
Businesses can no longer afford to let valuable insights languish in silos. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) promise to unlock the power of this data. However, the rise of “composable CDPs” has created a maze of options. Our guide cuts through the hype, revealing how integrating your data warehouse with your CDP can fuel personalized experiences that drive real results.
We’ll explore the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, helping you choose the right path to customer-obsessed success.
Contents
The Power of Data Warehouse Integration
Before diving into the nuances of different CDP approaches, it’s important to establish the undeniable advantages of integrating your data warehouse with your CDP.
Unified Customer View
Your data warehouse serves as a treasure trove of customer information with transactional data, sales, support, operational, behavioral, demographic, and all sorts of other data. By integrating your warehouse with your CDP, you create a unified and comprehensive view of your customers. As a result, this 360-degree perspective empowers you to gain deeper insights and personalization around their preferences, behaviors, and needs, transcending the limitations of siloed data.
Enhanced Segmentation and Personalization
With a single view of the customer, you can create more granular and targeted audience segments. This precision targeting allows you to deliver highly personalized marketing campaigns and experiences that resonate with individual customers, leading to improved customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and increased customer lifetime value.
Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning
Your data warehouse’s analytical capabilities can be leveraged to uncover hidden patterns, predict customer behavior, and drive more sophisticated personalization efforts. So, by connecting your warehouse with your CDP, you empower your marketing and data science teams to collaborate and extract actionable insights from your customer data. This synergy unlocks the potential for predictive modeling, churn analysis, and other advanced use cases that can significantly impact your marketing ROI.
Watch the video to learn how we helped SevenRooms gain a deeper understanding of their customers.
Data Enrichment and Augmentation
Integrating your warehouse with your CDP allows you to enrich your customer profiles with third-party data or internal data from other systems. This creates a more holistic view of your customers, enabling you to tailor your marketing efforts even further. For example, you can append demographic data, purchase history from offline channels, or social media interactions to gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ motivations and interests.
Improved Data Governance and Compliance
By centralizing your customer data in your data warehouse, you can establish data governance policies that comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
This protects your customers’ privacy and fosters trust in your brand, which is crucial in today’s privacy-conscious environment. You can also set permissions to allow only the folks with the right need to know access to the data.
Not only does it help you stay compliant, but it is much easier to clean, massage, and replace data in your warehouse than it is on other tools. This enables your CDP to have the most accurate data.
Create a tracking plan early in your planning to know what you do and don’t need. As Segment experts, McGaw creates a tracking plan or spec individually for each client to ensure clean data and improve data governance.
A well-integrated CDP can act as a control point too:
- Only allowing approved data to enter marketing systems
- Taxonomy and schema controls
- Enforcing data access/permission controls
- Managing consent preferences
- Facilitating data subject requests
Composable CDPs: Hype vs. Reality
Now, let’s address the “composable CDP” buzzword and its implications for data warehouse integration.
While the term “composable” suggests flexibility and modularity, it’s important to recognize that all CDPs, to varying degrees, enable integration with other marketing technologies.
And nearly all CDPs now are composable, or go by the new term “Hybrid CDP” as they can be composable, or you can buy the whole suite.
Think about it like an à la carte menu.
The real distinction lies in the approach to achieving composability in relation to your data warehouse. The term “composable CDP” has gained traction, but it’s more of a marketing concept than a distinct category of CDPs.
Warehouse-First (composable) CDPs and Hybrid CDPs: Shared Access to Warehouse Data
Both warehouse-first CDPs (like Hightouch) and hybrid CDPs (like Segment) can directly access and leverage your warehouse data, unlocking many of the benefits we just discussed.
- Warehouse-First CDPs: These solutions prioritize your data warehouse as the central source of truth. So, they ingest data primarily from the warehouse, where it can be accessed, turned into audiences and sent to be activated by in marketing tools. They excel at providing flexibility and control over your warehouse data, but often require significant data engineering expertise (expenses).
- Hybrid CDPs: These solutions offer a managed data infrastructure alongside robust data ingestion and activation capabilities. They can seamlessly integrate with your data warehouse, allowing you to leverage its data for segmentation, personalization, and analytics. Hybrid CDPs make it easier to consume website, mobile, and various client side or server side activity stream information. They provide a balance between ease of use, customization, and data mobility, making them suitable for a broader range of organizations.
Key Differences and Considerations
While both warehouse-first and hybrid CDPs can access your warehouse data, there are key differences to consider when making your selection.

