Ever tried building with colorful plastic bricks as a kid? Remember how you could snap different pieces together to create whatever you wanted? That's essentially what's happening with customer data platforms right now, and it's exactly what platforms like Wondaris enable—helping businesses assemble their ideal data solution easily.. The traditional, monolithic CDP is being replaced by something more flexible and customisable - the composable CDP architecture.
But what exactly makes this approach so appealing, and why are organisations rushing to adopt it? Let's break it down.
Think of a composable CDP as a build-your-own adventure for customer data management. Instead of purchasing a single, all-in-one platform that might not perfectly fit your needs, you're selecting individual components that work best for your specific requirements.
A composable CDP architecture lets you pick and choose specialised capability to perform different functions:
Each piece connects seamlessly with the others through APIs, creating a flexible system that you can modify, upgrade, or replace as your needs evolve.
Traditional CDPs were revolutionary when they first appeared. They promised to unify customer data and activate it across channels. But, as business needs have grown more complex, their limitations have become apparent:
The growing popularity of composable CDP architecture isn't just a passing trend. The rise of composable solutions aligns with the overall market expansion, with forecasts suggesting annual growth rates of over 30% for CDPs between 2024 and 2030 (Dinmo, 2025). Here's why this approach is gaining serious momentum:
With a composable approach, you're not stuck with what you chose initially. As new technologies emerge or your requirements change, you can swap out individual components without disrupting your entire data ecosystem.
"We needed to adjust our approach to customer data segmentation as we expanded internationally," a marketing director at a mid-sized retailer told me recently. "With our composable setup, we simply integrated a new tool that handled multi-currency transaction analysis better than our previous solution. No need to replace the entire system."
Why settle for a CDP that's good at everything but great at nothing? A composable architecture lets you choose specialised tools that excel at specific functions.
For example, an e-commerce business might utilise BigQuery for data ingestion and analytics and Wondaris for segmentation and activation. Both platforms are leaders in their category, creating a powerful ecosystem that outperforms any all-in-one solution.
Remember when I mentioned that traditional CDPs can take up to a year to implement? That's an eternity in today's fast-paced business environment.
Composable architectures typically take just 2-3 months to implement (HubSpot, 2024). You can start with the most critical components and add others as needed, generating value much faster than with traditional approaches.
Why pay for features you don't need? With a composable CDP, you invest only in the components that deliver value to your business. This targeted approach often results in significant cost savings over time.
Plus, the ability to replace individual components means you're never forced into expensive upgrades for an entire platform when you only need to improve one aspect of your data management.
Let's look at how different industries are leveraging composable CDP architecture to solve specific challenges:
Retail and E-commerce
Retailers face unique challenges with seasonal demand spikes, multi-channel customer journeys, and inventory management.
This combination delivers personalised shopping experiences based on real-time behavior, dramatically improving conversion rates and customer loyalty.
Media and Entertainment
Content preferences change rapidly, and audiences expect personalised recommendations across devices. Media companies are integrating audience segmentation tools like Wondaris with advertising platforms like Display and Video 360 to deliver targeted content and advertising.
The result? Higher engagement, reduced churn, and more effective monetisation.
Financial Services
Banks and insurance companies deal with strict regulatory requirements and complex customer relationships. Composable CDPs support localised data storage for compliance with data residency requirements (HubSpot, 2024).
This capability is crucial for financial institutions operating globally while needing to keep sensitive customer data in specific geographic regions.
Ready to explore composable CDP architecture for your organisation? A phased approach works best for most companies:
1. Crawl: Identify your most pressing customer data challenges and the tools that could address them most effectively.
2. Walk: Implement your initial composable stack focused on solving those specific problems, ensuring APIs connect smoothly between components.
3. Run: Gradually expand your architecture, adding specialised tools for additional functions as your strategy matures.
This structured roadmap ensures minimal disruption while delivering incremental value along the way.
As customer expectations continue to evolve and data privacy regulations become more complex, the flexibility of composable CDP architecture will become increasingly valuable.
The ability to quickly adapt to changing requirements—whether they involve new data sources, activation channels, or compliance needs—gives businesses a significant competitive advantage. And with 60% of organisations planning to invest in composable technology soon (Xerago, 2024), this approach is quickly becoming the new standard.
While the benefits are compelling, a composable CDP architecture isn't automatically the right choice for every organisation. Consider these questions:
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, exploring a composable approach could deliver significant benefits.
