Some data arrives in real time (a cart abandoned a minute ago), some in nightly batches (loyalty points, invoices).
- Identity resolution. Match rules decide which records are the same person: an email address in Shopify, a phone number in the booking system, a cookie on the website, a contact ID in Salesforce. Reconciliation rules decide which value wins when two sources disagree about a customer's address or name.
- The profile store. One profile per person, holding attributes (name, postcode, lifetime value), events (pages viewed, orders, support tickets) and links back to each source record.
- Segmentation. Marketers and analysts build audiences from the profiles ("bought in the last 90 days, opened no email in 30, lives in Victoria") without writing SQL.
- Activation. Segments and attributes are pushed to the systems that act on them: an email platform, ad networks, a website personalisation tool, a service console, or an AI agent that needs to know who it is talking to.
Underneath all five sits consent: which channels each person has agreed to, for what purpose. A CDP that can't carry an opt-out to every connected tool creates compliance risk rather than reducing it.
What is a CDP used for? Five examples
- Abandoned cart and browse messages. Website events reach the profile in seconds, and the email or SMS platform sends a reminder while the customer still cares. Few other use cases need real-time pipes.
- Suppressing people you shouldn't market to. Customers with an open complaint, a recent refund or a pending hardship request are removed from promotional audiences automatically, because the service desk data is on the same profile.
- Paid media audiences. Existing customers are excluded from acquisition campaigns, and high-value customers become the seed for lookalike audiences, instead of paying to reach people who already buy from you.
- Service with context. A contact centre agent sees recent orders, open tickets and marketing history in one view, so the customer doesn't repeat themselves.
- Feeding AI agents. An AI agent answering a customer question needs the same unified profile a person would: who this is, what they bought, what they've consented to. A CDP gives the agent one governed place to read from rather than five systems to query.
CDP vs CRM: what's the difference?
The short version: a CRM is built around people managing relationships; a CDP is built around data about customers, at volume. Most mid-sized organisations that have a CDP also have a CRM, and the two exchange data.
| CRM (customer relationship management) | CDP (customer data platform) | |
|---|---|---|
| Main users | Sales, service and account teams | Marketing, analytics and data teams, and the systems they feed |
| What it holds | Contacts, accounts, opportunities, cases, activities | Profiles built from every source, including high volumes of behavioural events |
| Where data comes from | Mostly entered by people, plus some integrations | Mostly ingested automatically from other systems |
| Identity | One record per contact, deduplicated by rules or by hand | Matches records across systems into one profile, including anonymous visitors who later identify themselves |
| Typical volume | Thousands to low millions of contacts | Millions of profiles and many millions of events |
| Output | Work for people: tasks, pipelines, cases | Segments and attributes for other systems |
A data warehouse is the other term people confuse with a CDP. A warehouse (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift) stores all kinds of business data for analysis. It doesn't do identity resolution, segmentation for marketers or activation out of the box. A "composable" CDP adds those on top of your warehouse instead of copying data into a separate platform.
If the real question is which system should hold the master customer record, read our guide to the single customer view, which compares four architectures (CRM as hub, packaged CDP, marketing platform profile and composable) and the identity rules each needs. For the CRM side, see our CRM services.
Which CDP platforms are there?
The market splits into four groups. We've listed the main options neutrally; the right one usually depends on where your best customer data already sits.
- Suite CDPs, part of a larger marketing or CRM stack: Salesforce Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), Adobe Real-Time CDP on Adobe Experience Platform, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. They fit best when you already run that vendor's CRM or marketing tools.
- Independent CDPs, such as Twilio Segment, Tealium and Bloomreach, which connect to many stacks and don't assume a particular CRM.
- Marketing platforms with a built-in profile store. Klaviyo sells its Klaviyo Data Platform as a CDP for direct-to-consumer brands. When marketing is the main user of the data, this can do the job a separate CDP would.
- Composable tools, such as Hightouch, which sit on your data warehouse and push segments from it to other tools.
Great Minds implements Salesforce Data 360, Adobe Real-Time CDP and Klaviyo, and connects them to Salesforce, Microsoft and commerce platforms. We'd still start any selection with your sources, use cases and consent model, not a vendor.
