Understanding and evaluating customer data platforms (CDP) for your ecommerce business

The current state of the ecommerce landscape means that if you’re not putting your customers first, you’re basically toast. 

But you know what’s really working for online stores? Making shopping feel personal for each customer, even when you’ve got tons of them. It’s also important to keep your existing customers coming back. As McKinsey aptly put it back in 2019, “Personalisation will be the prime driver of marketing success within five years.”

But here’s the thing—a lot of online stores are struggling with this. They’ve got customer info all over the place, their marketing tools don’t talk to each other, and they can’t see the big picture of how customers interact with them. 

This is where a customer data platform (CDP) comes in handy. Think of it as the “central brain” of your online store. It grabs all your customer data from everywhere and puts it in one place. This lets you get a clear picture of each customer, group them smartly, and give them a consistent experience no matter how they’re shopping with you. 

What is an ecommerce customer data platform anyway?

Ecommerce CDPs work much like regular CDPs, gathering customer data from various sources, centralising it, and making it available for distribution to systems of engagement and insight. These sources typically include content management systems (CMSs), analytics tools, loyalty programs, point-of-sale (POS) devices, marketing tools for different channels, and customer service platforms.

The old CDP vs. the modern, new-world CDP

In the past, turning raw data into actionable insights for your marketing was a daunting task. It took a lot of time and resources to gather data from various sources, clean it up, and analyse it. 

Once you finally managed to make sense of the numbers, you still had to figure out how to apply those insights to your marketing strategies to encourage repeat purchases. It was a complex process that often left many businesses struggling to keep up. 

But whereas old-world CDPs collect, unify, and store customer data from multiple sources at scale, modern CDPs take that functionality a step further, with a marketing application built in.

By centralising your customer data and making it accessible, you’re suddenly able to accomplish complex, powerful activities in just a few clicks, such as: 

• Identifying high-value customers and personalise their journey
• Reducing cart abandonment with timely, relevant messaging
• Creating product recommendations based on browsing and purchase history
• Optimising ad spend by suppressing existing customers
• Improving customer retention through predictive analytics

To put it simply, a CDP helps you truly get to know your customers and engage them in meaningful ways across their entire lifecycle. For ecommerce brands looking to thrive in an increasingly crowded market, it’s becoming an indispensable tool for delivering standout customer experiences.

How customer data platforms benefit ecommerce businesses

A CDP brings together all your customer data in one place, giving you a complete picture of your customers. This makes it much easier to tailor your marketing efforts to each individual. 

Here’s how a CDP can help:

You can build a detailed picture of each customer

A CDP aggregates data from various sources, creating a single, comprehensive profile for each customer. This 360-degree view includes:

• Personal information
• Purchase history
• Browsing behaviour
• Interaction data across channels

This consolidated view helps you understand customers better and make data-driven decisions.

As customers interact with your brand across different channels, Klaviyo checks for opportunities to merge these engagements under a single customer profile. 

This is based on a process called “identifier precedence,” where Klaviyo uses existing data to determine if these omni-channel engagements can be consolidated under a single, stronger identifier.

Klaviyo ranks these identifiers as:

1. Profile ID: The primary identifier Klaviyo assigns to each profile. 
2. External ID: An external ID that can be used as a primary identifier on the profile, typically in place of an email address. External IDs are set through some integrations (e.g. Bigcommerce), or through Klaviyo’s APIs. 
3. Email: The email address associated with a profile. 
4. Phone number: The phone number associated with a profile. 
5. Anonymous mobile app ID: For mobile app profiles, if Klaviyo cannot associate the user with an email address, an anonymous mobile app ID will represent the iOS profile. 

For each lower-ranking identifier, Klaviyo checks if a profile exists within the account recognised only by that identifier. If such a profile is found and can be associated with a higher-ranking identifier based on an instance where they were linked together, Klaviyo will attempt to merge under the higher-ranking identifier.

You can make shopping feel personal

With all that info, you can suggest products customers will love, send emails that actually interest them, and even change your website based on who’s looking at it. 

💡With Klaviyo’s group membership API, you can personalise page content based on a site visitor’s previous interactions and preferences. Also, suggest specific blog posts, products, and more, and display dynamic pricing (and promotions!) based on someone’s recent behaviour or loyalty status. 

Your customer service gets way better

By leveraging CDP data, customer service teams can:

• View recent customer interactions
• Quickly understand and resolve issues
• Provide consistent service across channels

It saves you time and headaches

No more info scattered all over the place or wasting time entering data by hand. This means your team can focus on the fun stuff—coming up with great ideas and making them happen.

A CDP centralises data management, reducing: 

• Data silos between departments
• Manual data entry and associated errors
• Time spent on data analysis

Your marketing budget goes further 

You can target your ads better, write emails people actually want to open, and turn more browsers into buyers. Basically, you get more bang for your marketing buck.

