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#FutureReadyHealthcare
Forward
It is our pleasure to introduce this comprehensive starter kit, designed to help life sciences organizations in their journey towards adopting Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). Co-created by Indegene and Tealium, this starter kit showcases our combined capabilities in the CDP space and serves as a valuable resource for marketing and technology leaders looking to understand the benefits and considerations of implementing a CDP solution as part of their marketing technology (MarTech) stack in 2025 and beyond.
CDPs have become a vital tool for organizations looking to gain a holistic view of their customers and drive better engagement and outcomes. As the volume of customer data continues to grow, CDPs provide a way to consolidate, manage, and interpret these data, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions and better personalize their engagement with customers.
This starter kit provides a detailed overview of the present and future state of CDPs, a checklist of key considerations, and a list of in-depth benefits – including improved customer engagement and better decision-making.
Also included are practical tips for building your business case, streamlining your CDP purchase, and several use cases to get you started. Additionally, we have also included a real-world customer success story to showcase the impact of CDPs.
With the rapid rise of AI in pharma, organizations can now leverage powerful machine learning and advanced analytics to uncover deeper customer insights and drive smarter segmentation. AI solutions for pharma, especially when embedded in customer data platforms, enable predictive analytics, personalized content delivery, and next-generation engagement with both healthcare professionals and patients. As AI in pharma marketing advances, brands can maximize the impact of every campaign and accelerate decision-making, all while ensuring regulatory compliance.
Our partnership allows us to offer a one-stop, best-in-class, customized CDP solution to our life sciences clients – a game changing combination of Tealium’s award-winning CDP product suite with Indegene’s technology and consulting expertise, and deep domain knowledge.
We hope that this starter kit will be a valuable resource for successful CDP implementation—optimizing your data strategy for the future of pharma and life sciences.
State of the Industry
Today’s customers and healthcare professionals (HCPs) expect the same seamless, personalized experiences from their pharma organizations as they do from leaders in other industries. It is now essential for providers to digitally enable and engage customers wherever they are, across any channel or touchpoint.
The good news is that your organization already has access to valuable customer data. With the right CDP platform and strategy, you can unlock new value from this data, personalize engagement, and deliver consistent, relevant experiences powered by real-time insights. Incorporating AI in pharma marketing enables even deeper understanding of patient and HCP needs, optimizes every interaction, and positions your team for ongoing success.
We recognize that investing in new technology can seem overwhelming, especially with the rapidly evolving landscape of CDPs and AI solutions in phatma. The even better news: you don’t have to navigate this journey alone! This CDP starter kit is designed to help you plan, evaluate, and build a future-ready strategy for acquiring and implementing a customer data platform—empowering your life sciences organization to lead in digital health engagement.
The CDP of the Future
CDPs are rapidly evolving, and life sciences marketers as well as technical teams continue to discover high-impact use cases tailored to their unique environments. Over the past two years, significant progress has been made integrating CDPs into daily operations, with teams leveraging these platforms for improved data activation and actionable insights.
Looking to 2026 and beyond, customer data platforms will become increasingly foundational to the MarTech stack for pharma and life sciences organizations. As regulatory landscapes shift, CDPs will adapt flexibly, continuing to drive both customer acquisition and retention strategies. Most notably, future-ready CDP solutions will further harness AI in pharma and advanced machine learning to enable deeper customer understanding and more effective engagement.
To maximize the benefits of CDP implementation and stay ahead in a dynamic market, pharma marketers should prioritize CDPs that:
Are highly flexible
Choose platforms built for scalability and agility. A flexible CDP solution makes integration with both current and future tools seamless, accelerating time to value and increasing overall ROI. Modularity in design supports composable architectures and industry-specific requirements.
Embed Predictive AI Capabilities
Select CDPs with intuitive, AI-driven customer insights and predictive analytics. User-friendly AI empowers marketers to anticipate customer needs, optimize engagement, and deliver standout, personalized customer experiences at scale. The integration of AI solutions for pharma supports smarter segmentation and targeted outreach.
Protect Data Privacy and Ensure Compliance
Robust data privacy and security features are essential. Capabilities such as advanced data encryption, consent management, and real-time audit trails help organizations remain compliant with global and regional regulations—including HIPAA, GDPR, and evolving pharma-specific guidelines.
