10 Customer Data Platform Use Cases to Drive Growth

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) offer powerful ways to unify, analyze, and activate customer data. While the possibilities with a CDP are virtually limitless, understanding the key use cases can help you maximize your return on investment.

Drawing from real-world examples from the Zeta CDP, we’ll explore ten proven customer data platform use cases that can drive meaningful business growth and enhance customer experiences.

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

A customer data platform is a software system that collects, unifies, and organizes customer data from multiple sources into a single source of truth.

CDPs can also enrich your data with information from other sources to create detailed individual customer profiles. For example, when a customer visits your website, makes a purchase in store, and opens a marketing email, the CDP combines these interactions with third-party demographic data and behavioral signals to build a comprehensive profile. This provides a clear picture of who your customers are and how they interact with your business across all touch points, from website and mobile apps to email, social media, and in-store visits.

The unified data is then made accessible to other marketing and analytics platforms, enabling brands to activate these audiences across channels like Meta, Google Ads, and connected TV, while also powering personalized marketing campaigns, improving customer service, and empowering data-driven decisions.

Top 10 Customer Data Platform Use Cases in 2025 and Beyond

Let’s explore ten powerful CDP use cases that are transforming how businesses understand and connect with their customers:

1. Optimize Ad Performance

CDP data helps you understand your audience, improve targeting, and drive ad performance across all channels.

When data is siloed in different platforms like Facebook Ads, TikTok, Google Ads, or Bing Ads, it’s dificult to see which tactics drie the most ROI. Using a CDP, businesses can export audience segments to these platforms as custom audiences and combine data in one place to drive strategy.

Tip! The Zeta CDP comes with 950+ interest and intent audiences out-of-the-box to supercharge your targeting.

2. Create Personalized Experiences

CDP data can be used to segment your audience based on behavior, location, and many other characteristics. By connecting your CDP to personalization platforms, marketers can build personalized ads, content, and other assets.

For example, say site visitors read three blog posts about building a sales team. The next time they visit your site, you could offer a content upgrade of a sales team management handbook or a guide to building better sales teams. You know those users will likely be interested, increasing your conversion rate and building a list of more qualified leads.

3. Connect Online and In-Person Data

Brands have long struggled to connect online and offline behavior. CDPs can help by gathering data from a reward program or point-of-sale platform. That data can then be connected with online behavior, providing a 360-degree view of your customer journey.

For example, a store might allow users to place an order in an app and pick it up in person. When the user arrives, they may see customized recommended products in their app or discounts based on in-app behavior. (Starbucks’ reward app is a fantastic example of this in action.)

4. Reduce Churn

There’s no question: acquisition costs more than retention. Using data from your CDP, you can spot users at risk of churn and work to retain them.

For example, you might notice customers who don’t log in to your software system at least twice in the first week are unlikely to stay. When you see customers exhibiting this behavior, you can preemptively send training videos or have a salesperson reach out to help with onboarding. Or, you could create an email segment list of at-risk customers and deliver a drip campaign focused on showing the value your brand delivers.

This entire process can be automated by automatically adding users who take specific actions to the list.

5. Deliver More Consistent User Experiences

Omnichannel marketing helps businesses provide users with a consistent, useful experience across all channels. Bringing data from multiple channels together has always been a challenge—but no longer.

Using a CDP, you can easily see when customers have requested support across multiple channels, focus your efforts on higher-value channels, and track customer journeys as they progress—even if users weave back and forth

6. Real-Time Lead Scoring

Lead scoring helps marketers and sales teams focus on the right leads at the right time. By unifying data from several platforms, your marketing and sales team see which leads are of higher value.

For example, an ecommerce company can see which leads have engaged with their brand on multiple platforms or which leads are in their target audience through data enrichment. This data can be used to create a trigger for an automated email sequence or to improve retargeting ads.

Lead scoring is also critical for B2B companies looking to prioritize high-value leads. Using AI and machine learning, a CDP can predict which leads are most likely to convert.

7. Measure Marketing Attribution

A CDP helps you understand exactly which marketing activities drive results by tracking each customer’s journey, from their first interaction with your brand through to purchase. Whether someone discovers you through a Facebook ad, later opens your email, or makes a purchase after clicking a Google ad, attribution connects all these touch points to show you what’s really working. 

By understanding which channels and campaigns contribute most to sales, brands can optimize their marketing spend and improve results across all channels.

8. Predict Future Customer Behavior

In the past, analytics platforms only tracked activities that already occurred. For example, Google Analytics can tell you how many people visited a page, but not how many might next week. CDPs combine data from multiple platforms and then use machine learning and AI to make future predictions based on past consumer behavior.

This information can help businesses prepare for higher traffic or order volume or understand how to allocate their marketing budget in the future. Predictive data can also foretell the probability a visitor will convert, churn, or even open an email.

9. Increase Cross-Selling and Upselling

By gathering data about specific transactions, a CDP can help online sellers offer personalized recommendations and increase cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

For example, an ecommerce company might see a customer has purchased a pair of running shoes and recommend socks or a running belt. Or, a sales tool might notice their enterprise company is on a smaller plan and would be better served by a larger one.

10. Build Lookalike Audiences to Expand Brand Reach

The data from your CDP can also improve targeting options across platforms. By combining data from multiple platforms, CDPs allow businesses to target ads more efficiently and find new audiences.

For example, you could export an audience segment from Google Ads and use it to build a lookalike audience in Facebook ads, or vise-versa. Zeta Global CPD+ accelerates brand growth by delivering an actionable view of your customers and enriched, intent-based scoring. Learn how we help businesses build personalized experiences at scale.

Next Steps: Implement CDP Use Cases with Zeta

To roll out these use cases, the Zeta CDP provides everything you need in one unified platform. Built on an identity graph that incorporates the details of 235+ million U.S. consumers, the Zeta CDP gives you a higher ROI and lower cost of ownership than other enterprise platforms.

But don’t just take our word for it. Check out our case studies or see what Forrester had to say.