A Practical Guide To CDP Implementation That Delivers ROI

Why It’s Worth Getting CDP Implementation Right

CDP implementation isn’t just another tech upgrade. When done right, it’s a catalyst for transforming your business. It can streamline processes, enhance customer experiences, and deliver measurable ROI.

Nearly 50% of companies achieve payback within 6 months of CDP implementation, according to Tealium. 79% achieve it within 12 months, and 91% within 18 months.

The Top 5 Benefits of Investing in a CDP

• Unified customer view
• Data analysis
• Customer experience orchestration
• Message selection
• Predictive capabilities

But these benefits aren’t automatic. They come from a carefully planned digital transformation project that starts long before you switch over to your new platform.

Before You Go Running Off to Buy a CDP…

CDPs yield measurable ROI more often than not. However, the benefits may be more pronounced in enterprise companies. CDPs are useful to free data trapped in siloed teams, complex tech stacks, or legacy processes. By corralling and correlating all this disconnected data, a CDP helps enterprise brands get a unified view of operations.

Still, Gartner recently discovered that only 17% of marketers report “high utilisation” of their CDP. This tracks with our experience. Not every company needs a CDP. Most can benefit, and more vendors are coming out with platforms catering to small and medium organisations. But whether you’ll get ROI from a CDP, or how quickly, depends on a long list of factors unique to your business.

How to Maximise the ROI of CDP Implementation

Achieving ROI depends on work that starts long before implementation. And implementation itself is not plug-and-play. It’s typically complex, especially in enterprise environments or multi-region organisations.

But, like any strategic digital transformation initiative, a well-designed CDP implementation is worth the time and effort involved. It can pay dividends across your organisation.

Sales, customer service, and product development teams benefit by knowing what customers want. IT and operations teams benefit from less complexity and greater efficiency. Customers might be the biggest beneficiaries, enjoying seamless and personalised experiences that drive loyalty.

So, how do you manage CDP implementation to give your organisation the best chance of reaping all those benefits? Let’s get into it.

Phase 1: Discovery

Define Your Business Requirements

Kick things off by getting crystal clear about what you need. Ask yourself and your team:

• What do we want to achieve? More customer lifetime value, higher conversion rates, or an elevated customer experience? Around 65% of companies go into CDP implementation with a goal to increase customer value, 61% to improve retention, and 57% to boost acquisition.
• What are our use cases? CDPs do a lot, but they can’t do it all. It’s important to be realistic and pragmatic about how the CDP will help to achieve your goal. In practice, the most common use case is data assembly, followed by real-time interactions and outbound campaigns.
• What KPIs will measure success? Defining clear and meaningful KPIs early will keep you on track and highlight gaps in your understanding. Data quality is the ROI metric most companies track (34%), followed by customer experience metrics (25%) and operational savings (17%).

Clarifying this chain – from pain point or goal through to use cases and eventually customer and commercial outcomes—is the basis of your business case for CDP implementation.

Map Your Landscape

Next, get a bird’s-eye view of your data. Identify all active data sources, and look for gaps or siloes. Integrating a CDP to bridge these gaps might mean creating new processes or data flows, or re-engineering broken ones. You’ll want to know about these mini-projects before starting the implementation.

It’s also important to map the marketing activities (channels and third-party platforms) that depend on CDP data. This will help to create a universal data structure.

Evaluate Your Current Data Infrastructure

Take a hard look at your current tech stack. Understand how your systems talk to each other and where any friction arises. This is your baseline. A CDP will rarely plug into your existing stack without modification or custom configuration. Knowing your starting point makes the integration a lot smoother.

Phase 1.5: Key Requirements

Identify Key Users and Stakeholders

Who’s going to use this platform? Who’s going to own it? As CDPs become more integrated and cross-functional, IT is increasingly seen as the best ‘home’ for security and governance reasons. In our view, that’s a practical solution, but any team benefiting from a CDP shares at least some responsibility for the data going in.

Marketers often need a user-friendly interface, while IT demands robust integrations and security, and analysts need a scalable and flexible data architecture. 

A CDP is a shared platform. For it to meet everyone’s needs, they all need a seat at the table from day one. 

Essential Features And Capabilities

“In our experience, most CDP implementations start with a pain point. It might be a lack of customer understanding, or chronic workflow bottlenecks, or high customer churn. Translating that pain point into a business goal, and understanding the impact on customer outcomes, helps to identify the key features and gives us a clear roadmap for CDP implementation.”

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting.