Offer Trusted Partnership
Beyond being mere vendors, a top CDP provider and a domain-specific CDP implementation expert can act as strategic partners. Look for teams with experience supporting the unique challenges of customer data platform deployments in pharma, offering collaborative support to help achieve both commercial and compliance goals.
The Tealium CDP
A CDP is a technology that collects data in a governed way from sources like the web, mobile, on-location, call center, and IoT, unifies it to create accurate customer profiles in real time, then makes it accessible to and actionable for other tools and technology.
Checklist — Considerations as You Look to Launch a CDP
The overview below includes recommendations from life sciences organizations that have adopted a CDP and are seeing strong success.
The basics
You, or a consulting partner, have identified a set of business problems and supporting use case(s) that warrant the technology. For example, you want to create a unified customer experience to help impact growth within key customer segments.
Your company uses several to many channels to market to buyers and needs that data to make decisions.
Your company is interested in tackling organization-wide challenges like data governance (CCPA, GDPR).
Your company would benefit from delivering real-time customer experiences to improve personalization efforts, cross-channel campaigns, and governance and privacy initiatives.
Customer journey
You have a multi-channel customer experience that you want to optimize and ensure is more relevant. For example, you want to combine your online and offline data into a unified profile to enhance your understanding of every customer across every touchpoint.
You want to understand the customer journey more than your CRM can provide. For example, you want to collect and use data that doesn’t live in your CRM.
You are looking to achieve personalization and targeted advertising at scale.
The team
You have identified a strategic owner in a Marketing, IT, or data science/related department. customer data often involves different departments, best-in-class companies often set up cross-functional project teams to ensure alignment and common goals.
You have a small, focused, core team, and a technology and consulting partner with deep domain expertise, such as Indegene, to drive the implementation and execution of use cases.
The data culture
Your company is interested in driving business goals from customer data insights.
Your company sees customer data as a strategic asset.
Your company is thinking about the future of data governance and privacy.
The Benefits of a Customer Data Platform
Deliver Personalized, Real-Time Experiences Across Every Touchpoint
Modern customer data platforms, such as Tealium, empower life sciences organizations to unify customer profiles and orchestrate seamless experiences for every individual—whether healthcare professionals (HCPs), patients, or members. By consolidating data from all sources, a CDP enables precise, real-time personalization across both online and offline channels. This ensures that communications, including product launches, support, care access, and benefits navigation, are always relevant, timely, and tailored to customer preferences, resulting in a frictionless and consistent brand journey across every digital and physical touchpoint.
Accelerate Value with Trusted, First-Party Data
As third-party cookies disappear, leveraging first-party data is crucial for compliant, high-impact engagement. A customer data platform pharma solution helps organizations acquire, unify, and activate first-party data to gain deeper insights into patient and HCP behavior, improve segmentation, and enable dynamic, consent-driven marketing programs. This unified approach helps drive cost-effective customer and patient acquisition, ongoing engagement, and a measurable lift in brand and support outcomes.
Break Down Silos and Maximize Data Utility
Effective CDP implementation unifies data from internal, external, and third-party sources, eliminating silos and enabling holistic views of each customer. CDPs like Tealium seamlessly integrate with existing technology stacks and support real-time data flows, enhancing collaboration across departments (marketing, sales, medical, and access teams). This integration powers advanced customer data platform pharma strategies, fuels AI in pharma marketing, and ensures data governance, flexibility, and control.
Build Trust with Privacy, Security, and Compliance at the Core
A privacy-first, AI-ready CDP solution establishes a robust, compliant data foundation—critical for pharma organizations navigating global regulations. With embedded consent management, data encryption, and advanced access controls, a modern CDP like Tealium helps ensure compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, and evolving privacy standards. This focus on trust and compliance not only reduces regulatory risk but builds long-term credibility with customers and stakeholders.
Unlock the Power of AI and Future-Ready Innovation
The latest CDPs harness AI for customer insights, predictive analytics, intelligent segmentation, and real-time optimization. AI solutions for pharma integrated within CDPs empower marketers to automate personalization, anticipate customer needs, and refine strategies based on live data. As the industry adopts more advanced CDP AI, life sciences brands can deliver more relevant, responsive, and effective engagement at every stage of the customer journey.