What does a CDP cost in Australia?
Licences are priced mainly on the number of profiles, with extra charges for usage. Two vendors publish list prices:
| Platform | List price (as published) | What it means for 100,000 profiles |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights | AU$2,544.10 per tenant a month, billed yearly, excluding GST; includes 100,000 unified people and 10,000 "interacted people" (people you message); extra 100,000-profile packs from AU$2,993.10 a month, falling to AU$1,496.60 above 2 million | About AU$30,500 a year; 500,000 profiles is about AU$174,000 a year (base plus four packs) |
| Salesforce Data 360 | $240 per 1,000 profiles a year (Enterprise Profiles $420), or $500 per 100,000 Flex Credits for pay-as-you-go; ingestion is free. Salesforce's Australian page shows these figures in US-dollar format, so confirm the AUD price in your quote | $24,000 a year ($42,000 on Enterprise Profiles) before any extra credits |
Adobe Real-Time CDP, Klaviyo's data platform and most independent CDPs quote on request. Three things move the total more than the licence:
- Usage charges. Segmenting, activating and querying consume credits on some platforms. Model your real segment refreshes and activations before you sign.
- Implementation. Connecting sources and writing identity and consent rules is usually the larger cost in year one, and it grows with the number of source systems, not the number of profiles.
- People. Someone has to own the identity rules and the segment library after go-live, or the CDP drifts out of date.
What to check in Australia
- Where profiles are stored. Adobe Experience Platform has an Australian hosting location (AUS5, New South Wales, on Microsoft Azure). For other platforms, ask which region your tenant will use. If personal information goes offshore, APP 8 requires reasonable steps to protect it before disclosure.
- Direct marketing rules. APP 7 limits using personal information for direct marketing, and the Spam Act rules ACMA enforces require consent for commercial email and SMS, messages that identify the sender, and an easy way to unsubscribe. Store consent as data on the profile, by channel and purpose.
- Automated decisions. From 10 December 2026, privacy policies must explain when computer programs use personal information to make decisions that significantly affect people. If a CDP segment decides who gets a credit offer or a price, read what changes on 10 December.
- Security and deletion. APP 11 requires reasonable steps to protect personal information and to destroy or de-identify it when it's no longer needed. Every copy a CDP makes is one more place to secure and delete from.
When do you need a CDP?
You probably need one when most of these are true:
- Customer data sits in four or more systems, and nobody can answer "how many customers do we have?" without a spreadsheet.
- Marketing wants to act on behaviour (browsing, purchases, bookings) within minutes, not after a weekly export.
- The same person receives contradictory messages: a promotion the day after a complaint, or an acquisition ad after they've already bought.
- Opt-outs take days to reach every tool.
- You plan to put AI agents in front of customers and need one governed profile for them to read.
You probably don't need a separate CDP yet if most of your customer data is already in one CRM or one marketing platform, or if your volumes are modest and your use cases are batch email. In that case, tidy the data in the system you have. When Meriton Suites moved from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Klaviyo, we migrated more than 1 million contacts with their consent and engagement history and connected the booking and ecommerce platform for behavioural triggers, without a separate CDP (case study). We cover how that migration ran in Migrating from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Klaviyo.
Product data has its own platform, the PIM, which we explain in What is PIM? A CDP knows who your customers are; a PIM knows what you sell.
Frequently asked questions
Is a CDP the same as a CRM?
No. A CRM supports people managing customer relationships (sales pipelines, service cases). A CDP unifies customer data from many systems, including high-volume behavioural events, and sends profiles and segments to other tools. Many organisations run both and sync them.
Is Salesforce a CDP?
Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud are CRMs. Salesforce's CDP is a separate product, Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), which can unify data from Salesforce and non-Salesforce sources.
How long does a CDP implementation take?
It depends mainly on the number of source systems and how clean their identifiers are. A first use case with two or three sources can go live in weeks; a CDP fed by a dozen systems is a multi-phase program. Agree the identity and consent rules before any connector is built.
Talk to us
Deciding whether you need a CDP, or which one fits the CRM and marketing tools you already run? Our customer data platform services cover selection, identity and consent design, and the integrations in and out. Talk to us.