Every CDP has a slightly different focus and feature set. Identify your must-haves, starting with the big-picture questions and continuing through to the pointy-end features.

• Architecture: CDPs are usually packaged (closed) or composable (open). Which type suits your business depends on existing systems, costs, tech expertise, and many more nuanced factors.
• Future readiness: 87% of users say that a CDP is essential in future-proofing their business; for example, 91% consider it critical for AI/ML projects. Invest in functionality that enables the growth your business is aiming for.
• Technical capabilities: Get specific about the features you need; what does “real-time” mean? What are your identity resolution needs? What does personalisation look like to your customers? How will the answers change in the future?
• Compliance management: CDPs can strengthen data compliance, especially in large and distributed organisations. This is only going to get more important in the AI age.

This process takes time. It’ll often involve translating back and forth between user groups, technical teams, and business leaders. There will be necessary compromises, which is why it’s essential to prioritise the customer’s needs over internal wants.

Get Real About Resourcing

Enterprise CDPs cost anywhere from £100k to £500k+ ($130k to $650k) annually. Smaller platforms cost less, and more complex systems cost more. The only way to get an accurate budget is to work through all the considerations.

• Software licences: Factor in the direct platform costs, plus any integrations, upgrades, plug-ins or bolt-ons you’ll need to make the CDP effective.

CDP implementation costs:

• Staffing: Over 50% of organisations have 10+ people on their CDP team. Granted, they’re not all working on the CDP full-time. But we’re still talking about significant resources.
• Maintenance: A CDP can reduce maintenance costs by making legacy platforms redundant, but there will be ongoing maintenance requirements.
• Ongoing support: Upskilling your team will reduce reliance on external support over time.

“CDP costs can be high, but it’s one area where we routinely see decent ROI. It’s also helpful to remember that CDPs are shared across the organisation, which means the costs can reasonably be shared between a few budgets based on analysing the needs and benefits of different user groups”

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting

Phase 2: Evaluating CDP Vendors

According to the latest CDP Institute report, there are 204 vendors sharing £6.58b ($8.52b) in funding. They predict funding will increase to £21.77b ($28.2b) by 2028. 

Most of the growth is happening outside the established American market, with APAC and Europe now eclipsing the Americans’ market share.

Bottom line? The CDP market is booming. You’ve got plenty of options, but also plenty to sift through.

The Biggest Names in CDPs

Among the 200+ vendors, there are a few names that regularly appear in “best CDP” lists:

• Adobe Real-Time CDP: Known for advanced analytics and integration with Adobe Experience Cloud.
• Zeta Global: Offers robust AI-driven marketing automation capabilities.
• Hightouch: A composable CDP ideal for organisations looking to turn existing data warehouses into actionable first-party data stores.
• Imagino: Provides AI-driven customer insights and personalisation.
• Twilio Segment: Excels in identity stitching and automating personalisation at scale.
• Salesforce: Integrates well with Salesforce CRM and offers comprehensive customer data management.
• Tealium: Ideal for continuous, cross-channel customer profiling, with superior data ingestion and rapid activation.
• Treasure Data: Simplifies complex customer journeys to orchestrate engagement at the enterprise scale.

Of course, this is a simplified snapshot of a landscape that’s growing in size and complexity. CDPs are often configurable for specific use cases, so don’t let these descriptions restrict your thinking.

One interesting insight from the CDP Institute’s annual report is that industry stalwarts grew more and faster than new players in 2024. Acquisitions are also becoming more common, which could see bigger companies absorbing innovative newcomers.

On the flip side, vendors like Zeta Global and Imagino are expanding rapidly, particularly outside the US. There are also non-traditional players like Bloomreach and Optimove, who describe themselves as a customer engagement platform and CRM marketing solution respectively.

Both could disrupt the mid-sized CDP market in their target industries (retail for Bloomreach and iGaming for Optimove) by making similar features accessible to non-enterprise companies.

How to Shortlist Vendors for CDP Implementation

Given all this complexity and configurability, how do you choose the right CDP for your business? The answer is there in the question. It’s about what’s right for your business.

Step 1: Clarify the challenge you’re trying to solve. Focus on the business need and don’t let shiny features distract from the main mission.

Step 2: Build a longlist based on case studies or specialisation. Search for a solution to your need, and you’ll soon discover that some CDPs do certain things better than others.

Step 3: Create a Request for Proposal (RFP). This goes out to a list of vendors and contains all the information they need to craft a detailed proposal.

