Why your CDP investment isn’t paying off — and what to do about it
Remember when CDPs seemed like the answer to all our customer data dreams? A single platform that would finally let us deliver those perfectly personalized experiences to every customer, every time.
But here we are in 2025, and most companies still struggle to create truly personal customer experiences despite significant investments in CDP technology. The hard truth?
A CDP alone isn't enough.
When CDPs were created, they offered a huge promise to the market and to marketers. If all your customer data is in one place, you can create more successful marketing campaigns and programs. Today, almost 12 years after the CDP category was first named, the need to drive successful campaigns and programs is more important than ever.
The data lays out a clear case. Companies that master 1:1 personalization drive 40% more revenue than their peers. And the stakes keep getting higher — 75% of American consumers now say they're more likely to be loyal to brands that understand them on a personal level.
So why have traditional CDPs fallen short?
Instead of focusing on better marketing, they’ve created fragmented data systems, complex implementations, and rising costs that rarely justify the investment. For most organizations, CDPs have become another data silo rather than the unified solution it was promised to be.
1. Customer data is still scattered
Sure, most CDPs claim to create unified customer profiles. However, for many companies, customer data is created and stored in various systems across marketing, sales, and customer service. Sometimes, in an attempt to centralize that data, it goes to a data warehouse. Yet, the reality is that so many systems still need to access customer data that adding a legacy CDP often just creates another data silo.
2. Customer marketing is more complex than anyone anticipated
What started as a marketing initiative to improve results quickly became an IT investment project requiring specialized skills and significant resources.
Many CDPs like Salesforce, Adobe, Segment, and Hightouch require you to be equipped with the right technical resources, martech stack, and integration capabilities to ensure you get the most out of your new tech. This doesn’t mean a platform that requires technical resources is necessarily bad; it just means there’s often a significant impact on your resources.
For example, the hidden costs can pile up, thanks to service fees from implementation, maintenance, training, and constant updates.
And that is just on the technical side. Most organizations still don’t have the internal resources to connect their marketing strategy to their data strategy, leaving many use cases the CDP was meant to support off the table and disconnected from the company's strategic vision.
3. Integration challenges
The average enterprise uses over 12 martech tools. Getting your tools to play nicely together requires help maintaining deep, bidirectional integrations with this ever-growing ecosystem, which can lead to data latency and synchronization issues. Understanding what data needs to go where and when is beyond most connectors' ability and requires expertise to untangle the martech web.
4. Higher costs that don’t justify ROI
Beyond platform fees, organizations face substantial costs in implementing their martech stack, such as:
- Implementation and integration services
- Ongoing maintenance and updates
- Training and headcount requirements
- Data storage and processing fees
- Strategic services
But there’s a revolution coming — a radically better way to deliver personalized customer experiences. And it starts with rethinking everything we know about customer data platforms.
The promise of modern customer marketing and the CDP
Now that we’ve painted the grim reality of traditional CDPs, let’s look at what’s truly possible when modern marketing is done right. When your business, customer data, and technology align, enterprise marketing transforms from scattered campaigns to revenue-driving, personalized customer experiences. Here’s what becomes possible.
1. Real-time personalization that drives growth
What if you could instantly recognize anonymous or high-value customers browsing your site, automatically tailor their customer journey based on their purchase history, and seamlessly coordinate messages across email, mobile, and ads? Modern CDPs make this possible by building Customer 360s and connecting customer signals to immediate action.
2. Predictive insights that unlock revenue
Rather than reacting to past behavior, you can anticipate customer needs — ranging from identifying customers who are likely to churn so you can intervene early or spot cross-sell opportunities before your customers know they need them.
3. Experiments that scale automatically
Your marketing workflows should empower marketers to experiment and optimize your brand’s messaging. With the right strategy, you can test different messages, offers, and journeys across segments to see what resonates best. Then, your martech stack helps you scale winning customer experiences across channels
4. Marketing that drives customer lifetime value
Track complete customer journeys, measure campaign impact across channels, and prove how personalization directly increases retention and lifetime value. In a world of shrinking marketing budgets and rising customer expectations, this alignment delivers what matters: measurable ROI and stronger customer relationships.
What it means for Simon Data to be “Anti-CDP”
This post isn't about dismissing CDPs — far from it. But we're taking a critical step back to look at the complete picture of what truly drives successful customer marketing.
Whether you’re evaluating your first CDP, looking to maximize your existing martech investments or have a CDP that isn’t quite working out the way you intended, we want to help you build the right foundation of strategy, people, and technology to deliver real results. While a CDP can be a powerful tool, it's just one part of a larger transformation that requires careful planning and organizational capabilities.
