Customer data platforms (CDP) claim to be the ultimate tool for organizing and managing customer data. But reverse ETL has changed the landscape by moving customer data from your data warehouse to your desired tools without making data copies.
Let us show you why using the same data that powers your analytics to power your customer engagement and personalization is the right approach.
The CDP at work
CDPs offer rigid data models, long onboarding times, and redundancies across analytics and marketing tools. That’s why only 1% of companies believe CDPs are actually meeting their current and future needs.
However, the biggest problem with CDPs is that they don't store the breadth of customer and company-level information your data warehouse does. Only the data warehouse holds the complete information needed to power your analytics.
In fact, CDPs copy data away from the data warehouse, diminishing their claim as a "single source of truth." Some CDPs have started to import data from the data warehouse to bolster their claim, but doing so results in data latency and overlooks the fact that the CDP is yet another silo of data, not a credible source of truth. With this fragmentation, you can't trust the data inside the CDP to be as credible or fresh as in the data warehouse.
The more nimble reverse ETL
Many companies already have the core ingredients for powerful customer activation — rich product data, behavioral signals, and modeled insights in your warehouse. What’s often missing is reverse ETL, the crucial layer that activates this data by delivering it directly into the tools your marketing and sales teams rely on every day.
Reverse ETL empowers data teams to activate trustworthy, governed data at scale, while giving marketers immediate access to the attributes and signals they need for personalization, targeting, and measurement. With a platform like Census (now a Fivetran company), data teams benefit from version control, logging, and observability, while business teams gain a visual, no-code interface for building and managing segments.
Instead of creating new data silos or relying on slow, manual processes, reverse ETL moves high-quality warehouse data into downstream applications quickly, safely, and reliably. The result: teams can run smarter campaigns, improve customer experiences, and drive measurable growth using the data they already have.
Reverse ETL vs. CDP
The intention behind a CDP — to use data to create a clearer picture of who customers are — is still as relevant as ever. But as a product category, CDPs are quickly becoming irrelevant.
They may have gained early traction by positioning themselves as an all-in-one solution for collecting, unifying, and activating customer data, but the reality is they introduce new silos, limit flexibility, and rarely deliver on the promise of true customer understanding.
With the rise of the modern data stack and data activation platforms powered by reverse ETL, like Census (now a Fivetran company), companies can now access best-in-class solutions with far more agility and control than traditional CDPs ever offered. Reverse ETL delivers trusted, warehouse-grade data directly into the tools where marketing, sales, and success teams work — enabling richer personalization, faster experimentation, and a far better return on the data investments organizations have already made.
Simply put, reverse ETL gives teams what CDPs promised but couldn’t deliver: real customer insight activated exactly where it drives impact.