Segment CDP
Let’s break down these differences across core CDP functions:
1. Data Ingestion
Warehouse-First CDPs:
- Pros:
- Direct access to raw data in your warehouse allows for granular control over data transformations and modeling.
- Cons:
- Requires significant data engineering effort to build and maintain data pipelines, especially for non-standard data sources.
- Initial setup and configuration can be time-consuming and complex.
- In many cases they do not allow you to send real-time activity stream data from your website, mobile app, web apps, or 3rd party services. Forcing you to rely on other services to send that data to your warehouse.
Hybrid CDPs:
- Pros:
- Extensive library of pre-built connectors for seamless data ingestion from hundreds of popular sources, including websites, mobile apps, CRMs, email marketing platforms, and more.
- Streamlined implementation with minimal engineering effort, accelerating time to value.
- Ability to access data from your warehouse, just like the warehouse first CDPs, and activate it in many other tools.
- Cons:
- Might require custom development or additional configuration for less common or proprietary data sources.
- Come with a high price point as you are offsetting much of the engineering costs to the CDP, compared to payroll (which is a big benefit).
2. Data Transformation and Modeling
Warehouse-First CDPs:
- Pros:
- Warehouses allow for complete customization of data transformation and modeling using SQL, dbt, Python, AI, or other data transformation tools.
- Empower data engineers and analysts to create complex data models and derive predictions and advanced insights.
- Cons:
- Demand significant data engineering expertise to handle complex data transformations and schema management.
- Ongoing maintenance and updates to data models can be resource-intensive.
Hybrid CDPs:
- Pros:
- Automate much of the data transformation process, normalizing data into a consistent format and reducing the reliance on engineering resources.
- Provide user-friendly interfaces for basic data transformations and enrichment.
- Cons:
- Might offer less flexibility for highly customized data transformations or complex data modeling scenarios.
- User identity resolution and management is more rigid in Hybrid CDPs compared to when it is managed in the warehouse.
3. Identity Resolution
Warehouse-First CDPs:
- Pros:
- Enable the creation of highly customized identity graphs using probabilistic or deterministic matching algorithms and data merging within your data warehouse.
- Can leverage advanced machine learning and AI techniques for identity resolution.
- Cons:
- Require specialized data science skills and can be complex to implement and maintain.
- Probabilistic matching can introduce some level of uncertainty in identity resolution.
Hybrid CDPs:
- Pros:
- Employ a deterministic or probabilistic approach to identity resolution, utilizing first-party cookies, device IDs, and other identifiers to create a unified view of your customers.
- Generally, deterministic is easier to implement and manage than probabilistic models.
- Cons:
- Might be less flexible for handling complex identity resolution scenarios or merging data from disparate sources.
- Deterministic matching can be limited in its ability to handle cross-device or anonymous user identification.
4. Data Activation
Warehouse-First CDPs:
- Pros:
- Offer flexibility to activate data across various marketing tools and channels using custom integrations or third-party tools.
- Can leverage the full power of your data warehouse for advanced segmentation and personalization use cases.
- Cons:
- Can be more involved and require additional development effort to push data to upstream systems.
- Might require additional tools or middleware to orchestrate data activation workflows.
Hybrid CDPs:
- Pros:
- Provide a vast network of turnkey integrations with popular marketing and analytics tools, enabling seamless data activation without custom development.
- Often include built-in features for audience segmentation, campaign orchestration, and personalization.
- Cons:
- Might have limitations in terms of integrating with less common or proprietary marketing tools.
- Advanced activation use cases might require additional configuration or custom development.
5. Real-Time Capabilities
Warehouse-First CDPs:
- Pros:
- Can leverage real-time data streaming capabilities in your data warehouse, depending on its configuration and capabilities, but this does increase warehousing costs a lot from processing fees.
- Can enable near real-time personalization and decisioning based on the latest customer interactions.
- Cons:
- Near real-time data processing and activation might require additional infrastructure and engineering effort.
- True real-time data activation is not always possible depending on how the data is stored, or the warehouse provider you work with.
- Can be complex to implement and maintain at scale.
Hybrid CDPs:
- Pros:
- Often offer built-in real-time data streaming capabilities, enabling immediate personalization and engagement based on the latest customer interactions.
- Simplify real-time use cases with pre-built features and integrations.
- Cons:
- Lack of enablement or knowledge on how teams can leverage all of their real-time data in experiments.
6. Data Governance and Compliance
Warehouse-First CDPs:
- Pros:
- Allow you to leverage your existing data governance policies and tools within your data warehouse.
