I stepped into the quagmire of CDPs so you don't have to 🫨

So, i’m gonna be honest - i was wrong about CDP’s.

I’ve spent the last three weeks knee-deep in research (and, let’s be honest, procrastination) trying to untangle the whole concept of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) for small SaaS companies.

What’s a CDP? Great question, fuzzy answers, short version: a sep platform that pulls in all of your marketing data so you can see everything about a customer or group of customers in one place.

That sounds like a permissions and data nightmare to setup. 👻

Yeah.

It is.

Most of the companies I’ve worked with had zero sources of truth, much less one.

Plus i’m typically trying to run more complicated campaigns with a lot of channels involved

So i overcorrected into “Thou shalt have a CDP.”

The purpose of a CDP is to automate and personalize customer interactions to:

• reduce churn,

• cut out the manual marketing finagling for new campaigns

• spot places where you can upsell or find friction you can improve.

• lot of other things

But honestly, you probably don’t need a CDP.

But a way to lower churn, increase LTV, and do less manual marketing work?

HECK TO THE YEAH YOU DO.

So… When Do You Actually Need a CDP?

Here’s my rule of thumb:

👉🏽 Unless you’re running highly complex campaigns (think: 10+ nodes in an automation flow), a CDP is probably overkill.

Once your data gets too complex to manage across tools—or when your team spends more time wrangling data than using it—that’s when a CDP starts to make sense.

Otherwise? Save your budget. A strong CRM correctly integrated with the rest of your stack can do 80% of the job without adding another platform.

okay, so i’m not using a CDP. But why bother with automating personalizing my marketing at all?

See why this matters so much? you just went from:

to

Guess which tool i still use and recommend? 😀 

What counts as personalization?

this list could be very long and really depends on your product.

For starters:

• name

• interaction (types and frequency) with your website

• interaction (types and frequency) with your product

Some of my favorite personalizations include:

🎂 product anniversaries 🎂 

• i.e.: you’ve been reading Really Good Emails for 2 years, 5 months, and 63 days (Really Good Emails)

you don’t have to use “typical” anniversaries! just pick a date!

⏳️ time saved/goals achieved (if you record those at onboarding) ⏳️ 

• i.e.: You saved 16hrs last month using Loom instead of being in a meeting. (Loom)

🍟 A re-activation campaign 🍟 

• ie: “it’s nice to see you again. Here’s a free waffle fry to say thank you for being you.” (Chick-fil-A)

This was sent to me as a push notification and is the gold standard in simple personalization in my book! i’m going to do a whole issue on CFA’s playbook for SaaS!

So here’s your workaround (in 5 steps you can do in a day each)

This will work for a push notification system, email flow, or automated message.

I’m using an email flow as the example here because we just talked about emails last week. 📨 

1️⃣ Day 1: List Your Data Sources + What They Store

For each source, list:

• What it does (CRM, analytics, billing, etc.)

• The key data points it collects (sign-ups, transactions, support tickets)

• What marketing personalization you can pull from it (purchase history, engagement, etc.)

Quick note: when i talked about CRM’s i had a lot of baby SaaS options. If you are at the spot where you’re doing personalization, you’re past baby SaaS stage (aka that spreadsheet ain’t gonna cut it).

2️⃣ Day 2: Identify Your Closest Source to a “Single Source of Truth”

(AKA: Pick a place where most of your segmentation happens so you aren’t manually checking multiple systems.)

• If you mostly work out of your CRM, sync product data and billing data to it.

• If you mostly work out of your product analytics tool, sync CRM data and billing events there.

⭐ If you don’t have a great system yet, start with your CRM and enrich it with data from other sources.⭐

3️⃣ Day 3: Map Out the Key Customer Moments You Want to Automate and Personalize

(AKA: Figure out what interactions matter most so you don’t get overwhelmed trying to automate and personalize ones that really don’t need it.)

Looking at the customer journey, what are the moments where you most want people to convert or take an action?

Those are great places to personalize.

Here’s some common ones:

• not hitting their Aha moment in x time window

• hitting their Aha moment but not upgrading

• Not using the product in z time

• 3 days from end of free trial

• Not using features that would match their stated use case

If mapping out the customer journey feels overwhelming, then try doing sticky notes on a whiteboard, take a picture, and use that as a photo you markup in Figma or your brain map tool of choice.

4️⃣ Day 4: Connect Data to Personalization

Deep breath, you’re doing great!

Looking at:

• the data that you have

• which tools they live in

• and the spots in the customer journey that you want to personalize and automate

Map out how to pull those into the spots you want personalization for.

For example, if you want to send an email tied to a users trial status, you need info from:

• Billing → their trial status (free or paid)

• CRM → their start date (when they started the trial)

• Product Stats → what features they’ve used (have they hit their aha? are they stuck not getting what they were promised in the product?)

And to personalize it, you need their:

• name

• department

• purpose for using your tool

Ask in the onboarding for allll of these things!

5️⃣ Go through and build the workflow

Just start with one so you get it setup and going. You can duplicate it later to make tweaks!

To avoid manual exporting & importing, set up these basic automations:

• Trigger: A user action (e.g., trial ending in 3 days)

• Data source: CRM/Product analytics (e.g., free trial status)

• Personalization layer: Key insights pulled dynamically

• Delivery method: Email, in-app notification, or text message

Start with one key workflow (like the free trial → paid email sequence), and expand from there.

Final Troubleshooting Check

You did it!! You got your customer data:

• unified across marketing touchpoints

• automated so you can not think about it

• personalized so it’s unique to your customers and your company

pause. give yourself a pat on the back. 👏 

Writing this issue and experimenting with CDP’s gave me so many thoughts on the way i view personalization and company communication and customer service.

There’s A LOT coming by way of that, because this is one of the crucial ways a company can differentiate - and be good to the humans that use their product - and it’s pretty darn close to free.99.

Y’all. there’s so much goodness coming at you. EEEEK!

I’ll see you next week. Cheers!

Sophia ⚡👩🏽‍💻 with help from Aelia 🪄🧕🏽

Powered by a ludicrous amount of homemade lattes ☕️ and “Is tHaT a 70*F/21*C dAy in FeBrUary?!” 😎 and Aelia’s help like the fast parrot emoji 🦜 (iykyk)