Empower IT With Centralized, Secure Data Management
A modern customer data platform streamlines data infrastructure for IT teams by providing a single, trusted environment for integrating, governing, and securing data from all sources. CDP solutions like Tealium enable IT to establish enterprise-wide standards for compliance and data quality, eliminate silos, and simplify integration with existing tech stacks, all while supporting privacy requirements and rapid deployment of innovative business use cases.
Choosing the Right Technology and Consulting Partner
Implementing a CDP can be a complex undertaking for life sciences organizations. However, the right technology and consulting partner can provide access to deep domain expertise, extensive experience in creating and implementing CDP use cases, enable integration with a range of MarTech tools, platforms, and systems, and give you the ability to scale and operate global centers of excellence by leveraging automation and the latest advancements in AI.
Indegene’s experts utilize a carefully planned and phased City Planning strategy to enhance omnichannel efforts and drive engaging customer experiences. This phased approach will help your organization:
1. Analyze and plan for the future with an in-depth analysis of your existing MarTech stack and data model. Indegene’s AI-first methodologies streamline your digital data enablement and CDP implementation approach, identifying areas for rationalization and new investment. This analysis covers various elements such as CDP use cases, gaps in current data streams, upstream and downstream platforms, functional roles, processes, and other current or potential pain points.
2. Develop strong connections with a proven engagement framework. CDP initiatives often span multiple organizational silos and require a high degree of collaboration among teams. In this context, partnering with the right MarTech, data, and AI consultants can facilitate change management and drive transformation with newer, more efficient operating models built around the CDP.
3. Customize and implement your CDP plan by drawing on domain, data, and technological experience from widespread implementations across major global markets and pharma brands. Indegene leverages its expertise in AI for customer insights, crafting a library of differentiated use cases based on a deep understanding of customer pathways and behaviors, and enabling easy integration with downstream systems of engagement such as SFMC, Veeva CRM, Adobe Campaign Manager, Marketo, Eloqua, and more.
4. Evaluate and optimize your implementation with industry-leading, AI-driven tracking and analytics expertise, allowing you to continuously measure the success of your implementation and make necessary adjustments to optimize results.
360-Degree discovery
Omnichannel Medical Strategy
Body 1
MarTech stack analysis
Omnichannel Medical Strategy
Body 1
City planning approach
Omnichannel Medical Strategy
Body 1
Discover
Commercial and brand vision | Current MarTech maturity | Pain point
Body 1
Define
New MarTech capabilities | MarTech roadmap rationlization
Body 1
Develop
Strategy | Capbility roadmap | Integration roadmap | Adoption
Body 1
Determine
Challenges and opportunities | Priorities and dependencies
Body 1
Design
Omnichannel MarTech blueprint | Activation roadmap
Body 1
Omnichannel Medical Strategy
Omnichannel Medical Strategy
Body 1
Getting Started with Buying a CDP
Buying a CDP is a lot like buying any other technology — it is important to have some ideas about how you want to use the platform. It helps to identify use cases — then build the business case, evaluate vendors and strategic partners, go through procurement, and lastly, move on to implementation and enablement. It is also largely beneficial to identify the cross-functional team that will own the technology.
Problem Identification
This is the “we need to do something” step. You’ve realized there is a problem or use case that is not being met and a solution must be found.
Foundational Use Cases
Marketing technology leaders may find themselves facing internal resistance from several directions. The IT team wants to build an alternative solution. The Business Intelligence team wants to control customer data. To help quell fears and prove the cross-functional value of the Customer Data Platform, we recommend starting with one killer use case.
Look for a team that was struggling to achieve a goal because of technical limitations, such as being able to tie a single-use promotion code to a single user in real-time. To limit coupon codes from going wild on the internet, the E-commerce team uses their CDP to tie these codes to individual profiles. They deploy the code through their Email Service Provider by grouping audiences together; for example, the code can be triggered for customer profiles that have just abandoned their cart. Now, the customer can come back to complete the purchase without the code running wild.
Nailing the RFP
A successful RFP will help you gather information about new technology, define and prioritize requirements from the perspective of customer use cases, and enable you to compare vendors and technology and consulting partners on an equal footing. With CDPs, one of the best unique practices we encourage is undergoing a MarTech Assessment.