- Cons: Might require additional configuration and integration to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Hybrid CDPs:
- Pros:
- Often offer built-in features for data governance and privacy compliance, helping you manage data responsibly and adhere to regulations.
- Simplify compliance management with centralized controls and pre-built features.
- Cons:
- Might have limitations in terms of customizing data governance policies or integrating with specific compliance tools.
Beyond the CDP: The Broader Marketing Stack
While CDPs play a crucial role in unifying and activating customer data, they are just one piece of the larger martech puzzle. To achieve true composability and agility, you need to consider the entire marketing stack and how it integrates with your CDP.
Watch the video to see how we helped Andrew and the Lunchbox team set up a great foundation on Segment for growth.
Data Orchestration and Enrichment
In many cases, you’ll need additional tools and processes to orchestrate data flows between your CDP and other marketing systems, as well as enrich your customer data with external sources. This might involve data integration platforms, ETL tools, or custom scripts.
Marketing Automation and Campaign Management
Your CDP should seamlessly integrate with your marketing automation platform to enable targeted and personalized campaigns across various channels. Look for pre-built integrations or the ability to build custom connections using APIs.
Analytics and Reporting
Analytics and reporting capabilities are a must for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and gaining insights into customer behavior. Consider how your CDP integrates with your analytics tools and whether it provides built-in reporting features.
Customer Experience and Personalization
Your CDP should empower you to deliver personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints, from your website and mobile app to email and social media. Look for features like real-time personalization, A/B testing, and journey orchestration.
Making the Right Choice: A Strategic Imperative
Ultimately, the choice between a warehouse-first CDP and a hybrid CDP is a strategic decision that can significantly impact your marketing success. Consider the following factors when evaluating your options:
- Business Objectives and Priorities
- What are your key marketing goals and priorities? Do you need to prioritize flexibility and customization, or are you looking for a more streamlined and automated approach?
- Technical Resources and Expertise
- Evaluate your team’s skills and bandwidth. Warehouse-first CDPs demand significant data engineering expertise, while hybrid CDPs are more user-friendly and accessible to marketers and non-technical users.
Who owns it? Is Marketing owning the CDP? — Consider the CDP type based on whom the intended user is. IT, Data, or Product (depending on the company).
- Evaluate your team’s skills and bandwidth. Warehouse-first CDPs demand significant data engineering expertise, while hybrid CDPs are more user-friendly and accessible to marketers and non-technical users.
- Time to Value
- How quickly do you need to start leveraging your customer data and activating campaigns? Hybrid CDPs typically offer faster time to value compared to warehouse-first CDPs.
- Budget and Cost Considerations
- Evaluate both upfront and ongoing costs, including subscription fees, data engineering resources, and potential data storage redundancy. Consider the long-term cost implications and choose a solution that fits your budget.
- Data Governance and Compliance
- Ensure that your chosen CDP solution aligns with your data governance policies and compliance requirements, especially concerning data privacy and security.
- Vendor Support and Partnership
- Consider the level of support and training offered by the CDP vendor. A responsive and knowledgeable support team can be invaluable, especially during the initial implementation and onboarding process.
- Future-Proofing
- Choose a CDP that can adapt to the changing needs of your business. Look for solutions that offer scalability, flexibility, and the ability to integrate with emerging technologies.
Conclusion
The “composable CDPs” buzzword can be misleading. All CDPs, to some extent, enable composability. However, the real distinction lies in the approach: warehouse-first CDPs offer flexibility and control at the cost of complexity, while hybrid CDPs like Segment prioritize ease of use and automation.
The ideal choice depends on your organization’s unique needs and resources. If you have a mature data warehouse and a strong data engineering team and prioritize flexibility and customization, a warehouse-first CDP might be a good fit. However, if you value ease of use, faster time to value, and a more streamlined approach, a hybrid CDP like Segment could be the ideal solution.

A visual representation of Veronica Beard’s tech stack featuring Segment. Try our FREE Stack Builder tool now.
So, regardless of your chosen approach, integrating your data warehouse with your CDP is key to unlocking the full potential of your customer data. By leveraging the power of your warehouse, you can create a unified customer view, enable advanced analytics, and deliver personalized experiences that drive customer engagement and loyalty.
As you evaluate your CDP options, consider your data infrastructure, technical expertise, time constraints, and budget. The right CDP will empower your marketing efforts and help you achieve your business goals in the data-driven era. Stay informed, evaluate your options carefully, and choose a solution that aligns with your long-term goals and empowers your team to thrive in the ever-changing world of marketing technology.
Need help evaluating your CDP options? Reach out to a McGaw expert.
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