Imagine this situation: A potential customer visits your website from his cell phone while riding the subway, adds a product to the cart and abandons it. Hours later, he receives a generic email offering him a totally different product. The next day, when he finally buys the original product in your physical store, he keeps getting advertisements for that same item on Instagram for a week.
The result? User frustration and a wasted marketing budget.
This unfortunately common scenario is the symptom of a business disease: data disconnection. This is where the missing piece in the puzzle of many Martech strategies comes into play: the Customer Data Platform (CDP).
At Inprofit, we know that automation alone is not enough; it needs intelligence. And for automation to be truly omnichannel, it needs a centralized brain that understands, in real time, who the customer is, regardless of the channel they use.
What really is a CDP and why is it not your CRM?
To master omnichannel automation, we must first clean up the terminology. Often, in the consulting we do, we see a common confusion: “Why do I want a CDP if I already have a powerful CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot?”.
It’s a valid question, but the answer makes the difference between managing sales and managing experiences.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is primarily designed to manage the direct and conscious relationship with the customer, focusing on sales and after-sales service. It is powered by data that the team enters or direct interactions.
A CDP (Customer Data Platform), on the other hand, is a packaged software platform that creates a unified, persistent customer database, accessible to other systems. Its magic lies in three capabilities:
- Massive ingestion: Collect data from all sources (web, app, physical POS, CRM, social networks, e-mail).
- Identity resolution: You are able to say “this anonymous user who browsed yesterday” is “this loyal customer who bought today”. Connect the dots.
- Activation: It does not keep the data; it sends it clean and segmented to your automation tools.
Simply put: the CRM is the advanced agenda of your sales team; the CDP is the central nervous system that connects your entire digital ecosystem.
The real “360° view
The biggest enemy of omnichannel automation is data silos. You have behavioral data in Google Analytics, transactional data in your ERP, interaction data in Mailchimp or Klaviyo, and support data in Zendesk. None of them talk to each other.
When you try to automate over silos, you create fragmented experiences.
The CDP acts as the “Single Source of Truth”. By centralizing information, it enables the creation of a unified customer profile (Golden Record). This is vital for a First-Party Data strategy. In a digital environment where privacy is the norm and third-party cookies lose relevance, owning your own structured and actionable data is your company’s most valuable asset.
Only when you have that true 360 view, can you ask your automation tool to execute consistent actions.
From theory to practice: Applying omnichannel
This is where the technical magic happens. Once the CDP has unified the data, it feeds into your Marketing Automation to execute campaigns that look like magic, but are pure data engineering.
What does this look like in practice? Let’s look at a workflow orchestrated by a CDP:
Scenario: Intelligent recovery
- Detection: User browses the App but does not purchase. The CDP records the event and associates it with the user ID.
- Real-time segmentation: The CDP analyzes the history. Is it a VIP customer? Does it have a high propensity to purchase? If yes, it puts him in the “Priority Recovery” audience.
- Omnichannel activation:
- Step 1 (Immediate): The CDP sends a signal to the Email Marketing tool to send a personalized reminder.
- Step 2 (Conditional): The user does not open the email. The CDP detects this and updates the audience in Facebook Ads and Google Ads to show them a specific, non-generic retargeting ad.
- Step 3 (Closing): The user buys in the physical store the next day. The POS sends the sale to the PDC.
- Step 4 (Suppression): The CDP, in real time, removes the user from the ad audience and from the recovery email flow. This is key: we stop spending money on impacting those who have already converted and avoid annoying the customer.
Without a CDP, this seamless orchestration between App, Email, Ads and Physical Store is virtually impossible to maintain at scale.
Integrating a CDP into your Martech stack
The implementation of this martech technology is not only a question of “modernization”, it is a question of profitability and operational efficiency.
- Hyper-personalization at scale: You no longer greet with “Hello [Name],” but instead recommend products based on size, favorite color, last purchase, and yesterday’s browsing behavior.
- Optimization of ROAS (Return on Advertising Investment): By removing from paid campaigns users who have already converted or who do not qualify, every euro invested goes to real acquisition.
- Agility in decision making: Marketing teams are no longer dependent on IT to pull lists or cross-reference databases. The information is there, ready to be activated.
- Improve CLV (Customer Lifetime Value): By understanding the complete customer lifecycle, you can automate loyalty and cross-selling actions at the exact moment when the user is receptive.
Implementation: Not Plug & Play
It would be irresponsible for us to say that setting up a CDP is a matter of two clicks. As technology experts, at Inprofit we always warn: technology is the enabler, not the strategy.
Implementing a CDP requires a thorough audit of your current data sources. You need to define a clear data taxonomy (how you name events, how you standardize attributes). If you feed a CDP with “junk” data, you will get “junk” automations at a speed and scale never seen before.
It also requires alignment between Marketing, Sales and Technology teams. CDP breaks down technology silos, but it must also break down departmental silos.
The future belongs to those who master the data
The battle for consumer attention is won in the details. It is won by delivering the right message, in the preferred channel, at the right time. And that, today, is beyond human manual capacity.
Omnichannel automation driven by a CDP is not a passing trend; it is the natural evolution of digital marketing toward a more scientific, respectful and efficient model. Companies that succeed in unifying their view of the customer will not only sell more, but will build stronger, longer-lasting relationships.
Do you feel like your data is scattered and your automation tools are working in isolation? Chances are your digital ecosystem needs a central brain.
At Inprofit, we are specialists in untangling technological complexity to turn it into business growth. Don’t let data disconnection slow down your potential.