The shift toward composable CDP architecture represents an evolution in how businesses manage their most valuable asset: customer data. By embracing this flexible, modular approach, organisations can create systems that truly align with their unique needs while maintaining the agility to adapt as those needs change.
Whether you're just beginning your customer data journey or looking to enhance your existing capabilities, considering a composable strategy could be the key to unlocking new possibilities for personalisation, efficiency, and growth.
After all, the most powerful solutions aren't the ones that try to do everything—Composable solutions like Wondaris are the ones that do exactly what you need, exactly how you need it done.
When it comes to capturing and managing data about your current and prospective customers, the acronyms DMP and CDP are often mistakenly used interchangeably. For those increasing digital maturity in their organisation, it can be confusing; particularly when trying to understand the shift from 3rd party to 1st party data as well.
What do the acronyms stand for? A DMP is a Data Management Platform, whereas a CDP is a Customer Data Platform, and both are designed to collect and use customer data. However, despite the often overlapping information, they are different tools that perform distinct functions in how and what they do with customer data.
Data Management Platforms (DMPs)
So, which one do you need? Or is it both? Below we highlight the differences between the two platforms and how they benefit organisations to deliver the most effective, targeted messages to their audiences.
DMPs focus on 3rd party data and were designed to optimise ad targeting. They’re a well-established tool great for acquisition marketing such as direct mail, advertising, and data exchanges. A DMP will collate and classify audience and campaign data from multiple sources via cookies.
Based on the way DMPs package data they help marketing teams better understand their audience groups and therefore deliver better ads and optimise digital campaign performance. Further, the platform is designed to reach audiences similar to the ones already identified and help grow a customer base.
However, given that DMPs play in the 3rd party data space, the information collected and stored is de-identified - it’s the same anonymous information that can be obtained and shared by many, and doesn’t specifically reflect the interests of your unique customer base.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
Similarly, a CDP uses 3rd party data but distinguishes itself with the management and application of 1st party data and the personally identifiable information that DMPs can't collate. They also have a broader scope in the number of ways they can be applied. By gathering data from multiple channels, a CDP creates a highly personalised view of individual audience members, which can lend itself to very specific messaging opportunities. CDPs such as Wondaris are ideal for teams who want to leverage existing tech stacks and may not have the capacity for manual input - the ability to automate the collation and activation of data into multiple channels with simple click-through workflows reduces the time to roll out campaigns and delivers better efficiency and ROI.
Another benefit of a CDP is that by being able to collate and store such specific data (in a privacy-safe way) you are able to better nurture long-term customer engagement.
How do they compare?
A simple way to summarise is that a DMP works with customer segments, whilst a CDP drills down to a single customer view. The former is a short-term data collection exercise, whilst the latter stores its data long-term.
So do you need both? It really depends on the use case for the business, but for many organisations the answer is ‘yes’. Because a CDP can store and utilise 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data including personal identifying information (and therefore lends itself to a wider range of applications and effective targeted campaigns), it would appear to be the clear one-stop shop for marketers. We don’t discount the use of a DMP and its place in ad network campaigns, and/or if you’re looking to reach new audiences. Its ability to complement customer data as well as identify new or unknown customers can feed into a CDP for more complete customer profiles.
The Wondaris cloud platform allows you to link all of your business and marketing data sources so you can better understand what’s driving people to your brand and how you can ensure they stay loyal to you long-term. Connect with the Wondaris team today.
Want to try Wondaris? Get in touch.
It’s time to dig deeper into customer experience; the cornerstone of your brand’s success. These days ‘optimisation’ means far more than just understanding your audience segments. You need to set out to achieve a highly personalised experience for each and every customer.
Thankfully, there are multiple tools that help you to do just that. And, you don’t have to choose one over the other. Many of them work together, and in fact, can unlock more useful insights when they are used in conjunction.
Two platforms, in particular, are your customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platforms (CDP). For those who are less familiar with these, let’s take a closer look at each one and their distinctions, before delving into how you can use them in tandem.
Your Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) is the platform that stores all the important information about your current and potential customers. It functions as a database and usually relies on members of your team to be inputting and updating data manually and giving this data context, with labels or pipelines.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP), on the other hand, is a platform that pulls data from multiple external sources and uses this to create a unified view of your customer and their behaviours.
Now, let’s look at some of the benefits you can experience when you use them together:
1. Data Sharing
Your CRM is the central source of truth for your customers. This information, once shared with the data in your CDP, is elevated to a new level as you are able to zoom out and see your customers through a different lens. By sharing data, you can spot trends, identify new areas of opportunities, or perhaps hone in on existing opportunities that aren’t being nurtured properly.