What types of ecommerce business is a CDP suitable for? 

While a CDP can be helpful for pretty much any online business that has customer info floating around, it’s particularly handy if you’re selling through a bunch of different channels. Maybe you’ve got an online store and a few brick-and-mortar shops, and you’re all over social media, too. A CDP can pull all that data together so you can really get to know your customers and give them a personalised experience that makes them want to buy more. 

CDPs are also great if you’re running a subscription service, or you’ve got a loyalty programme. These kinds of businesses need to keep a close eye on what their customers are up to over time. With a CDP, you can spot buying patterns, group your customers in smart ways, and send out marketing messages that actually speak to each person. 

How do you choose an ecommerce CDP? 

Finding the perfect CDP is like searching for the perfect pair of shoes—it has to be the right fit. This is made 10x harder by the fact there are a lot of options out there, and they all claim to be the best.

To give you a hand, here are the key features you should look for when shopping for a CDP. 

Data handling

• Easy integration. You want a CDP that plays nice with your existing tools. It should be able to pull in data from your ecommerce platform, email marketing software, social media accounts, and any other sources you use. The easier this is, the quicker you’ll be up and running.
• Data storage. Look for a CDP that can store all your customer data, not just bits and pieces. This gives you a complete picture of your customers over time.
• Data cleaning and unification. Your CDP should be able to take data from different sources and merge it into a single, accurate customer profile. It should also clean up messy data and remove duplicates.
• Outbound syncing. The CDP should be able to send your unified customer data back out to your marketing tools. This lets you use your insights across all your channels.
• Monitoring. You’ll want features that help you keep an eye on your data quality and alert you to any issues.

Intelligence features

• Flexible insights. Your CDP should give you a clear view of your overall business performance. Look for customisable dashboards and reports.
• Advanced segmentation. The platform should let you slice and dice your customer data in various ways, with things like recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) analysis, customer funnels, and product performance insights.
• Marketing activation. Your CDP should make it easy to use your customer insights in your marketing efforts. Look for features that help you create targeted campaigns based on your data.

Performance measurement

1. Resource efficiency. The CDP should save your team time and effort compared to your old way of handling data.
2. Incremental revenue. Your CDP-powered marketing efforts should lead to an increase in sales.
3. Cost savings. The CDP should help you eliminate unnecessary expenses, like time spent building integrations or ad spend on customers who’ve already purchased.

Remember, the best CDP for your business is one that fits your specific needs and goals. Don’t get dazzled by fancy features you’ll never use. Instead, focus on finding a platform that solves your current data challenges and can grow with your business over time.

And don’t be afraid to ask for a demo or trial period before making a decision—you want to make sure you’re comfortable with the platform before committing to it.

Not all CDPs are built the same—5 platforms, compared

Here’s a rundown of the top ecommerce CDP platforms. 

1. Klaviyo CDP

We might be biased, but Klaviyo CDP is a firm favourite among ecommerce brands of all sizes. 

As a CDP built specifically with ecommerce businesses in mind, Klaviyo CDP is designed to help online stores collect, organise, and use their customer data more effectively.

One of Klaviyo CDP’s standout features is how it integrates with popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. This means it can easily pull in data about your customers’ shopping habits, including what they’ve bought, what they’ve looked at, and even items they’ve left in their cart.

Klaviyo CDP also offers some incredibly powerful segmentation tools. You can slice and dice your customer data in all sorts of ways, which is invaluable for creating targeted marketing campaigns. For example, you can quickly create a segment of customers who’ve bought from you more than once in the last 6 months.

Then there’s Klaviyo CDP’s predictive analytics. The platform uses AI to help you figure out things like which customers are most likely to make another purchase soon, or which ones might be at risk of not coming back.

On the marketing side, Klaviyo has built-in email and SMS tools. This means you can use the customer data you’ve collected to send personalised messages directly from the platform. It’s pretty handy having everything in one place like that.

One thing to keep in mind is that Klaviyo is more than just a CDP—it’s also a fully-fledged marketing automation platform, so you can effortlessly manage your customer data and marketing strategies in one central place. 

2. Segment 

Segment is an ecommerce CDP that helps businesses collect, unify, and manage customer data from various sources. It allows you to gather data from different tools like websites, apps, and marketing platforms, and brings it all together in one place. 

With Segment, you can create a single view of each customer, making it easier to personalise marketing efforts and improve the customer experience. It also integrates with a wide range of other tools, so you can connect your data to the platforms you already use. 

3. Insider 

Insider is a dedicated ecommerce CDP that helps businesses manage and personalise customer experiences across multiple channels. 