A MarTech Assessment can be done internally, or with a trusted partner like Indegene, to provide a neutral, third-party view. The MarTech Assessment is designed to find the gaps in your current MarTech stack. With technology as plugged into your MarTech as the CDP, this assessment will help reveal the critical integrations you’ll need to validate in your vendor selection process.
The MarTech Assessment will also show you what CDP-like capabilities you have already and enable better proofs-of-concept and a stronger implementation strategy. Since there are many technologies that ostensibly do parts of what a CDP can do, you’ll need a clear plan for how these technologies will work together without duplicating operations or creating shadow data silos.
Getting Buy-In
One of the most challenging parts of buying a CDP can be getting buy-in across the organization. Since the CDP is (or should be) a long-term investment, many stakeholders will need to sign off in some form.
The following pages on “Building the Business Case” provide more details on how to approach getting cross-functional buy-in.
Aligning your Organization
With your foundational use cases in place, you can determine the skills you’ll require to achieve them. Our life sciences customers have found that creating a smaller, internal core team while also engaging a cross-functional technology and consulting partner with deep domain expertise is key to getting up and running quickly. This ensures that you don’t miss engaging someone who you’ll later need to depend on to assign resources to the project.
To help keep things organized, people need to know where they’ll be expected to get involved. We’ve identified four groups to help you staff your CDP dream team, both internally and through a technology and consulting partner.
1. Data source experts — These are often developers, system admins, solutions architects, business intelligence, or data governance staff — and their buy-in is critical. They’re responsible for how data comes into your CDP through touchpoints where customers are engaging with your brand, such as your website, mobile app, paid marketing, and social media.
Titles may include: Developer/IT Engineer, Analytics, Business Intelligence Analyst, Solutions Architect, Data Governance Manager
2. Audience experts — These are typically customer data and analytics or data governance staff. They know how to aggregate and enrich your data in its raw form, and send it where it needs to go. These team members often drive the push for a CDP, because they understand data and how to tie it back to user experience.
Titles may include: Data Governance Manager, Data Analyst, Digital Analyst, Engagement Analyst
3. Channel Marketing experts — This group includes channel managers, strategists, marketing operations, experience architects, or data analysts. They receive data from your CDP and use customer profiles to enhance the impact of your other marketing tools. These experts are usually eager to see how they can segment customer profiles more accurately, and will drive the vision for your CDP.
Titles may include: Digital Strategist, Paid Media Manager, Email Marketing Manager, Content Marketer, Social Media Marketing Manager, Experience Architect, Marketing Operations
4. Trusted consulting and implementation partners — Expert marketing technologists can be involved from end to end in the previous three categories, or play a larger role in one space.
Titles may include: Technology partners, Marketing Technologist
Below is a visual representation of these stakeholders. Chances are pretty good you have most or all of these functions already in place. In some cases, one person may fulfill multiple roles:
It’s important that your organization has a common understanding of what you intend to accomplish with your CDP. You can foster this collective knowledge in three steps to ensure solid adoption and expansion as you begin to use the technology.
Educate — Conduct exploratory interviews to get stakeholders’ input, and develop a unified understanding of your company’s challenges and objectives—including the capabilities people expect from the CDP.
Motivate — Highlight the opportunities a CDP will offer your company, such as a unified view of your customers and better ROI on your other marketing tech.
Align — Create a strategic objective framework by mapping the project goals with those of your organization.
Purchase Decision
Congratulations! At this point, you’ve selected the right vendor and technology and consulting partner based on your goals, use cases, and requirements.
Building a Business Case for a CDP Within your Pharma Organization
Marketing Teams
Build a business case for marketing around personalization, engagement, or to solve challenges like third-party cookie loss, and as a bonus, show how the CDP can improve the technology they’re already using / invested in.
Metrics they need to see to evaluate success:
Customer Growth (Marketing/Sales Qualified Leads and Lead Conversion)
Customer Loyalty (Customer Lifetime Value)
Marketing Efficiencies (Customer Acquisition Cost)
Marketing Technology Utilization and Marketing Return on Investment
IT Teams
Show how the CDP can bring better standards to many tools by providing a single view of the customer and unified audience management and make work more efficient by lightening the load on IT as common data management processes become automated.