2. Actioning Data
If your CRM is the expert tool for managing relationships, then your CDP is the expert tool for managing the path to purchase. Together, these make for a formidable combination. Rather than simply collecting a lot of data, you can take action and make information, quick iterations to your online presence and cross-channel marketing to drive more sales and increase profitability.
3. Segmentation
Together, these platforms paint a clearer picture of your users. Specifically, which of your live advertisements are best performing with certain segments. You can then utilise this information to become even more granular with your audience until you’ve identified clear homogenous groups, and crafted highly relevant messaging for each of them. What’s more, this highly optimised segmentation can unfold in real time and be continuously improving as customers are interacting with your brand online.
4. Shared Functionality
The shared functions of your CRM and CDP allow you to compile more intelligent customer lists, look-alike lists and segments, and tailored campaigns. And this is just the basic shared functionality. You can do even more optimising and refining if your CRM has machine learning capabilities.
So we’ve learned that both CRMs and CDPs play a critical role in delivering a successful customer experience. Rather than pitting one tool against the other, have each of them work to their strengths and use them in conjunction to unlock deeper insights and new revenue opportunities.
If you’d like further support to better understand and nurture customer-centric experiences, the team at Wondaris is happy to help. Our cloud platform allows you to link all of your business and marketing data sources so you can better understand what’s driving people to your brand and how you can ensure they stay loyal to you long-term.
Want to try Wondaris? Get in touch.
Note: This is an excerpt from our May 6th Press Release.
Google’s Customer Match is an advertising tool that enables users to create custom segments from their existing customers by leveraging their 1st Party Data. Previously, users had to manually upload data files, or invest in development to build through Google’s API.
Through the partnership, Wondaris joins a group of endorsed 3rd party providers that are able to upload this data via a native integration, thereby mitigating the data security and integrity risks involved with manual data entry processes.
The Wondaris and Google CMU will allow businesses to upload high-value audiences securely through simple and clickable workflows.
“We are excited to offer this powerful automation tool for our customers,” remarked Wondaris CEO Simon Pereira.
“Through the CMU integration, a process that might have taken marketers and data teams several days manually can now be managed with a few clicks, in a privacy-compliant way.”
Wondaris can be found directly in the Google Ad Platform by following these steps.
Step 1.
In your Google Ads account, navigate to Tools & Settings & select Linked Accounts.
Step 2.
Scroll down to find Wondaris or Search "Wondaris" in the top right search bar.
Step 3.
Click on Details.
Step 4.
Click Link & Authorise Wondaris.
Step 5.
Go to Wondaris and import your Customer Lists.
Wondaris is a cloud-based customer data platform that helps companies quickly and easily build high-value audiences from their 1st party data and activate them into multiple marketing channels with simple, clickable workflows.
We provide a complete data ownership and portability solution, with the ability to centralise data from any of the public cloud vendors, including Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Azure and Snowflake, either via the pre-built connectors or businesses’ existing integration stack.
Wondaris offers businesses a privacy-safe, secure, and infinitely scalable environment to leverage and manage 1st Party Data to drive more effective marketing and better customer experiences.
Want to try Wondaris? Get in touch.
Technology is changing at an exponential rate, and in such a rapidly evolving landscape, it is easy to get confused by the seemingly endless terminology and acronyms that come with those changes. So in this post, I have attempted to explain the difference to between two big buzz words being thrown around the traps.
Data Lake and Data Warehouse are now commonly used terms within the world of big data and are often used as if they are interchangeable. However, they are not, and in fact, it’s the core function of each that differentiates them.
A data lake is for the storage of unstructured, unorganised raw data; and its purpose and audience is undefined.
Data warehouse stores processed, structured data for a specific purpose and audience.
Because of these differences, it is essential to understand why you are storing data to decide which is right for your business. They do not need to exist in isolation or as a single repository; however, most organisations will have a single data lake but might have multiple data warehouses.
Unfortunately, the strength of each is also generally the weakness of the other and as the world shifts to a customer experience economy, most organisations will discover they need both to meet the current and future demands of their internal and external stakeholders.
However, as access to cloud storage and computing becomes more affordable, even small businesses have the opportunity to leverage the power of almost infinite storage and compute power.
The key is to make sure you understand the “Why”. if you know that then you can articulate what you need for your business and that is what will guide your decisions.
"(Required)" indicates required fields