It collects data from different sources, such as websites, apps, and emails, and combines it to create a unified view of each customer. Insider offers features like personalised recommendations, A/B testing, and targeted messaging, which help businesses tailor their marketing strategies. It also integrates with various other tools, so you can connect and use your data across different platforms. 

4. Bloomreach

Bloomreach is tailor-made for ecommerce. It’s got all the usual CDP stuff, but what sets it apart is its focus on product discovery. It uses AI to help customers find the right products, which can boost your conversion rates. Plus, you can personalise your website content based on each visitor’s behaviour.

5. Tealium AudienceStream

Tealium is a heavyweight in the CDP world. It’s great for larger ecommerce brands that need to handle massive amounts of data.

One of Tealium’s best features for ecommerce is its real-time segmentation, which lets you instantly update customer profiles based on their actions. This means you can respond to customer behaviour as it happens, like sending a discount code to someone who just abandoned their cart.

Klaviyo CDP: the stand-out CDP for your ecommerce business 

Klaviyo CDP stands out as a top CDP choice for ecommerce brands because it indexes on providing actionable pathways for omnichannel retail marketers. 

Here are just a few of the ways Klaviyo CDP shortens the distance between data, insight, and action:

Clean up and reformat profile data without needing to bother IT

Maybe you’ve got customer locations stored as “UK”, “uk”, and “United Kingdom”, and your system doesn’t recognize all of those as the same property. Or maybe you’ve got dates entered in different formats.

That’s where Klaviyo CDP’s data transformation comes in. You can standardise how information looks across your entire database with just a few clicks.

Clean data means you can segment your customers more accurately. No more missed opportunities because someone typed “france” instead of “France.” You can be sure that when you’re targeting customers in a specific country, you’re reaching everyone you intend to.

Plus, when your data is consistent, your personalisation efforts become way more effective. You can create more targeted campaigns, recommend products more accurately, and, ultimately, provide a better shopping experience for your customers.

With Klaviyo CDP, you can transform profile properties to ensure clean, reliable data that you can use for better targeting and personalization. You can turn on pre-built transformations covering the most common use cases with a single click, or easily set up custom transformations – no developers, IT, or data scientists needed!

1. Standardise text: Make sure your segments and flows capture everyone who truly qualifies – and keep it simple by automatically transforming iterations and typos into a standardised spelling.
2. Format text: Personalise your emails confidently, even if customers don’t enter their information perfectly. You can automatically capitalise and clean up those user-inputted text values.
3. Format dates: Make sure that dates are consistently formatted and always recognized as dates so you can easily use them in segments, flows, and templates.
4. Merge properties: Keep workflows simple by making sure there’s a single trustworthy property for information you could collect in multiple ways, like interests.

Create personalised website experiences for each customer

Imagine being able to instantly recognise a customer when they land on your site and show them exactly what they’re interested in. This is what Klaviyo’s group membership API does. 

When someone visits your website, this API can quickly check which segments or lists they belong to in your Klaviyo account. Based on that info, you can customise their entire web experience on the fly. You can also:

• Show returning customers products they’re likely to love based on their past purchases or browsing history.
• Automatically display special offers or exclusive products to your VIP customers as soon as they hit your site.
• Tailor your pricing and promotions based on how recently someone’s purchased, how often they buy, or how much they typically spend—like offering a bigger discount to someone who hasn’t shopped in a while to win them back.
• Suggest blog articles that are most relevant to each visitor’s interests.

All of this happens in real time, creating a highly personalised experience for each shopper. And, once it’s set up, it all happens automatically. Your website becomes smarter and more personalised without you having to manually adjust anything.

Automatically pull customer data from third-party sources

Klaviyo’s data warehouse syncing feature is a way to get all your customer data in one place, even if it’s coming from different sources. Klaviyo can automatically send your customer info to a third-party data warehouse on a regular schedule, which can help you build a full picture of your customers.

You know how you might have customer data spread across different tools—maybe your email platform, your CRM, or your helpdesk software? This feature helps you bring it all together. You end up with a complete view of each customer, which is gold for understanding their journey with your brand.

It’s also great for spotting trends and opportunities you might have otherwise missed. When all your data is in one place, you can start to see patterns. Maybe you notice that customers who buy product A often come back for product B within three months. 

It also makes it easier to test new ideas. Want to try a new email campaign or change up your product recommendations? With all your historical data in one place, you can easily compare results and see what’s working best.

The beauty of this is that once it’s set up, it happens automatically. You don’t need to manually export and import data all the time. It just keeps your data warehouse updated, giving you fresh insights whenever you need them.

For ecommerce brands, especially as you grow, having this kind of comprehensive data view can be a real competitive advantage. It helps you make smarter decisions, create more targeted marketing campaigns, and ultimately, serve your customers better.

