Ultimate ecommerce CDP guide: unlock the value of your customer data

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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?

An ecommerce CDP works much like a regular CDP. It’s a system that collects, unifies, and stores customer data from multiple sources at scale and makes it available for manipulation and distribution to systems of insight and activation channels.“Systems of insight” may include tech like your data warehouse, ecommerce platform, and analytics solution, while “activation channels” may include tech like your marketing automation platform, advertising platform, or customer service solution.

Traditional CDPs vs. embedded CDPs

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. 

CDPs were intended to solve this problem. But historically, they’ve been designed for enterprises with substantial financial and developmental resources to invest in implementation, maintenance, and everyday operations—leaving small to midsize businesses with unmet needs around data storage, unification, and activation.

Unlike a traditional CDP that exists as a standalone product, an embedded CDP is built directly into another system, like a CRM. It enables businesses to collect, unify, and activate customer data without a separate CDP, streamlining workflows and reducing integration complexity.

Whereas traditional CDPs focus solely on data unification, embedded CDPs combine data storage with activation—making it easier and faster for users to deliver hyper-personalised experiences, all within their existing platform.

By centralising your customer data and making it accessible and actionable in an embedded CDP, 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 your ecommerce brand:

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
• Product reviews
• Customer service interactions
• Interaction data across channels

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

You can make shopping feel personal

With all that info, you can suggest products customers will love, send marketing messages 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 

With a CDP, 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—or, better yet, one that’s natively integrated so no data syncing is required between your marketing, service, and analytics platforms.
• 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 advertising platforms, data warehouses, and other destinations. This ensures insights are actionable across all channels.
• Programmatic data access: Additionally, data should be accessible via webhooks and APIs to support use cases like onsite personalisation.
• Monitoring: You’ll want features that help you keep an eye on your data quality and alert you to any issues.

Intelligence features

• Comprehensive reporting: Your CDP should give you a clear view of your overall business performance. Look for customisable dashboards and reports.
• Actionable insights: Your CDP should surface recommendations that help you make smarter marketing decisions, such as what products to promote to maximise up-sell opportunities.
• Advanced segmentation: The platform should let you slice and dice your customer data in various ways, with features 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.

Demonstrable ROI

• Resource efficiency: The CDP should save your team time and effort compared to your old way of handling data.
• Incremental revenue: Your CDP-powered marketing efforts should lead to an increase in sales.
• 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

Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP) is the centralised customer database that comes built-in with Klaviyo B2C CRM.

Unifying marketing, commerce, and service data in a single, actionable platform, KDP goes beyond the traditional CDP in a variety of important ways. It empowers you to:

• Consolidate your ecommerce tech stack. You don’t have to manage a separate, standalone CDP. Reduce your CDP licensing costs and management overhead.
• Unlock immediate value from your data. Connect your data faster with 350+ pre-built integrations with leading ecommerce and tech apps. Klaviyo is the recommended email marketing solution for Shopify Plus customers globally, as well as the preferred marketing automation platform for WooCommerce.
• Create one unified customer view. Empower your marketing and service teams to access a shared, real-time customer view, so you can deliver a single ecommerce brand experience.
• Access lifetime customer profiles. KDP stores every ecommerce data point for as long as you need it. And with a lifetime lookback window, you can create segments based on any historical data point.
• Enrich your data with AI-powered insights. Traditional CDP vendors upcharge AI, but Klaviyo AI is included out of the box. Predict ecommerce data points important to your brand, like churn, lifetime value, and future purchases, to take proactive, impactful action when it matters.
• Act on prescriptive, helpful guidance. Tools like RFM analysis don’t just leave you with raw RFM scores. Instead, they group your customers into segments like champions, loyal, needs attention, and at-risk. Klaviyo also suggests actions to take, such as sending messages to re-engage RFM segments.
• Speed up insight to action. With native activation channels, your ecommerce data is always available to use in real time within existing marketing and service workflows, like creating an abandoned cart flow or responding to a return request via support ticket. Klaviyo also supports exporting data to third-party destinations for deeper insights and personalisation.

Klaviyo Marketing customers get a set of free, standard KDP features included, such as identity resolution, profiles, predictive analytics, and segmentation.

But you can also upgrade to Advanced Klaviyo Data Platform (Advanced KDP) for access to advanced data management, the ability to export data to third-party destinations, and access to advanced insights like RFM analysis, product catalog insights, and more.

Because KDP is built on a powerful data infrastructure that centralises customer data and makes it robustly actionable for highly targeted marketing, it enables you to do more, more effectively, with the data you already have in your tech stack.

Learn more about what makes KDP the standout CDP for your ecommerce business.

How real-life brands use KDP to increase revenue 

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

1. Ruffwear uses KDP to drive incremental revenue and improve margins

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

The company used recency, frequency, and 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 their “Needs attention” or “At risk” segments, recommending bestsellers based on purchase history. 

The brand also used KDP 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 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%. 

Learn more about how KDP makes RFM analysis faster and easier, along with other advanced use cases.

2. Nextbase uses KDP to drive revenue on autopilot and increase on-site conversions

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

By integrating KDP with Shogun’s Targeted Experiences, Nextbase personalised on-site 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 remarkable 122% boost in on-site conversion rates. 

3. Helen of Troy sees 40%+ TCO reduction from switching to Klaviyo for email + SMS

Helen of Troy is the parent company composed of 15 major brands, ranging from home and outdoor giants to leaders in the beauty and wellness space.

Before Klaviyo, Helen of Troy had email and SMS in one platform. Yet using the two channels together demanded a huge amount of developer resources. Basic functionality required developer support and an upcharge. Helen of Troy even had to check Google Analytics to track SMS revenue.

Today, Helen of Troy’s home and outdoor division uses Klaviyo to store first-party data and share it between marketing channels. And with KDP, they can turn their existing customer transaction data into even deeper personalisation.

By consolidating email and SMS in the same platform that manages all their customer data, Helen of Troy has fewer integrations, lower development time, and lower costs—in fact, they’ve saved over 40% on total cost of ownership.

The key to success is putting your customers first

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

An embedded CDP like KDP could be just what you need. By creating a “central brain” for your customer data, an embedded 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?