Let's talk about how to get it right.
The path forward to 1:1 customer marketing
Personalized customer marketing in 2025 and beyond requires a fundamental shift in approach. Rather than seeking a silver bullet solution, marketing teams must build their modern customer marketing program on three interconnected pillars: strategy, people and processes, and technology.
Here’s what we mean.
1. Strategy
You need a clear roadmap that aligns with your business goals, customer needs, and technology capabilities. Without this alignment, even the best technology will fail to deliver results. More importantly, you need a clear plan that connects your business strategies and campaigns with any data and technology needed to support them.
2. People & processes
The right mix of skills and operational models is critical. This means having:
- Marketing teams who understand data
- Data teams who understand marketing
- Clear processes for working together
- A balance of in-house and external expertise
3. Technology
Technology should enable innovation, not constrain it. This means:
- Flexible, scalable solutions
- Real-time data capabilities
- Easy integration with existing tools
- Clear ROI measurement
The strategy to achieve personalized customer marketing
The first step to success with a CDP is to build your customer marketing and data strategy. Often, organizations see a gap in their existing marketing strategy that isn’t delivering the desired business results.
Marketers feel the symptoms of a poor strategy: customers are harder to find or understand, existing customers are buying less — and you don’t often know why — and you can’t answer the questions your team is getting about how to fix it.
But what comes next is the biggest mistake brands make: shiny object syndrome. Often, companies start shopping for technology to solve this problem without understanding the right business goals and the customer data needed to support those goals.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Instead, approach 2025 by:
- Defining your business goals and what it will take to hit those objectives
- Aligning your customer data plans to those objectives by examining what data is needed, what exists today, and most importantly, what is missing
- Using this information as a foundation to inform and update your campaign strategies, use cases, and to determine what customer experiences you need to invest in to drive the desired outcome
While many organizations have pieces of this work in place, align as a team before approaching vendors. If you're not aligned, consider finding a vendor (like Simon Data!) to help establish this foundation before implementation begins.
The core business objectives
Modern marketing boils down to three simple but essential strategy areas:
- Drive attention: reaching the right prospect at the right time with a message that resonates
- Convert attention into revenue: turning interest into action with personalized messaging across all channels
- Retain and grow customer lifetime value: building relationships with customers to increase purchase frequency, drive higher order values, and create brand advocates
In reality, it’s impossible to work on all three areas simultaneously. Most often, a brand knows which area to focus on based on its current business needs and goals, which goes a long way toward helping frame and focus its strategy.
The objectives define the data foundation
The data foundation you will build needs to map directly to your core business objectives.
You should track engagement metrics across channels, capture interaction history and channel preferences, and monitor content performance and response rates to drive attention.
To convert attention to revenue, unify customer profiles across touchpoints, track purchase intent signals, and connect marketing activities to conversions.
If you’re focused on growing CLTV, measure purchase frequency and order value, monitor loyalty program engagement, and track customer service interactions while continuously optimizing your marketing campaigns.
If you lack data in any of these areas or have blindspots that could prevent you from turning your customer data into revenue, many AI options are available to help you unlock insights.
Trust, accuracy, and compliance in customer data
Before we talk about understanding customer data, let’s talk about trusting it. Teams must work from a single source of truth (SSoT) — such as a Cloud Data Platform like Snowflake. For marketers, this means trusting data to drive decisions and fuel creative strategies. Here’s why it’s important to ensure you have compliant, safe, and accurate data.
Reason 1: Meet customer expectations
Customers now expect brands to understand their history and preferences. A CDP connects individual interactions into meaningful patterns, revealing the full customer journey in ways fragmented data systems cannot.
Reason 2: Revenue impact and personalization at scale
Without real-time data coordination, marketing teams risk targeting converted
customers with misaligned messages. Unified customer data enables accurate campaign measurement and efficient budget allocation while powering personalized interactions. Understanding customer context through data helps deliver relevant experiences that build lasting relationships.
Reason 3: Privacy & compliance
Siloed data increases compliance risk. Your CDP must stay current with GDPR, CCPA, and SOC-2 requirements, update customer preferences across all channels instantly, manage consent and privacy settings automatically, and enable innovation while maintaining compliance.
A composable CDP handles these requirements behind the scenes so marketers can focus on creating value from their customer data.
While establishing trust in your customer data and ensuring compliance are critical first steps, they're just the beginning of your personalization journey. You need the proper organizational foundation to transform this trusted data into meaningful customer experiences.