Share data across channels in real time with webhooks

Whenever something important happens in Klaviyo CDP—like a sale or an unsubscribe—it instantly tells all your other systems. This is huge for online stores because it saves a ton of time, keeps everything in sync, and lets you react quickly to what your customers are doing.

Once you set it up, it just works in the background, keeping all your customer data fresh across the board. 

Let’s say someone unsubscribes from your emails. Klaviyo makes sure that person is removed from all your email lists instantly, across all your tools. This helps you avoid the embarrassing (and potentially legally risky) situation of sending emails to people who’ve opted out.

Because the data is moving around in real time, you can set up automated responses to customer actions. Maybe you want to trigger a special offer when someone abandons their cart, for example, or send a thank-you message right after a purchase. 

Level up your post-purchase strategies with product analysis

Scaling a business depends on growing customer lifetime value (CLV) as effectively as possible.

To do that, it’s critical to understand and leverage how customers buy today—how they make follow-up purchases, what they buy together, and when they return. Without access to the right data or analytics tools, it’s hard to develop data-driven merchandising strategies and impactful marketing programs.

With Klaviyo CDP’s product analysis, you have access to insights about repeat purchase timing and what products customers tend to buy together or in succession, answering questions like:

• After someone buys a product, how long does it typically take for them to make their next purchase?
• What items do they tend to buy in the same cart?
• What items do they tend to buy in their next purchase?

You can use buying behaviour insights to sharpen merchandising strategies, such as optimising the timing and recommended up-sells in post-purchase flows, and creating recommended bundles for abandoned cart flows or sales.

How real-life brands use Klaviyo CDP to increase revenue 

Check out how some of our valued customers are using Klaviyo CDP to do great things.

1. How Ruffwear used Klaviyo CDP to grow overall revenue 9%

Ruffwear, a brand specialising in durable outdoor gear for dogs, leveraged Klaviyo CDP to boost customer lifetime value and improve marketing efficiency.

The company used recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) segmentation to gain fresh insights into their disengaged customers. This allowed them to create more targeted re-engagement flows based on customer value and likelihood to return.

By using RFM-triggered re-engagement flows, Ruffwear was able to send personalised content to customers in the “Needs attention” or “At risk” segments, recommending bestsellers based on purchase history. 

The brand also used Klaviyo CDP to expand the reach of major campaigns and evaluate the revenue performance of different sign-up channels. As a result, Ruffwear saw significant improvements in its marketing effectiveness. In just 6 months, the brand’s discount rate—ratio of discounts to sales—dropped 10% YoY, while overall revenue grew by 9%. 

You can learn more about how CDP makes RFM analysis faster and easier, along with other major use cases here.

2. How Nextbase used Klaviyo CDP to increased conversion rates by 122%

Nextbase, a global provider of dash cams and smart dash cams, leveraged Klaviyo CDP to dramatically improve its web strategy and drive revenue. 

By integrating Klaviyo CDP with Shogun’s targeted experiences, Nextbase personalised onsite content for repeat buyers using the group membership API. This integration allowed them to show tailored product recommendations to existing customers based on their previous purchases—and move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach of displaying their hero product to every visitor. 

The results were impressive: Nextbase saw a 23% increase in click rates and a remarkable 122% boost in onsite conversion rates. 

3. 2xist sees 56.1x platform ROI in first quarter with Klaviyo CDP

2xist (pronounced “to exist”) has been a leading name in men’s underwear for more than 30 years. Currently owned by The Moret Group, the same retail group that also manages Disney and Jockey brands, the brand sells an array of different styles, plus swimwear, loungewear, and tees.

Before Klaviyo CDP, the team had to manually pull and refresh each RFM segment, and run analysis in Excel—their CDP didn’t have any pre-built performance dashboards. They needed an RFM-based discounting strategy for email subscribers—but first, they needed a simpler way to execute it.

With Klaviyo CDP, the RFM segments updated automatically, without any manual exporting or refreshing, and getting started was easy.

Now, when a customer enters the 3 RFM segments most likely to churn—“needs attention,” “at risk,” and “inactive”—it triggers a segment-specific retention flow with a personalised discount. These flows drove $15.2K in incremental revenue in 2xist’s first paid quarter with Klaviyo CDP.

The key to success is putting your customers first

Today, putting customers at the centre of your strategy is the only way to see success. But with customer data scattered across various platforms, creating a seamless shopping experience can be a real challenge.

A CDP could be just what you need. By creating a “central brain” for your customer data, a CDP allows you to better understand your audience and tailor your marketing efforts effectively. 

Are you ready to enhance your customer interactions and boost your revenue? Or are you still grappling with disorganised data and missing out on valuable insights?