Metrics they need to see to evaluate success:
Bottom Line Impact (Return on IT Investment)
Operational Efficiencies (Total Cost of Ownership, Time to Value, Utilization of Key IT Managed Resources, Staffing Efficiencies)
Security and Risk Mitigation (Number of Incidents, Cost Per Incident and Resolution Time) Return on Investment
Finance Teams
With so much money having been spent on MarTech, you’ll need to be able to quantify marketing activities to show ROI.
Show the value of the CDP on your revenue generation and cost savings, but also show how it can help make the temperamental process of attribution into a more exact science. They’ll thank you for better showing them the financial impact of technology and teams beyond the CDP directly.
Understand the metrics they need to see to evaluate success:
Bottom line metrics for positive business growth (Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads) and revenue (Gross Profit and Average Gross Margin)
Marketing Efficiencies (Customer Acquisition Cost, Marketing Technology Utilization and Marketing Return on Investment)
Marketing Technology Utilization and Marketing Return on Investment
Technology Teams
Technology is often seen as a cost-center. These teams will want to understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the long-term implications of the CDP to the larger tech ecosystem.
Show how the CDP can bring better standards to many tools by providing a single view of the customer and unified audience management, and make work more efficient by lightening the load on IT as common data management processes become automated.
Understand the metrics they need to see to evaluate success:
Bottom Line Impact (Return on IT Investment)
Operational Efficiencies (Total Cost of Ownership, Time to Value, Utilization of Key IT Managed Resources, Staffing Efficiencies)
Security and Risk Mitigation (Number of Incidents, Cost Per Incident and Resolution Time) Return on Investment
Crawl, Walk, Run Approach to CDPs
Adoption
Customer journey stage 1
Define and integrate data sources
Data quality specs
Define core use cases,attributes and audiences
Define privacy andconsent data
Growth
Customer journey stage 2
Automate actions using audiences for core use cases
Expand data sources
Add file upload, POS data sources
Expand email, analytics and other integrations
Optimization
Complete customer journey
Increase customer data supply chain visibility
Create a more omprehensive view of the customer
Orchestrate data across the customer lifecycle
Distribute regulatory compliance through the supply chain
Anticipate customer behavior and take proactive actions with machine learning
Expansion
Scale use cases
Add more data sources
Fully automate with business rules
Expand use of machine learning insights
Optimize the tech stack
Focus on future-proofing your customer data
CDP Use Cases for Pharma to Get Your Started
Single view of the customer
Achieving a single view of the customer may seem like a use case that is only really valuable to marketing, but it’s key for data and analytics teams to drive timely actions and derive relevant insights throughout the customer journey. As the upstream source of the single view of the customer for your downstream activation technologies, you’re removing much of the manual labor that would be required to update each one individually — and doing so in real time.
Customer acquisition
One of the most powerful ways that marketers use a CDP is for customer acquisition. Specifically, building audience segments using cross-channel data to better target prospects. Customer insights that would normally only exist in one channel — like your mobile data — can now inform other channels to create more personalized ad and content recommendations.
Honoring consumer consent in every channel
Whether it’s GDPR, CCPA, or another privacy regulation, consumers now have many different ways to opt-in and opt-out of data collection, data usage, and contact methods. CDPs aren’t responsible for getting consent from your customers (that’s what Consent Management Platforms are for), but consent data can be tied into the customer profile to update preferences and act immediately to remove customers from the audiences and channels they’ve opted out of.
Customer Success
Indegene and Tealium enable personalized HCP journeys for a global pharma major
A global pharmaceutical organization wanted to provide a personalized experience for HCPs and fortify its marketing technology ecosystem for future market shifts. They were currently functioning within a fragmented environment and targeting a broad segment of HCPs.
Indegene and Tealium worked together to implement a bespoke, multi-phased CDP solution that facilitated personalized communications, enhancing engagement and outcomes for HCPs. This multi-stage approach included a comprehensive analysis, planning, and strategy phase, implementing and configuring the Tealium CDP, and setting up business rules and personalized journeys.
Our solution incorporated the following features:
CCPA and GDPR compliance while capturing and managing HCP data
Dynamic segmentation based on content affinity and channel preferences
Automated and near real-time downstream triggers (email, CRM) to support operations for 10+ brands in the US and EU
Some of the immediate benefits the organization was able to achieve include:
5x
increased website conversions
40%
increase in email open rate
1.5
weeks rapid time-to-market for new brands
Authors
Sharanjit Singh
Jay Calavas
Head of Vertical Products, Tealium