Let's dig into the essential resources, team structures, and processes that will help you deliver exceptional personalized marketing at scale.
The resources you need to deliver exceptional customer marketing
Delivering a personalized marketing experience at scale isn’t a one-and-done process — you need the right mix of people, processes, and measurement frameworks, plus the ability to experiment and evolve.
In our experience, three essential elements support exceptional customer marketing:
- Team structure and capabilities: The right mix of talent and expertise to execute 1:1 marketing
- How teams work together: The processes and workflows that enable streamlined execution
- Successful measurement: The metrics that demonstrate impact and guide learning and improvement
The right marketing team structure and capabilities
Creating memorable customer experiences starts with building a great team. Beyond technology, you need marketing leaders who understand customer journeys and data, campaign managers who can create personalized experiences, and analysts who optimize marketing performance.
The core team partnerships needed for CDP success
- Marketing: Drives strategy and execution of personalized campaigns
- Data/Analytics: Ensures data quality and builds predictive models
- Security/IT: Provides technical implementation, integration support, and compliance oversight
- Customer Support: Offers frontline insights about customer needs
- Customer Experience: Designs and optimizes end-to-end customer journeys while ensuring consistent brand interactions across all touchpoints
Not all teams have to look or operate the same, but you should be able to identify teams involved in the process and any resource gaps where you might need additional support. This can come from in-house experts, contractors, or by leveraging service experts like Simon when you have expertise and resource gaps.
How cross-functional teams should work together
Once your team is in place, you need efficient processes to execute customer marketing at scale. Strong operational models ensure your CDP investment translates into actual results.
While models will differ for each business based on where they operate, how they are structured, and even what vertical they are in, some common elements span businesses and serve as a starting point for your planning.
Operational requirements for CDP success:
- Clear data governance policies and ownership
- Agile campaign workflows for rapid testing and iteration
- Defined collaboration processes between marketing and technical teams with SLAs and SOPs in place
- Documentation of key processes and best practices
- Honesty without retribution about where current roadblocks or barriers exist so they can be improved
Cross-team collaboration
The most successful organizations break down silos between teams by establishing:
Daily operations: Regular syncs between marketing and data teams, shared project management tools, and clear roles for campaign execution help maintain momentum.
Communication channels: Create direct lines of communication between teams for strategic planning and urgent troubleshooting. Quick response times are critical for maintaining personalization at scale.
Review cycles: Schedule regular campaign performance reviews, data quality, and process efficiency. These check-ins help identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement.
Even the best CDP will only drive results when it has strong operational processes behind it. Focus on building workflows that empower teams to move quickly while maintaining quality. Your CDP should make these workflows and processes more manageable, often empowering teams to do more work in less time than previously, even when adding additional syncs and meetings.
Measuring marketing success at scale
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Before investing in any technology, set clear metrics you plan to influence that support your business goals.
- Business impact
Track metrics that impact the bottom line: customer lifetime value, retention rates, and revenue per customer. These directly show the ROI of your personalization efforts.
- Marketing performance
Monitor campaign performance through customer acquisition costs, channel-specific ROI, cross-channel engagement rates, customer behavior, and conversion rates. You should also analyze segmentation effectiveness.
- Customer experience
Measure the quality of your personalization efforts with Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction, channel preference adoption, engagement rates, and response rate metrics. These indicators ensure you’re delivering experiences that resonate with customers.
Your martech stack — and, specifically, your CDP — investment should make measuring, improving, and experimenting with these metrics easier.
Delivering a memorable customer experience requires three essential elements: skilled teams who understand both marketing and data, metrics that demonstrate impact, and smooth workflows that enable rapid execution.
Deliver the personalized marketing experience customers crave
While CDPs promised to revolutionize personalization, the reality is that successful customer marketing requires more than just another platform.
As we move through 2025, the winners will be brands that focus on the fundamentals: clear business objectives, strong data foundations, and cross-functional teams working together seamlessly.
They'll choose technology that enables their strategy rather than letting technology dictate it. Most importantly, they'll recognize that personalization at scale isn't just about having the right tools — it's about having the right approach.
Whether you're just starting your personalization journey or looking to optimize your existing stack, remember that the goal isn't to have the most advanced CDP. The goal is to create meaningful customer experiences that drive measurable business results. By focusing on the complete picture — from strategy to execution — you can finally deliver on the promise of true 1:1 customer marketing.
The future of customer marketing is here. Are you ready to embrace it?