Step 4: Schedule demos and assess vendors. Spend time with each platform. Ask detailed questions and challenge assumptions to ensure they’re ready to support your growth goals.

There are three assumptions here. Firstly, that a CDP is the right solution. It might not be. Secondly, that your initial search turns up the right results. And thirdly, that you have the time and experience to make carefully considered decisions – remember, we’re talking about six-figure subscriptions.

The easier option, often the one that prevents cost blowouts and stress headaches, is to engage a CDP consultant. We’ll go into more detail on that below or you can skip ahead to When to Work With a CDP Implementation Partner.

Phase 3: Implementation and Change Management

Organisational readiness was the most common roadblock to CDP implementation in 2024, cited in 52% of projects. For comparison:

• Incoming data was a challenge in 35% of cases.
• Data design and an underestimation of the project both appeared in 24% of implementations.
• CDP failure was only an issue in 10% of cases.

Interestingly, this is one reason that more companies are engaging consultants to help with CDP implementation.

Develop a Robust (and Realistic) Implementation Plan

Plan, plan, plan. Outline your timeline with clear milestones. Account for data migration, system integration, and thorough testing.

A phased approach, moving processes one at a time, ensures a smooth transition without disrupting your customer or employee experience.

Training and Change Management

Remember when we said that the typical CDP team is comprised of 10+ people? Your CDP is only as good as the team using it.

Develop a training plan that gets everyone up to speed. If your CDP implementation involves new processes, organisational reshuffling, or similar upsetting of apple carts, factor in the extra time and attention needed for change management.

“It’s a good idea to frame change management communication around the benefits and capabilities of CDPs beyond ‘traditional’ marketing use cases. This reinforces the fact that a CDP is a shared investment and helps to get more people on board.”

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting

CDP Implementation: Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast

We recommend a phased implementation. That means implementing processes and workflows one by one in the CDP, rather than expecting to cut over all at once.

Although this means hanging onto legacy platforms for longer than you might like, it ensures that customers don’t experience any disruption and data isn’t lost or compromised in the transition.

Phase 4: Ongoing Management and Optimisation

Monitor, Measure, and Continually Improve

Once your CDP is live, don’t set it and forget it. Establish a system to track your KPIs and review performance.

Continuous monitoring helps you identify areas for improvement and ensure that your CDP consistently delivers value against business goals.

The journey doesn’t end with implementation. Tweak your data processes, refine integrations, and keep up with evolving business needs.

This ongoing optimisation is key to maximising your return on investment.

When to Work With a CDP Implementation Partner (and When to DIY)

When it comes to assembling your CDP implementation team, you have a few options:

• Vendor-only: For simpler setups when your team is confident and experienced.
• Vendor plus third-party implementation partner: Best for complex configurations and bridging resource gaps.
• Early consulting engagement: Bringing in external experts before the RFP phase to help with vendor selection, planning, and implementation.

The CDP Institute’s 2024 member survey found that more companies are engaging CDP implementation consultants.
It’s unclear whether this is a sign of complex implementations, shrinking internal teams or more custom configurations. Maybe there’s just more awareness of the benefits consultants bring.

Whatever the reasons, the right CDP implementation partner makes the project more successful and streamlined. The emphasis there is on the right partner.

The Right Expertise
An agile, all-rounder agency that can scale to meet your needs is great for a full-project partnership, while a specialised implementation partner could be better for a short-term engagement.

The Right Advice
Tech-agnostic consultants have a more balanced view of the market and a better understanding of the features that will meet your needs. Unless you’re already committed to one CDP vendor, it’s good to keep an open mind.

The Right Approach
CDP implementation partners need to know how to engage all key stakeholders without getting bogged down in endless committees.

The Right Support
You should be able to call on your CDP consultants throughout the project. Whether that’s a quick debugging task or ongoing support to keep the system running at peak efficiency, a flexible partner is a worthwhile investment.

Should You Engage a CDP Implementation Partner?

The reality is that most CDP implementations require a consultant. Small, self-contained implementations might be the only exception.

However, the decision of when and to what extent you engage a consultant is entirely up to you. Earlier tends to be better, unless you’ve been through the process before and know what to look out for.

If you do decide to engage a partner, make sure your expectations are clear from the start. Get them involved and working. Don’t let them sit back and create slide decks.

And look beyond tech capabilities for a partner that understands your long-term goals. The best CDP implementation consultant is also a good culture fit, extending your team’s expertise and guiding decisions in the best interests of your business.